Deep Dive | The Virtual Cage: The Individual versus the Tech Giants

Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up. (Franz Kafka, Little Fable)

The first two decades of the third millennium saw the internet functioning as a diverse and wild (though not equitably accessible) playground. Some readers probably remember forums and private web pages that you had to find, to hear about, or to discover through random wandering. What was unique about those websites was not their structure. Today’s reddit is sufficiently similar to forums, and personal web pages can easily be created on WordPress or social media. What was unique was their disconnection from each other. They were not the outgrowths of this or that empire, but islands floating in an ocean, many of them not having a financial model originating in silicon valley. 

As the internet began being identified as a valuable space for expansion, tech giants divided the internet between them. Most of the internet is served to us, today, by Facebook, Amazon, Google or Bytedance. In Data Grab, Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias compare this process of dividing the internet to the long process of European colonialism. The book contains many interesting points of comparison, starting with a discussion of installation of telegraph and electricity networks in Africa and Asia. Many of these were “gifted” by colonial nations, and were later used by the occupying forces against the very people they were gifted to.

Data colonialism also advances by offering useful services. I am not a technophobe, and I do not deny the immense utility of content and communication networks such as Whatsapp, Instagram and Youtube. However, their use creates more than just dependency. Couldry and Mejias describe how an essential aspect of colonialism was constructing the object that the colonial power would later extract. For example, colonialists implemented their own systems of property rights, allowing them to then define immense amounts of land and natural resources as unclaimed within their system of ownership, which gave them free license to seize those assets. Some are still owned by many European nations, even years after they relinquished direct military control. The Data equivalent is, for example, what we call “private data”. When I started writing on Facebook, I never saw myself as generating “Data”. I only thought about my communication with others. However, within Facebook the cogs were already spinning in order to take what I generated and make it a marketable product. It used to be called “Big Data”, and now it is called AI.

It is tempting to think that nothing is lost in this process. After all, even if I generate this data, it is not something I need. So what if Facebook takes my personal data and uses it to market things to me, or generate internet spam? One way of understanding the price is through a process Cory Doctrow described as “enshittification”. Enshittification is the process in which a new digital service is initially offered with high quality, mostly because it does not have a financial model. It is funded by investment money and does not return the investment through advertisement or some other plausible profit model. In this stage, the service brings in many users. They get used to it and become dependent on it. In the second stage, the company starts enshittifying the product. For example, it gives more space to advertisers, at the expense of people who would like to communicate with each other. In the case of gig-economy applications, or Amazon, after killing the competition with low prices funded by investment money, they raise the prices and/or lower employee compensation. At the next stage, even advertisers and other business users of these platforms suffer from enshittification. 

Digital Colonialism is an essential part of our economy. The tech sector made the richest people in the world rich, and most of our daily communication is funneled through it. For better or worse we live in a world that runs on these platforms, and we cannot control them. What then, would a rebellion against them look like?

During the rise of digital colonialism, one of the most popular rebellious characters was the hacker. The hacker was the individual that could freely evade capture within the tightening nets of the tech giants. The Matrix’s Neo is the classic example. But that vision looks stale today. First of all, this solution was only ever relevant for the tech-savvy privileged person who has spare time to spend evading the system. Beyond that, even if you’re not connected to these systems, your consolation prize is a life of evading every technological advancement, because each one arrives with a slew of surveillance mechanisms. Furthermore, the tech giants employ armies of data security specialists against hackers, and even if we had root access to Facebook’s mainframe, what would we even do with it?

Another development is that these cages, long ago closed around us, no longer look like the ingenious brain-child of a cruel and brilliant master. Our dictators are bland, boring people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, none of which had any interesting technological vision in the last decade, beyond those that they could purchase. The “golden cage” they constructed for us is covered with a dull virtual reality made up of unoriginal AI art. The problem with the system we’re stuck in is not their direct power over us, but how the world they created is kinda crappy, while still being the only place to hang out.

Thus, the rebellion we should seek nowadays is not escape from a virtual cage, but the construction of an alternative virtual home. Take, for example, Molly White, the creator of “Web3 is going great”. She has gained a lot of internet popularity by following the embarrassing attempts to construct Web 3, a supposedly new version of the web, in which authentication relies on unnecessary and wasteful Blockchain mechanisms. As she points out, because of her low opinion of these attempts, she learned how to construct a website and a community around it herself – a community that is not dependent on the networks on which it exists. A very interesting rebellion, thus, is to build together spaces that do not lean on these garbage internet platforms. They can be in the physical and personal space, in bars, in coffee shops and movie theaters where we can meet and create community, but also in new network platforms.

Every such attempt always looks small. A website here or there, a reading group, quotidian habits. These all do not amount to a revolution, it is true. But, we must remember that globalization is a colonialist concept. Pre-colonial communities did not necessarily aspire to become international empires, and neither must our acts of rebellion. Taking care of our own communities and our own fields, could be enough at the end of the day. It could be enough to have a group of friends that does not depend on Facebook likes. Reconstruction does not have to start with plans for replacing the existing empire. What we need is to retake the local, day-to-day space, to reduce the power of digital giants to run our lives. Every institution not dependent on them is a small part of creating a world that does not need them. Today’s rebel thus does not need to blow up bridges, she needs to build them.