Some people knew the internet would NOT liberate us …

I just ran across an item from 1994 written by Carmen Hermosillo talking about cyberspace, the internet and the future. It is quite something but TL:DR, so here are a few highlights:

Introducing Humdog: Pandora’s Vox Redux (1994)

“When I went into cyberspace I went into it thinking that it was a place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any other human interaction. I was wrong when I thought that. it was a terrible mistake …

“I have seen many people spill their guts on–line, and I did so myself until, at last, I began to see that I had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money–value.

“In the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which Karl Marx called ‘the means of production.’ capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited.

“I created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board I was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. That means that I sold my soul like a tennis shoe and I derived no profit from the sale of my soul … furthermore, i was paying two bucks an hour for the privilege of commodifying and exposing myself. Worse still, i was subjecting myself to the possibility of scrutiny by such friendly folks as the FBI: they can, and have, downloaded pretty much whatever they damn well please. The rhetoric in cyberspace is liberation–speak. The reality is that cyberspace is an increasingly efficient tool of surveillance with which people have a voluntary relationship.

“Proponents of so–called cyber–communities rarely emphasize the economic, business–mind nature of the community: many cyber–communities are businesses that rely upon the commodification of human interaction …

“The ideology of electronic community appears to contain three elements. First, the idea of the social; second, eco–greenness; and lastly, the assumption that technology equals progress in a kind of nineteenth century sense. All of these ideas break down under analysis into forms of banality …

“This, however, should not surprise anybody. Aesthetically, electronic community of the kind likely to be extolled in the gentle, new–age press, contains both elements of the modernist resistance to depth and appeal to surface combined with the postmodern aesthetic of fragment. The electronic community leaves a permanent record which is open to scrutiny while maintaining an illusion of transience. In doing this, it somehow manages to satisfy the needs of the Orwellian and the psycho–archaeologist …

“Many times in cyberspace, I felt it necessary to say that I was human. Once, I was told that I existed primarily as a voice in somebody’s head. Lots of times, I need to see handwriting on paper or a photograph or a phone conversation to confirm the humanity of the voice, but that is the way that I am.”

The reason I am citing this article is that it was written in 1994, and Carmello’s major concern was that the internet, that was nascent back then, would steal our humanity. More importantly that the internet would make humans ‘the product’. Our thoughts, our knowledge, our sharing and our community spirit would be usurped by large corporations, who would leverage this through centralised controls for profit, and by government organisations for surveillance.

Surely that could never happen Alphabet, Meta, ChatGPT, NSA, CIA, FBI …

In fact, the core essence of here concerns thirty years ago was that everyone believed the internet would decentralise democracy and liberate the people. Instead, it would actually do the opposite and centralise control by using the people.

It was pretty visionary.

If you want the whole thing click here meantime, to illustrate this point, The Economist highlights the way that cryptocurrencies have become institutionalised:

“When bitcoin was started in 2009, a utopian, anti-authoritarian movement welcomed it. Crypto’s earliest adopters had lofty goals about revolutionising finance and defending individuals against expropriation and inflation. They wanted to hand power to small investors, who would otherwise be at the mercy of giant financial institutions. This was more than an asset: it was technology as liberation.

“That is all forgotten now. Crypto has not just facilitated fraud, money-laundering and other flavours of financial crime on a gargantuan scale. The industry has also developed a grubby relationship with the executive branch of America’s government that outstrips that of Wall Street or any other industry. Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset.”

So everything networked does not free the people. It is just another way for governments and corporations to profit from them.