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<div class="gmail_quote">From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Patrick
Bond</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:pbond@mail.ngo.za">pbond@mail.ngo.za</a>></span><br>
Date: Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 12:06 AM<br>
Subject: [Debate-List] (Fwd) The internet wrecking ball
(review of Astra Taylor book)<br>
To: DEBATE <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:debate-list@fahamu.org">debate-list@fahamu.org</a>><br>
<br>
<br>
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://newleftreview.org/II/92" target="_blank">New
Left Review 92, March-April 2015 </a>
<h2>Emilie Bickerton</h2>
<h1>CULTURE AFTER GOOGLE</h1>
<p>Literature on the social impact of the internet has
always struggled to keep up with the breakneck pace set by
its subject. First-generation thinking about the net took
form in the early 1990s, when usage was rapidly expanding
with the dissemination of early browsers; it grew out of a
pre-existing thread of technology advocacy that ran back
to 60s counter-cultural consumerism.<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://newleftreview.org/II/92/emilie-bickerton-culture-after-google#_edn1"
name="14ccaebacd10071e__ednref1" title=""
target="_blank"> [1] </a><i>Wired</i> magazine, founded
in 1993, was its chief vehicle; key figures included
tech-enthusiasts Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Howard
Reingold, with their âpatron saintâ Marshall McLuhan.
This euphoric perspective dominated throughout the ânew
economyâ boom: the internet was changing everything, and
for the better, heralding a new age of freedom, democracy,
self-expression and economic growth. Grateful Dead
lyricist John Perry Barlowâs 1996 âDeclaration of the
Independence of Cyberspaceâ, delivered from Davos, set
the tone: âGovernments of the Industrial World, you
weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace,
the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you
of the past to leave us alone.â Pitted against this,
there had long existed a minor current of critical left
writing, also running back to at least the early 70s; this
included âleft McLuhaniteâ figures such as <i>The
Nation</i>âs Neil Postman. More overtly political,
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameronâs classic 1995 essay,
âThe Californian Ideologyâ, skewered <i>Wired </i>in
its early days, while on the âNettimeâ listserv and in
the pages of <i>Mute</i> magazine, writers such as Geert
Lovink attempted to forge a real ânet criticismâ. But
these voices were mostly confined to the dissident
margins. </p>
<p>With the 2000â01 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://dot.com" target="_blank">dot.com</a> crash
there came something of a discursive shake-out. It was in
the early post-crash years that Nicholas Carrâs <i>Does
</i><i><span>it</span></i><i> Matter?</i> (2004) was
published, puncturing ânew economyâ hype. But with the
Greenspan bubble and massive state-intelligence funding
after 9.11, American tech was soon on its feet again. Tim
OâReillyâs coining of the âWeb 2.0â buzzword in
2004 captured the returning optimism. The blog craze,
Wikipedia and the first wave of social media all came into
play during these years, and it was now that the landscape
of tech giants was consolidated: Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Apple, Microsoft. The technology discourses of this phase
echoed the developing shape of the Web: with âopen
sourceâ (another OâReilly buzzword) and Wikipedia, it
was argued that undefined crowds could be superior
producers of content and code than named (or paid)
individuals. </p>
<p>When a second, much deeper crisis erupted in 2008,
American tech was one of the few sectors to remain
relatively unscathed, already moving into new lines of
production: smartphones, tablets, e-readers. The uptake of
these devices brought a qualitative expansion of internet
use, blurring the boundary between everyday life and a
âcyberspaceâ that had hitherto been conceptualized as
a separate sphere. Suddenly it was evident that all the
talk of the internetâs capacity to instigate
far-reaching social change was no mere talk. It was in
these years that a set of more pessimistic and critical
voices started to come to the fore, worrying about the
dangers of the Webâs expanding use: Nicholas Carrâs <i>The
Shallows </i>(2010), Jaron Lanierâs <i>You Are Not A
Gadget </i>(2010), Sherry Turkleâs <i>Alone Together
</i>(2011), Evgeny Morozovâs <i>The Net Delusion </i>(2011).
Carrâs book in particular became the key expression of a
mounting anxiety, even before the Snowden revelations in
June 2013 brought home some of the darker implications of
these developments. But now that the internet was so
plainly entangled in so much of everyday life, and so much
of the structure of capitalist society, it was becoming
increasingly meaningless to isolate a singular
technological entity, âthe internetâ, as either simply
good or bad. The main object of net criticism was
increasingly coextensive with society itself, thus making
a more social mode of critique plainly the most pertinent
one. </p>
<p>This is the context for Astra Taylorâs <i>The
Peopleâs Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in
the Digital Age</i>. Taylor presents herself as neither
a âcheerleader of progress at any costâ nor a
âprophet of doomâ, condemning change and lamenting
what has been lost. She aims to provide a more nuanced
mode of net criticism than either of these standard
rhetorical poles. She is by no means the first to do so:
Evgeny Morozov is another figure who would locate himself
here, taking up a third rhetorical position that
distinguishes itself against the other two and offering
less techno-determinist, more socio-political modes of
explanation. But if the occupants of this third position
are right to place themselves here, it might be said that
it is easy nowâin the third decade of the Webâs
existenceâto be right in this way. What matters is the
detail of the diagnosis and what we can do. </p>
<p>Taylorâs ambition, as her subtitle suggests, is to make
the case for a new cultural politics of the digital age.
How Web 2.0 affects the production and distribution of
culture touches her in a direct sense. She is a
documentary filmmaker and editor of two books, one on
philosophy, the other on the Occupy movement in the <span>us</span>.
She has no parallel university job to shield her from the
growing structural inequalities she describes; nor for the
most part do the musicians, film-makers, photographers and
investigative reporters whose stories she recounts,
working at the coal face of a culture industry that has
been transformed by the internetâbut not in ways that <i>Wired</i>
predicted. Taylorâs personal background might make her
seem an ideal candidate for Web enthusiasm. She has
written in <i>n+1</i> magazine about her enlightened
home-schooling by counter-cultural parents. <i>The
Peopleâs Platform</i> opens with the story of how in
1991, the twilight of the pre-Web era, the 12-year-old
Taylor brought out her own environmentalist magazine,
copying it with the help of a friendâs father who
managed the local Kinkoâs and distributing it to
bookstores and food co-ops around Athens, Georgia, in her
parentsâ car. She notes how much easier it would have
been to get her message out today, when âany kid with a
smartphoneâ has the potential to reach millions of
readers with the push of a button. In 2011 Taylor helped
produce five crowd-funded issues of the Zuccotti Park
broadsheet, <i>Occupy! Gazette</i>, distributed free in
print and online. This background is important; she is
coming from a position of high expectations and dashed
hopes, not sceptical resistance to technological change. </p>
<p><i>The Peopleâs Platform</i> looks at the implications
of the digital age for cultural democracy in various
sectorsâmusic, film, news, advertisingâand how battles
over copyright, piracy and privacy laws have evolved.
Taylor rightly situates the tech euphoria of the late 90s
in the context of Greenspanâs asset-price bubble,
pointing out that deregulated venture-capital funds
swelled from $12bn in 1996 to $106bn in 2000. Where
tech-utopians hailed the political economy of the internet
as âa better form of socialismâ (<i>Wired</i>âs
Kevin Kelly) or âa vast experiment in anarchyâ
(Googleâs Eric Schmidt and the State Departmentâs
Jared Cohen), she shows how corporations dominate the new
landscape: in 2013 Disney and TimeWarnerâs shares were
up by 32 per cent, <span>cbs</span>âs by 40 per cent
and Comcastâs by 57 per cent. The older tech and
culture-industry corporations have âpartneredâ with
the new: <span>at&t</span> with Apple, Disney and
Sony with Google. The major record labels have stakes in
Spotify, as has Fox in Vice Media, while Condé Nast has
bought up Reddit. In contrast to the multiple distribution
grids that once purveyed telephony, <span>tv</span>,
radio and film, nearly everything is now carried on cable
or wireless âunichannelsâ, monopolized in the <span>us</span>
by a handful of giants: <span>at&t</span>, Verizon,
TimeWarner, Comcast. </p>
<p>Their scale is matched by the newcomers. Google, which
accounts for 25 per cent of North American consumer
internet traffic, has swallowed up a hundred firms since
2010. With over a billion users, Facebook has enrolled
more than a seventh of the worldâs population. A third
of global internet users access the Amazon cloud on a
daily basis. As Taylor pointedly notes, the main source of
Facebookâs and Googleâs profits is other firmsâ
advertising expenditure, an annual $700bn in the <span>us</span>;
but this in turn depends on the surplus extracted from
workers who produce âactual thingsâ. The logic of
advertising drives the tech giantsâ voracious appetite
for our data. In 2012 Google announced it would be
collating information from its multiple servicesâGmail,
maps, search, YouTube, etc.âto combine the âknowledge
personâ (search queries, click-stream data), the
âsocial personâ (our email and social media networks)
and the âembodied personâ (our physical whereabouts,
tracked by the phones in our pockets) into a single â<span>3d</span>
profileâ, to which advertisers can buy access in real
time. Facebook, which is now bundling usersâ offline
purchases with their profiles, âto make it easier for
marketers to reach their customersâ, as Mark Zuckerberg
put it, had a market value of $104 billion on the day of
its <span>ipo</span>. Without our âlikesâ and
comments, our photos and tweets, our product ratings or
restaurant reviews, these companies would be worth
nothing. </p>
<p>Online and offline are not separate worlds, Taylor
insists; the internet in her account has a distinctly
âearthlyâ reality. Broken down into its three
different layersâphysical infrastructure (cables and
routers), software (code, applications) and contentâit
turns into something more controllable, potentially
vulnerable to harnessing. The current battle over ânet
neutralityâ in the <span>us</span> is a marker of
thisâa struggle over the dilution of regulation
preventing cable companies and service providers from
slowing traffic down to stifle competition, or charging
extra fees to speed it up. A further question is whether
the principle of equal access could be extended from wired
broadband to wireless connectionsânot just mobile phones
but cars, watches, fridges, clothes, as the
internet-of-things looms ever closer. </p>
<p>If the corporations have prospered in the digital age,
what of the relationship between creative labour and
technological innovation? For the tech-utopians, the Web
would be a paradise of collaborative creativity, with art
and knowledge produced for sheer pleasure. Richard
Floridaâs <i>Rise of the Creative Class</i> (2002)
hailed the advent of the âinformation economyâ, in
which workers already controlled the means of production,
as these were inside their heads. The tension between
Protestant work ethic and Bohemian creativity would be
dissolved, as profit-seeking and pleasure-seeking,
mainstream and alternative morphed together. In reality,
Taylor notes, the ideology of creativity has become
increasingly useful for a profit-gouging economy. In a
cruel twist, the ethos of the autonomous creatorâthe
trope of the impoverished but spiritually fulfilled
artistâhas been repurposed to justify low pay and job
insecurity. The ideal worker matches the traditional
profile of the creative virtuoso: inventive, adaptable,
putting in long hours and expecting little compensation in
return. âMoney shouldnât be an issue when youâre
employed at Appleâ, shopworkers are informed. Graduate
students are encouraged to think of themselves as
comparable to painters or actors, the better to prepare
themselves for impoverishment when tenure-track jobs fail
to materialize. </p>
<p>In Henry Jamesâs âThe Lesson of the Masterâ, a
young writer listens with growing alarm to the future
mapped out for him by his mentor, pursuing the path of
total dedication to his art. No children, no material
comforts, no marriageâall this would tarnish âthe
goldâ he has the capacity to create. He resists: âThe
artistâthe artist! Isnât he a man all the same?â
Taylorâs investigation of âfree cultureâ arrives at
a similar, if gender-neutral, position. She recognizes
that âthe fate of creative artists is to exist in two
incommensurable realms of value, and be torn between
themâ: on the one hand, cultural production involves
âthe economic act of selling goods or labourâ; on the
other, it entails âthat elevated form of value we
associate with art and cultureâ. What she shows is that,
for cultural workers, conditions in the first realm have
worsened quite drastically, while the promise of the
digital eraâa level playing field of universal,
democratic accessâturns out to offer scant compensation;
to add oneâs shout to the digital cacophony doesnât
create an intelligible debate. A songwriter tells Taylor
that it takes 47,680 plays on Spotify to earn the
royalties of the sale of one <span>lp</span>, while
iTunes can take a cut of 30 per cent or more. The âfree
cultureâ internet ideology disguises sharply unequal
social relations: the digital giants offer free apps,
email and content as bait to hook an audience to sell to
advertisers; struggling independent artists are supposed
to provide their work on the same terms. </p>
<p>Taylor ruefully describes the experience of discovering
that her documentary film, <i>Examined Life</i>âinterviews
with philosophers, two years in the makingâhad been
posted online by strangers before it had even opened in
theatres. When she wrote to those responsible, explaining
that she would like a few months to recover the filmâs
costs before it went free online, she was told (with
expletives) that philosophy belonged to everyone. âI had
stumbled into the copyright wars.â She has no doubt that
existing <span>us</span> copyright law is indefensible.
In 1978, authorsâ exclusive rights to their work were
extended for seventy years after their death, making a
mockery of the original principle of copyright as a reward
or incentive for cultural production. Instead, she argues,
it gave a handful of conglomerates an incentive ânot to
create new things, but to buy up tremendous swathes of
what already existsâ. <i>The Peopleâs Platform</i>
argues strongly for a reformed copyright system, in
essence as a defence of labour, and calls for a
relationship of âmutual supportâ between âthose who
make creative work and those who receive itâ. Taylor
quotes Diderotâs splendid fulmination: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What property can a man own if a work of the mindâthe
unique fruit of his upbringing, his studies, his
evenings, his age, his researches, his observations; if
his finest hours, the most beautiful moments of his
life; if his own thoughts, the feelings of his heart,
the most precious part of himself, that which does not
perish, that which makes him immortalâdoes not belong
to him?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Contrary to tech-enthusiastsâ hopes for new forms of
creative collaboration, the majority of online cultural
content is produced by commercial companies using
conventional processes. The internet has steepened the
âpower curveâ of cultural commodities, Taylor notes,
with a handful of bestsellers ever more dominant over a
growing âtailâ of the barely read, seen or heard.
Netflix, which occupies 40 per cent of <span>us</span>
bandwidth most evenings, reports that the top 1 per cent
of its inventory accounts for 30 per cent of film rentals;
YouTubeâs ten most popular videos get 80 per cent of
total plays. Taylor laments the hollowing of the middle
strataâless conventional works that nevertheless
resonate beyond a specialist niche. </p>
<p>The âmissing middleâ is particularly relevant when
she turns from film and music to journalism. The news
industry is another ravaged environment in the digital
age, with local and rural papers in the <span>us</span>
hit especially hard; the number of reporters covering
state capitals halved between 2003 and 2009. Even in the
booming Bay Area, the <i>Oakland Tribune</i> shrank from
two hundred reporters in the 1990s to less than a dozen
today. As Taylor points out, while you can now access the
<span>nyt</span>, British <i>Guardian</i> and Canadian <i>Globe
& Mail </i>with a single click, your home-town
papers have likely shut down. Her defence of the
profession is a classic one, based on the idea that
journalists should act as democracyâs watchdogs against
ignorance and corruption, calling politicians to account
and bringing events from around the world out of potential
obscurity and onto front pagesâpaper or digital. In
modern newsrooms, however, in-depth international
reporting is all but extinct: by 2006, she writes,
American media, both print and broadcast, supported a mere
141 foreign correspondents overseas. Budgets are
channelled into developing digital editions and online
magazines, like <i>The Huffington Post</i>; news
aggregators such as Gawker or âcontagious mediaâ sites
like Buzzfeed proliferate. Yet the time-bomb hanging over
foreign correspondents was ticking long before the Web.
Here again, new problems are generally old problems with a
different face: trends already evident in the 90s
underwent a dizzying acceleration as the digital era took
hold. The original newspaper model had used profits from
print advertising to fund its most expensive but often
least read international pages by bundling audiences
togetherâcrossword aficionados and business-page readers
with sports and celebrity-gossip fans. Online, a
newspaperâs sections are split and audiences unbundled,
allowing readers to go directly to the news they want
without having to glance atâor pay forâanything else.
</p>
<p><span>aol</span>âs guidelines for the new-model <i>Huffington
Post</i> suggest the orientation of the future: editors
are to keep their eyes glued to social media and data
streams to determine trending topics, pairing these with
search-engine optimized titlesâoften barely literate,
but no matter if they top results listsâand drawing on
thousands of bloggers as well as staff writers to push out
a non-stop stream of condensed, repurposed articles. Those
determining the content of the magazine are already locked
in a âmost popularâ feedback loop. Meanwhile, the
rapid-fire output of news agencies that run to a
âhamster wheelâ tempoâwire-copy writers may be
expected to churn out ten stories a dayâis becoming the
only source from on-the-ground reporters around the world.
Agency journalists may be good reporters, but their remit
is to stay faithful to the neutrality commitment of their
employer and only say what someone else, usually in an
official position, has said already. </p>
<p>The ascendant model for news in the advertising-driven
digital era is to offer us what weâve read about before,
whether this is the price of oil or the latest tennis
results; major internet services shape content according
to algorithms based on past behaviour. We can personalize
the news, âcurateâ and share content, but in the
process, âwhat we want winds up being suspiciously like
what weâve got already, more of the sameâthe cultural
equivalent of a warm bath.â News aggregation is about
âcapturing eyeballsâ. As one young toiler in âthe
salt mines of the aggregatorâ explains: âI have made
roughly 1,107 times more money linking to thinly sourced
stories about Lindsay Lohan than I have reporting any
original news.â Independent online news sites can be
starved of funds. After the <i>Baltimore Examiner</i>
shut down in 2009, journalists tried to set up a web-based
in-depth reporting site, <i>Investigative Voice</i>,
along the lines of <i>Voice of San Diego</i>, <i>MinnPost</i>
or <i>ProPublica</i>. It seemed, Taylor writes, âa
shining example of what many hope our new-media future
will beâ, combining âthe best of old-school
shoe-leather journalismâ with the internet as âa quick
and affordable distribution platformâ. The reporters
pioneered âepisodic investigative journalismâ, posting
and updating revelations of government and police
department malpractice, inviting reader input. After
barely a year, they were broke. Taylorâs contact took a
job with a local Fox affiliate, so he could see a doctor.
</p>
<p><i>The Peopleâs Platform</i> ends with a manifestoâin
itself a more ambitious move than those of most books on
digital culture, even if Taylorâs demands seem
disappointingly limited after what has gone before. She
shrinks from the thought of nationalizationâthere is no
equivalent here to Evgeny Morozovâs âSocialize the
data centres!ââand disparages the free-software
movement pioneered by Richard Stallman and others as
âfreedom to tinkerâ. Instead she calls for more
regulation of the service providers and major platforms;
improved broadband provision; introducing a kind of
GlassâSteagall of new media, to force a separation of
content creation from communication and thus prevent a new
round of vertical integration; levying a tax on the
advertising industry; pressuring Silicon Valley to pay tax
at higher rates; more public spending on the âcultural
commonsâ, the arts and public broadcasting (the
education system gets no mention). In the âcopyright
warsâ, she opts for reform rather than abolition or
âcopyleftâ. More broadly, Taylor argues that the
ideology of âfree cultureâ promoted by Web enthusiasts
has centred on distribution, obscuring and ultimately
diminishing the people and social supports that underlie
cultural production. She seeks to redress the balance by
way of a more âecologicalâ, long-term mentality,
drawing on the politics of ethical consumption and âfair
tradeâ to call for culture that is âsustainableâ and
âfairâ, as opposed to âfreeâ. </p>
<p>In many ways, <i>The Peopleâs Platform</i> is
strongest on the detail, nailing highly specific targets
(such as the myth that e-readers are a boon to the
environment; according to a <i>New York Times</i> report,
one Kindle consumes the resources of four dozen books and
has the carbon footprint of a hundred). Taylor provides a
valuable and demystifying account of the current American
cultural landscape. Strong on empirical documentation, the
book is weaker on conceptualization or structural
analysis. There is a sense that much of the material here
remains on the surface. Though her stated aim is to
uncover âthe socio-economic forces that shape technology
and the internetâ, all we are given on this front by way
of explanatory causes is a passing mention of shareholder
value. Politically, Taylor situates herself as âa
progressiveââthe book abounds in phrases beginning
âprogressives like myselfââwhich would seem to refer
to that section of American opinion located around the
left of the Democrats, <i>The Nation</i> and <i>Democracy
Now!.</i> She shares its strengthsâa powerful sense of
moral indignation and hatred of injusticeâand
weaknesses, not least a parochialism that can be blind to
the world beyond Americaâs borders and a failure to
analyse the Democratic Partyâs functional role for Wall
Street and Silicon Valley. </p>
<p><i>The Peopleâs Platform</i> never confronts the fact
that the Obama Administration has not only presided over
the continuing expansion of the global surveillance state
but has been exceptionally cosy with the Valley elite.
While Google, Facebook <i>et al</i>. have been
enthusiastic backers of the Democrats, a revolving door
has seen staff and ideas continue to pass between tech and
intelligence âcommunitiesâ. There is surprisingly
little in Taylorâs book on the digital heroes who have
incurred the Silicon Presidentâs wrath: Manning,
Snowden, Swartz. Yet their actions have done more than
most tomes of net criticism to reveal the power relations
of the digitalized world. Similarly, Taylorâs manifesto
might have been stronger had she looked across the Rio
Grande. That so much of the global infrastructure of the
Web, both hardware and software, is owned by American
corporations has different implications outside <span>us</span>
borders. In pursuit of what Stallman has called
âcomputational sovereigntyâ, the Lula government in
Brazil began funding free-software projectsââfreeâ
in the sense of <i>libre</i>, rather than <i>gratuit</i>âover
a decade ago. The Correa government in Ecuador has taken
the same path. A more comparative, internationalist
approach might also have shed greater light on what
conditions allow online investigative journalism to
succeed; in France, the subscription-based <i>Médiapart</i>
has flourished since its foundation by former <i>Le Monde</i>
editor Edwy Plenel in 2007, breaking some of the
countryâs biggest stories of political corruption. </p>
<p>While Taylorâs dismissal of free software as âfreedom
to tinkerâ captures something real about its <i>prima
facie</i> narrowness as a political programme, she
misses the peculiar way in which this very narrowness
gives rise to significant implications when we broaden the
frame and examine a more social picture. While the
individual user may not be interested in tinkering with,
for example, the Linux kernel, as opposed to simply using
it, the fact that it can be tinkered with opens up a space
of social agency that is not at all trivial. Since
everyone can access all the code all the time, it is
impossible for any entity, capital or state, to establish
any definitive control over users on the basis of the code
itself. And since the outcomes of this process are pooled,
one does not have to be personally interested in
âtinkeringâ to benefit directly from this freedom.
With non-free software one must simply trust whoever, or
whichever organization, created it. With free software,
this âwhoeverâ is socially open-ended, with
responsibility ultimately lying with the community of
users itself. </p>
<p>While this issue of trust might have seemed narrowly
geeky a few years ago, as our lives become increasingly
mediated by software infrastructures, and especially
post-Snowden, it is quite apparent that such things can
have major political ramifications. For example, it is not
unusual for non-free software to come with secret
âbackdoorsâ that can enable third parties to collect
information about users. Intelligence agencies can turn on
the microphone or camera on your phone to find out what
youâre doing or saying. With free software, the problem
is significantly reduced, since there is a world of users
out there attentive to such risks, ready and able to fix
them when they are found. These questionsâand the
ability to avoid surveillance or subtle forms of
technological interference by third partiesâhave an
obvious relevance for journalists, activists, committed
intellectuals and cultural workers, the subjects at the
heart of <i>The Peopleâs Platform</i>. </p>
<p>It is apparently still quite possible to live mostly
beyond the purview of Big Tech and the surveillance state,
and a truly vast âcommonsâ exists that can support
that independence. The use of non-tracking search engines
such as DuckDuckGo, instead of Google, can significantly
shorten the trail of oneâs data footprints, as can a
security-conscious email provider like Kolab (especially
when combined with encryption), or a free activist one
such as Riseup or Inventati/Autistici, rather than an
ad-based service such as Gmail, which feeds on its ability
to analyse your inbox. A federated social network such as
Diaspora can replace Facebook; instead of Googleâs
Android, smartphones and tablets can run the free-software
Replicant operating system; Owncloud can provide the same
functionality as Dropbox. The list could be expanded: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://prism-break.org/en/" target="_blank">prism-break.org</a>,
run by one Peng Zhong and based, perhaps only virtually,
in northern France, offers a wealth of suggestions. </p>
<p>The major obstacles to a large-scale exodus in that
direction are, first, the self-reinforcing tendency
towards consolidation, which makes it very easy to join,
for example, Facebook, and quite hard to leave; and
second, the straightforward temptation of corporate
services that are free and easily accessible, while the
alternatives tend to cost time or money, or both. Still, a
cultural politics of the internet should be grateful for
the work of free-software programmers and would do well to
draw upon the possibilities it opens up. Since WikiLeaks
and the Snowden revelations, there have been signs of an
emerging alliance between hackers and journalists, as
evidenced by <i>The Intercept</i>, the online platform
launched by Glenn Greewald, Jeremy Scahill and
documentary-maker Laura Poitras. Taylor is surely right
that we need to address the underlying socio-economic
forces that shape digital technologies. Yet against such
powerful foes, an effective strategy will aim to open
multiple fronts; real advances, however small, should be
welcomed. The twist to Jamesâs story was that the
Master, having dispatched his epigone to Switzerland in
the name of art, promptly married the young manâs
beloved. The lesson, in other words, was entirely worldly.
Todayâs young cultural workers may have learned that
already. </p>
<br>
<hr><br>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://newleftreview.org/II/92/emilie-bickerton-culture-after-google#_ednref1"
name="14ccaebacd10071e__edn1" title="" target="_blank">
[1]</a> Astra Taylor, <i>The Peopleâs Platform:
Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age</i>,
Fourth Estate: London 2014, £12.99, paperback 277 pp, 978
0 0 0752 5591</p>
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