Stephen M. Hull

The Internet is Not Neutral
8/17/2018

It doesn’t matter that r/atheism is cordoned off from r/adviceanimals and r/lgbt, it’s all Reddit and therefore all mixed up. Twitter is Pandemonium, where every doomed resident shrieks what in another age might have been a considered opinion. But then again, maybe not — maybe we’ve always been like this, but technology allows us to be oinking boors at a pace and volume heretofore unheard of, rather than simply grunting in our dumpy little village and then dying, as God intended. But in either case, a lot of people aren’t ready to meet or understand every other kind of person, and even if we are, there’s no point in facilitating this so-called community if it’s going to turn into a miserable, enraged free-for-all. Put more charitably, it’s impossible to take the time to fully understand and empathize with every person whose screed and off-hand comment you see online, no matter how well-intentioned either party is.

The dream of “bringing people together” turns out to have meant a an unprecedented quantity of either paying customers or lodes of data. I frequented a lot of stupid message boards in the late 90s and early 2000s, and as hellish as they could be, at least they didn’t (often) leak into the mainstream where someone would see it, misunderstand it, and eventually calcify their hatred of some distant copy of it. The response is usually to create a filter of some kind, and sure, that will work to an extent, but it’s not perfect, and its necessity belies the fantasy of unity sold by big platforms.

The internet needs a good dose of obscurity and obstacles. It needs more true community, not fake unity. Don’t get me wrong, kindness to the stranger and the alien are still foundational to a good society and your own moral character, but the capitalist venture to create artificial “community” (a word we should all have come to loathe by now, having heard Zuckerberg mewl it enough for a lifetime) didn’t unify us, it turned us into shrieking, scrabbling psychopaths chained to a Skinner box. The internet has become a 24/7 town hall meeting where a live mic is handed out to everyone at the door.

To be fair, decentralization was a key part of the goal of the internet with regards to human community. No one person or organization was to control everything. The goal was a set of technical standards, like HTTP, rather than a single commercial platform, like Facebook. Standards could homogenize communication formats without forcing communication to occur in a space controlled by a single entity. Still, the dream of people united simply over their shared humanity was a murky one. There is no neutral space. It’s a fantasy which would see all political, religious, economic, and ideological differences subordinated to watery, technocratic humanism. It’s of course wonderful that we’re all people, and it’s true that we’re all in this together and that we should love each other. But our shared humanity is also the lowest common denominator. The idea that directionless harmony would dominate in a formless environment (or worse, an environment optimized for addictive usage patterns and data mining) is ahistorical in the extreme.

The dire necessity to love your neighbor and its attendant benefits for society have always been there, along with all our regular social ills, and it’s foolish to think that the simple addition of communication tech will improve that. There’s a dark strain of both nihilism and arrogance in this shallow optimism, that on the one hand suggests no one’s beliefs or identities are so deeply rooted that technology-mediated smiles and friendliness can’t win them over, and that people just need to learn and talk to each other and they’ll come to their senses. It’s an implicit assertion that this or that ideology, religion, or identity is nice to have, but the real universality, the real common frame of reference is actually Silicon Valley flavored STEM progressivism. We can all come together, not be racist, learn to code, and create a delivery startup.

Too much power, leveraged for the production of convenience, has been taken by companies like Google and Facebook. My hope is that people will get to have online communities where they’re protected and feel safe, and get to interact with like-minded people, and aren’t bombarded with communication they’re neither willing nor prepared to parse. The fretting over feedback loops, groupthink, or “the media bubble” may not be unfounded, but it’s certainly not mitigated by the system we have now, nor would it be worsened by a bit more insulation from a barrage of every other view there is. Insulation has been the default for all of human history. It has never been this easy to communicate. And now that we can, it’s far easier to find radical distortions of other people and their views presented by people “on your side” than it is honest representations, regardless of your ideological persuasion, and this is endemic to the platforms in part due to their sheer size.

Your neighbor won’t disappear. You can still go next door and learn what they care about. Your local library is lousy with books about people who aren’t you. You can still read news from sources you don’t always agree with. But we should reject the techno-optimism of these big platforms and the internet itself as a force for pure good, and reject the lie that they are a neutral ground.