“Developing dissident knowledges”: Geert Lovink on the Social Media Abyss | P2P Foundation
▻https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/developing-dissident-knowledges-geert-lovink-social-media-abyss/2017/07/12
The closest comparison that we have today to the New Soviet Man is perhaps the cult to the cyberlibertarian entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. We are now used to thirty-somethings in sweaters telling us, from the ping-pong tables in their offices, that the only road to success —both personal and collective— lies in technology. To oppose them is no easy task: who is going to question a discourse that has innovation and “the common good” at its core? But the internet today hardly resembles the technology that, in its origins, seemed to promise a source of decentralization, democratization and citizen empowerment. Nowadays, the giants of Silicon Valley —lead by Facebook and Google— have mutated towards a monopolistic economic model and flirt with intelligence agencies for the exchange of their precious data.
Lovink shares the “healthy scepticism” of Rendueles when elaborating what we could call an “Internet critical theory”. In Social Media Abyss, he inaugurates the post-Snowden era — “the secular version of God is Dead”— as the beginning of a general disillusionment with the development of the internet: now we can say that the internet “has become almost everything no one wanted it to be”. But even though we know that everything we do online may be used against us, we still click, share and rate whatever appears on our screen. Can we look at the future with optimism? Or are we too alienated, too precarized, too desocialized (despite being constantly “connected”) to design alternatives? In the words of Lovink, “what is citizen empowerment in the age of driver-less cars”?
Interview de Geert Lovink
And when I say ordinary I mean very ordinary. If you look at the general strategy, especially of Facebook, the target is this last billion, which is comprised of people really far under poverty levels. When we’re talking about the average internet user, we are not talking about affluent, middle-class, people anymore. This is really something to keep in mind, because we need to shed this old idea that the internet is an elitist technology, that the computers were once in the hands of the few, that the smartphone is a status symbol, etc. We are really talking about an average user that is basically under the new regime of the one percent, really struggling to keep afloat, to stay alive.
So when I say invisibility, I mean that this growing group of people (and we’re talking about billions across continents) are forced to integrate the internet in their everyday struggles. This is what makes it very, very serious. We’re not talking about luxury problems anymore. This is a problem of people that have to fight for their economic survival, but also have to be bothered with their privacy.
Yes, it feels like now it’s all measured by followers, even social movements.
Exactly, we cannot distinguish the social movement from the followers anymore. This is the trap we are in at the moment, so in a way we have to go back to a new understanding of smaller networks, or cells, or groups. It is no surprise that many people are now talking of going towards a new localism, because the easiest way to build these smaller groups is to focus on the local environment. But that’s not necessarily what I have in mind: I can also imagine smaller, trans-local networks.
There is another consideration we can make. I understand that Pierre Lévy says we should use the existing technologies more efficiently. But obviously other people say we can only use the social media that exist now in a more emancipatory way if these platforms are socialized, if we really take over their ownership. That is a very interesting and radical proposition that other people have started to work on. What if we take those social media very seriously, so seriously that they become part of the public utilities? This is an interesting development in which you don’t emphasize so much on the alternatives or the conceptual level.