Tag: materiality of internet

The Ground Beneath the Screens

a review of Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and The Anthrobscene (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
by Zachary Loeb

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Despite the aura of ethereality that clings to the Internet, today’s technologies have not shed their material aspects. Digging into the materiality of such devices does much to trouble the adoring declarations of “The Internet Is the Answer.” What is unearthed by digging is the ecological and human destruction involved in the creation of the devices on which the Internet depends—a destruction that Jussi Parikka considers an obscenity at the core of contemporary media.

Parikka’s tale begins deep below the Earth’s surface in deposits of a host of different minerals that are integral to the variety of devices without which you could not be reading these words on a screen. This story encompasses the labor conditions in which these minerals are extracted and eventually turned into finished devices, it tells of satellites, undersea cables, massive server farms, and it includes a dark premonition of the return to the Earth which will occur following the death (possibly a premature death due to planned obsolescence) of the screen at which you are currently looking.

In a connected duo of new books, The Anthrobscene (referenced below as A) and A Geology of Media (referenced below as GM), media scholar Parikka wrestles with the materiality of the digital. Parikka examines the pathways by which planetary elements become technology, while considering the transformations entailed in the anthropocene, and artistic attempts to render all of this understandable. Drawing upon thinkers ranging from Lewis Mumford to Donna Haraway and from the Situationists to Siegfried Zielinski – Parikka constructs a way of approaching media that emphasizes that it is born of the Earth, borne upon the Earth, and fated eventually to return to its place of origin. Parikka’s work demands that materiality be taken seriously not only by those who study media but also by all of those who interact with media – it is a demand that the anthropocene must be made visible.

Time is an important character in both The Anthrobscene and A Geology of Media for it provides the context in which one can understand the long history of the planet as well as the scale of the years required for media to truly decompose. Parikka argues that materiality needs to be considered beyond a simple focus upon machines and infrastructure, but instead should take into account “the idea of the earth, light, air, and time as media” (GM 3). Geology is harnessed as a method of ripping open the black box of technology and analyzing what the components inside are made of – copper, lithium, coltan, and so forth. The engagement with geological materiality is key for understanding the environmental implications of media, both in terms of the technologies currently in circulation and in terms of predicting the devices that will emerge in the coming years. Too often the planet is given short shrift in considerations of the technical, but “it is the earth that provides for media and enables it”, it is “the affordances of its geophysical reality that make technical media happen” (GM 13). Drawing upon Mumford’s writings about “paleotechnics” and “neotechnics” (concepts which Mumford had himself adapted from the work of Patrick Geddes), Parikka emphasizes that both the age of coal (paleotechnics) and the age of electricity (neotechnics) are “grounded in the wider mobilization of the materiality of the earth” (GM 15). Indeed, electric power is often still quite reliant upon the extraction and burning of coal.

More than just a pithy neologism, Parikka introduces the term “anthrobscene” to highlight the ecological violence inherent in “the massive changes human practices, technologies, and existence have brought across the ecological board” (GM 16-17) shifts that often go under the more morally vague title of “the anthropocene.” For Parikka, “the addition of the obscene is self-explanatory when one starts to consider the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks” (A 6). Like a curse word beeped out by television censors, much of the obscenity of the anthropocene goes unheard even as governments and corporations compete with ever greater élan for the privilege of pillaging portions of the planet – Parikka seeks to reinscribe the obscenity.

The world of high tech media still relies upon the extraction of metals from the earth and, as Parikka shows, a significant portion of the minerals mined today are destined to become part of media technologies. Therefore, in contemplating geology and media it can be fruitful to approach media using Zielinski’s notion of “deep time” wherein “durations become a theoretical strategy of resistance against the linear progress myths that impose a limited context for understanding technological change” (GM 37, A 23). Deploying the notion of “deep time” demonstrates the ways in which a “metallic materiality links the earth to the media technological” while also emphasizing the temporality “linked to the nonhuman earth times of decay and renewal” (GM 44, A 30). Thus, the concept of “deep time” can be particularly useful in thinking through the nonhuman scales of time involved in media, such as the centuries required for e-waste to decompose.

Whereas “deep time” provides insight into media’s temporal quality, “psychogeophysics” presents a method for thinking through the spatial. “Psychogeophysics” is a variation of the Situationist idea of “the psychogeographical,” but where the Situationists focused upon the exploration of the urban environment, “psychogeophysics” (which appeared as a concept in a manifesto in Mute magazine) moves beyond the urban sphere to contemplate the oblate spheroid that is the planet. What the “geophysical twist brings is a stronger nonhuman element that is nonetheless aware of the current forms of exploitation but takes a strategic point of view on the nonorganic too” (GM 64). Whereas an emphasis on the urban winds up privileging the world built by humans, the shift brought by “psychogeophysics” allows people to bear witness to “a cartography of architecture of the technological that is embedded in the geophysical” (GM 79).

The material aspects of media technology consist of many areas where visibility has broken down. In many cases this is suggestive of an almost willful disregard (ignoring exploitative mining and labor conditions as well as the harm caused by e-waste), but in still other cases it is reflective of the minute scales that materiality can assume (such as metallic dust that dangerously fills workers’ lungs after they shine iPad cases). The devices that are surrounded by an optimistic aura in some nations, thus obtain this sheen at the literal expense of others: “the residue of the utopian promise is registered in the soft tissue of a globally distributed cheap labor force” (GM 89). Indeed, those who fawn with religious adoration over the newest high-tech gizmo may simply be demonstrating that nobody they know personally will be sickened in assembling it, or be poisoned by it when it becomes e-waste. An emphasis on geology and materiality, as Parikka demonstrates, shows that the era of digital capitalism contains many echoes of the exploitation characteristic of bygone periods – appropriation of resources, despoiling of the environment, mistreatment of workers, exportation of waste, these tragedies have never ceased.

Digital media is excellent at creating a futuristic veneer of “smart” devices and immaterial sounding aspects such as “the cloud,” and yet a material analysis demonstrates the validity of the old adage “the more things change the more they stay the same.” Despite efforts to “green” digital technology, “computer culture never really left the fossil (fuel) age anyway” (GM 111). But beyond relying on fossil fuels for energy, these devices can themselves be considered as fossils-to-be as they go to rest in dumps wherein they slowly degrade, so that “we can now ask what sort of fossil layer is defined by the technical media condition…our future fossils layers are piling up slowly but steadily as an emblem of an apocalypse in slow motion” (GM 119). We may not be surrounded by dinosaurs and trilobites, but the digital media that we encounter are tomorrow’s fossils – which may be quite mysterious and confounding to those who, thousands of years hence, dig them up. Businesses that make and sell digital media thrive on a sense of time that consists of planned obsolescence, regular updates, and new products, but to take responsibility for the materiality of these devices requires that “notions of temporality must escape any human-obsessed vocabulary and enter into a closer proximity with the fossil” (GM 135). It requires a woebegone recognition that our technological detritus may be present on the planet long after humanity has vanished.

The living dead that lurch alongside humanity today are not the zombies of popular entertainment, but the undead media devices that provide the screens for consuming such distractions. Already fossils, bound to be disposed of long before they stop working, it is vital “to be able to remember that media never dies, but remains as toxic residue,” and thus “we should be able to repurpose and reuse solutions in new ways, as circuit bending and hardware hacking practices imply” (A 41). We live with these zombies, we live among them, and even when we attempt to pack them off to unseen graveyards they survive under the surface. A Geology of Media is thus “a call for further materialization of media not only as media but as that bit which it consists of: the list of the geophysical elements that give us digital culture” (GM 139).

It is not simply that “machines themselves contain a planet” (GM 139) but that the very materiality of the planet is becoming riddled with a layer of fossilized machines.

* * *

The image of the world conjured up by Parikka in A Geology of Media and The Anthrobscene is far from comforting – after all, Parikka’s preference for talking about “the anthrobscene” does much to set a funereal tone. Nevertheless, these two books by Parikka do much to demonstrate that “obscene” may be a very fair word to use when discussing today’s digital media. By emphasizing the materiality of media, Parikka avoids the thorny discussions of the benefits and shortfalls of various platforms to instead pose a more challenging ethical puzzle: even if a given social media platform can be used for ethical ends, to what extent is this irrevocably tainted by the materiality of the device used to access these platforms? It is a dark assessment which Parikka describes without much in the way of optimistic varnish, as he describes the anthropocene (on the first page of The Anthrobscene) as “a concept that also marks the various violations of environmental and human life in corporate practices and technological culture that are ensuring that there won’t be much of humans in the future scene of life” (A 1).

And yet both books manage to avoid the pitfall of simply coming across as wallowing in doom. Parikka is not pining for a primal pastoral fantasy, but is instead seeking to provide new theoretical tools with which his readers can attempt to think through the materiality of media. Here, Parikka’s emphasis on the way that digital technology is still heavily reliant upon mining and fossil fuels acts as an important counter to gee-whiz futurism. Similarly Parikka’s mobilization of the notion of “deep time” and fossils acts as an important contribution to thinking through the lifecycles of digital media. Dwelling on the undeath of a smartphone slowly decaying in an e-waste dump over centuries is less about evoking a fearful horror than it is about making clear the horribleness of technological waste. The discussion of “deep time” seems like it can function as a sort of geological brake on accelerationist thinking, by emphasizing that no matter how fast humans go, the planet has its own sense of temporality. Throughout these two slim books, Parikka draws upon a variety of cultural works to strengthen his argument: ranging from the earth-pillaging mad scientist of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, to the Coal Fired Computers of Yokokoji-Harwood (YoHa), to Molleindustria’s smartphone game “Phone Story” which plays out on a smartphone’s screen the tangles of extraction, assembly, and disposal that are as much a part of the smartphone’s story as whatever uses for which the final device is eventually used. Cultural and artistic works, when they intend to, may be able to draw attention to the obscenity of the anthropocene.

The Anthrobscene and A Geology of Media are complementary texts, but one need not read both in order to understand the other. As part of the University of Minnesota Press’s “Forerunners” series, The Anthrobscene is a small book (in terms of page count and physical size) which moves at a brisk pace, in some ways it functions as a sort of greatest hits version of A Geology of Media – containing many of the essential high points, but lacking some of the elements that ultimately make A Geology of Media a satisfying and challenging book. Yet the duo of books work wonderfully together as The Anthrobscene acts as a sort of primer – that a reader of both books will detect many similarities between the two is not a major detraction, for these books tell a story that often goes unheard today.

Those looking for neat solutions to the anthropocene’s quagmire will not find them in either of these books – and as these texts are primarily aimed at an academic audience this is not particularly surprising. These books are not caught up in offering hope – be it false or genuine. At the close of A Geology of Media when Parikka discusses the need “to repurpose and reuse solutions in new ways, as circuit bending and hardware hacking practices imply” (A 41) – this does not appear as a perfect panacea but as way of possibly adjusting. Parikka is correct in emphasizing the ways in which the extractive regimes that characterized the paleotechnic continue on in the neotechnic era, and this is a point which Mumford himself made regarding the way that the various “technic” eras do not represent clean breaks from each other. As Mumford put it, “the new machines followed, not their own pattern, but the pattern laid down by previous economic and technical structures” (Mumford 2010, 236) – in other words, just as Parikka explains, the paleotechnic survives well into the neotechnic. The reason this is worth mentioning is not to challenge Parikka, but to highlight that the “neotechnic” is not meant as a characterization of a utopian technical epoch that has parted ways with the exploitation that had characterized the preceding period. For Mumford the need was to move beyond the anthropocentrism of the neotechnic period and move towards what he called (in The Culture of Cities) the “biotechnic” a period wherein “technology itself will be oriented toward the culture of life” (Mumford 1938, 495). Granted, as Mumford’s later work and as these books by Parikka make clear – instead of arriving at the “biotechnic” what we might get is instead the anthrobscene. And reading these books by Parikka makes it clear that one could not characterize the anthrobscene as being “oriented toward the culture of life” – indeed, it may be exactly the opposite. Or, to stick with Mumford a bit longer, it may be that the anthrobscene is the result of the triumph of “authoritarian technics” over “democratic” ones. Nevertheless, the true dirge like element of Parikka’s books is that they raise the possibility that it may well be too late to shift paths – that the neotechnic was perhaps just a coat of fresh paint applied to hide the rusting edifice of paleotechnics.

A Geology of Media and The Anthrobscene are conceptual toolkits, they provide the reader with the drills and shovels they need to dig into the materiality of digital media. But what these books make clear is that along with the pickaxe and the archeologist’s brush, if one is going to dig into the materiality of media one also needs a gasmask if one is to endure the noxious fumes. Ultimately, what Parikka shows is that the Situationist inspired graffiti of May 1968 “beneath the streets – the beach” needs to be rewritten in the anthrobscene.

Perhaps a fitting variation for today would read: “beneath the streets – the graveyard.”
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Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

Back to the essay
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Works Cited

Mumford, Lewis. 2010. Technics and Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mumford, Lewis. 1938. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

October 28, 2015
The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor

Or is it? : Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform

Review by Zachary Loeb

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Imagine not using the Internet for twenty-four hours.

Really: no Internet from dawn to dawn.

Take a moment to think through the wide range of devices you would have to turn off and services you would have to avoid to succeed in such a challenge. While a single day without going online may not represent too outlandish an ordeal such an endeavor would still require some social and economic gymnastics. From the way we communicate with friends to the way we order food to the way we turn in assignments for school or complete tasks in our jobs – our lives have become thoroughly entangled with the Internet. Whether its power and control are overt or subtle the Internet has come to wield an impressive amount of influence over our lives.

All of which should serve to raise a discomforting question – so, who is in control of the Internet? Is the Internet a fantastically democratic space that puts the power back in the hands of people? Is the Internet a sly mechanism for vesting more power in the hands of the already powerful, whilst distracting people with a steady stream of kitschy content and discounted consumerism? Or, is the Internet a space relying on levels of oft-unseen material infrastructures with a range of positive and negative potentialities? These are the questions that Astra Taylor attempts to untangle in her book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014). It is the rare example of a book where the title itself forms a thesis statement of sorts: the Internet was and can be a platform for the people but this potential has been perverted, and thus there needs to be a “taking back” of power (and culture).

At the outset Taylor locates her critique in the space between the fawning of the “techno-optimists” and the grousing of the “techno-skeptics.” Far from trying to assume a “neutral” stance, Taylor couches her discussion of the “techno” by stepping back to consider the social, political, and economic forces that shape the “techno” reality that inspires optimism and skepticism. Taylor, therefore, does not build her argument upon a discussion of the Internet as such but builds her argument around a discussion of the Internet as it is and as it could be. Unfortunately the “as it currently is” of this “new media” evinces that: “Corporate power and the quest for profit are as fundamental to new media as old.” (8)

Thus Taylor sets up the conundrum of the Internet – it is at once a media platform with a great deal of democratic potential, and yet this potential has been continually appropriated for bureaucratic, technocratic, and indeed plutocratic purposes.

Over the course of The People’s Platform Taylor moves from one aspect of the Internet (and its related material infrastructures) to another – touching upon a range of issues from the Internet’s history, to copyright and the way it has undermined “cultural creators” ability to earn a living, the way the Internet persuades and controls, across the issues of journalism and e-waste, to the ways in which the Internet can replicate the misogyny and racism of the offline world.

With her background as a documentary filmmaker (she directed the film The Examined Life [which is excellent]) Taylor is skilled in cutting deftly from one topic to the next, though this particular experience also gives her cause to dwell at length upon the matter of how culture is created and supported in the digital age. Indeed as a maker of independent films Taylor is particularly attuned to the challenges of making culturally valuable content in a time when free copies spread rapidly on-line. Here too Taylor demonstrates the link to larger economic forces – there are still highly successful “stars” and occasional stories of “from nowhere” success, but the result is largely that those attempting to eke out a nominal subsistence find it increasingly challenging to do so.

As the Internet becomes the principle means of dissemination of material “cultural creators” find themselves bound to a system wherein the ultimate remuneration rarely accrues back to them. Likewise the rash of profit-driven mergers and shifting revenue streams has resulted in a steady erosion of the journalistic field. It is not – as Taylor argues – that there is a lack of committed “cultural creators” and journalists working today, it is that they are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their efforts. The Internet, as Taylor describes it, is certainly making many people enormously wealthy but those made wealthy are more likely to be platform owners (think Google or Facebook) than those who fill those platforms with the informational content that makes them valuable.

Though the Internet may have its roots in massive public investment and though the value of the Internet is a result of the labor of Internet users (example: Facebook makes money by selling advertisements based on the work you put it in on your profile), the Internet as it is now is often less of an alternative to society than it is a replication. The biases of the offline world are replicated in the digital realm, as Taylor puts it:

“While the Internet offers marginalized groups powerful and potentially world-changing opportunities to meet and act together, new technologies also magnify inequality, reinforcing elements of the old order. Networks do not eradicate power: they distribute it in different ways, shuffling hierarchies and producing new mechanisms of exclusion.” (108)

Thus, the Internet – often under the guise of promoting anonymity – can be a site for an explosion of misogyny, racism, classism, and an elitism blossoming from a “more-technologically-skilled-than-thou” position. There are certainly many “marginalized groups” and individuals trying to use the Internet to battle their historical silencing, but for every social justice minded video there is a comment section seething with the grunts of trolls. Meanwhile behind this all stand the same wealthy corporate interests that enjoyed privileged positions before the rise of the Internet. These corporate forces can wield the power they gain from the Internet to steer and persuade Internet users in such a way that the “curated experience” of the Internet is increasingly another way of saying, “what a major corporation thinks you (should) want.”

Breaking through the ethereal airs of the Internet, Taylor also grounds her argument in the material realities of the digital realm. While it is true that more and more people are increasingly online, Taylor emphasizes that there are still many without access and that the high-speed access enjoyed by some is not had by one and all. Furthermore, all of this access, all of these fanciful devices, all of these democratic dreams are reliant upon a physical infrastructure shot through with dangerous mining conditions, wretched laboring facilities, and toxic dumps where discarded devices eventually go to decay. Those who are able to enjoy the Internet as a positive feature in their day to day life are rarely the same people who worked in the mines, the assembly plants, or who will have to live on the land that has been blighted by e-waste.

While Taylor refuses to ignore the many downsides associated with the Internet age she remains fixed on its positive potential. The book concludes without offering a simplistic list of solutions but nevertheless ends with a sense that those who care about the Internet’s non-corporate potential need to work to build a “sustainable digital future” (183). Though there are certainly powerful interests profiting from the current state of the Internet the fact remains that (in a historical sense) the Internet is rather young, and there is still time to challenge the shape it is taking. Considering what needs to be done, Taylor notes: “The solutions we need require collective, political action.” (218)

It is a suggestion that carries a sentiment that people can band together to reassert control over the online commons that are steadily being enclosed by corporate interests. By considering the Internet as a public utility (a point being discussed at the moment in regards to Net Neutrality) and by focusing on democratic values instead of financial values – it may be possible for people to reverse (or at least slow) the corporate wave which is washing over the Internet.

After all, the Internet is the result of massive public investment, why is it that it has been delivered into corporate hands? Ultimately, Taylor concludes (in a chapter titled “In Defense of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sustainable Culture”) that if people want the Internet to be a “people’s platform” that they will have to organize and fight for it (“collective, political”). In a time when the Internet is an important feature of society, it makes a difference if the Internet is an open “people’s platform” or a highly (if subtly) controlled corporate theme park. “The People’s Platform” requires people who care to raise their voices…such as the people who have read Astra Taylor’s book, perhaps.

* * * * *

With The People’s Platform Astra Taylor has made an effective and interesting contribution to the discussion around the nature of the Internet and its future. By emphasizing a political and economic critique she is able to pull the Internet away from a utopian fantasy in order to analyze it in terms of the competing forces that have shaped (and continue to shape) it. The perspective that Taylor brings, as a documentary filmmaker, allows her to drop the journalistic façade of objectivity in order to genuinely and forcefully engage with issues pertaining to the compensation of cultural creators in the age of digital dissemination. Whilst the sections that Taylor writes on the level of misogyny one encounters online and the section on e-waste make this book particularly noteworthy. Though each chapter of The People’s Platform could likely be extended into an entire book, it is in their interconnections that Taylor is able to demonstrate the layers of interconnected issues that are making such a mess of the Internet today. For the problem facing the online realm is not just corporate control – it is a slew of issues that need to be recognized in total (and in their interconnected nature) if any type of response is to be mounted.

Though The People’s Platform is ostensibly about a conflict regarding the future of the Internet, the book is itself a site of conflicting sentiments. Though Taylor – at the outset – aims to avoid aligning herself with the “cheerleaders of progress” or “the prophets of doom” (4) the book that emerges is one that is in the stands of the “cheerleaders of progress” (even if with slight misgivings about being in those stands). The book’s title suggests that even with all of the problems associated with the Internet it still represents something promising, something worth fighting to “take back.” It is a point that is particularly troublesome to consider after Taylor’s description of labor conditions and e-waste. For one of the main questions that emerges towards the end of Taylor’s book – though it is not one she directly poses – makes problematic the book’s title, that question being: which “people” are being described in “the people’s platform?”

It may be tempting to answer such a question with a simplistic “well, all of the people” yet such a response is inadequate in light of the way that Taylor’s book clearly discusses the layers of control and dominance one finds surrounding the Internet. Can the Internet be “the people’s platform” for writers, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and activists with access to digital tools? Sure. But what of those described in the e-waste chapter – people living in oppressive conditions and toiling in factories where building digital devices puts them at risk of cancer or disassembling such devices poisons them and their families? Those people count as well, but those upon whom “the people’s platform” is built seem to be crushed beneath it, not able to get on top of it – to stand on “the people’s platform” is to stand on the hunched shoulders of others. It is true that Taylor takes this into account in emphasizing that something needs to be done to recognize and rectify this matter – but insofar as the material tools “the people” use to reach the Internet are built upon the repression and oppression of other people, it sours the very notion of the Internet as “the people’s platform.”

This in turn raises another question: what would a genuine “people’s platform” look like? In the conclusion to the book Taylor attempts to answer this question by arguing for political action and increased democratic control over the Internet; however, one can easily imagine classifying the Internet as a “public utility” without doing anything to change the laboring conditions of those who build devices. Indeed, the darkly amusing element of The People’s Platform is that Taylor answers this question brilliantly on the second page of her book and then spends the following two hundred and thirty pages ignoring this answer.

Taylor begins The People’s Platform with an anecdote about her youth in the pre-Internet (or pre-high speed Internet) era, wherein she recalls working on a small personally assembled magazine (a “zine”) which she would then have printed and distribute to friends and a variety of local shops. Looking back upon her time making zines, Taylor writes:
“Today any kid with a smartphone and a message has the potential to reach more people with the push of a button that I did during two years of self-publishing.” (2)

These lines from Taylor come only a sentence after she considers how her access to easy photocopying (for her zine) made it easier for her than it had been for earlier would-be publishers. Indeed, Taylor recalls:

“a veteran political organizer told me how he and his friends had to sell blood in order to raise the funds to buy a mimeograph machine so they could make a newsletter in the early sixties.” (2)

There are a few subtle moments in the above lines (from the second page of Taylor’s book) that say far more about a “people’s platform” than they let on. It is true that a smartphone gives a person “the potential to reach more people” but as the rest of Taylor’s book makes clear – it is not necessarily the case that people really do “reach more people” online. There are certainly wild success stories, but for “any kid” their reach with their smartphone may not be much greater than the number of people reachable with a photocopied zine. Furthermore, the zine audience might have been more engaged and receptive than the idle scanner of Tweets or Facebook updates – the smartphone may deliver more potential but actually achieve less.

Nevertheless, the key aspects is Taylor’s comment about the “veteran political organizer” – this organizer (“and his friends”) were able to “buy a mimeograph machine so they could make a newsletter.” Is this different from buying a laptop computer, Internet access, and a domain name? Actually? Yes. Yes, it is. For once those newsletter makers bought the mimeograph machine they were in control of it – they did not need to worry about its Terms of Service changing, about pop-up advertisements, about their movements being tracked through the device, about the NSA having installed a convenient backdoor – and frankly there’s a good chance that the mimeograph machine they purchased had a much longer life than any laptop they would purchase today. Again – they bought and were able to control the means for disseminating their message, one cannot truly buy all of the means necessary for disseminating an online message (when one includes cable, ISP providers, etc…).

The case of the mimeograph machine and the Internet is the question of what types of technologies represent genuine people’s platforms and which result in potential “people’s platforms” (note the quotation marks)? This is not to say that mimeograph machines are perfect (after all somebody did build that machine) but when considering technology in a democratic sense it is important to puzzle over whether or not (to borrow Lewis Mumford’s terminology) the tool itself is “authoritarian” or “democratic.” The way the Internet appears in Taylor’s book – with its massive infrastructure, propensity for centralized control, material reality built upon toxic materials – should at the very least make one question to what extent the Internet is genuinely a democratic “people’s” tool. Or, whether or not it is simply such a tool for those who are able to enjoy the bulk of the benefits and a minimum of the downsides. Taylor clearly does not want to be accused of being a “prophet of doom” – or of being a prophet for profit – but the sad result is that she jumps over the genuine people’s platform she describes on the second page in favor of building an argument for a platform that, by book’s end, seems to hardly be one for “the people” in any but a narrow sense of “the people.”

The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age is a well written, solidly researched, and effectively argued book that raises many valuable questions. The book offers no simplistic panaceas but instead forces the reader to think through the issues – oftentimes by forcing them to confront uncomfortable facts about digital technologies (such as e-waste). As Taylor uncovers and discusses issue after bias after challenge regarding the Internet the question that haunts her text is whether or not the platform she is describing – the Internet – is really worthy of being called “The People’s Platform”? If so, to which “people” does this apply?

The People’s Platform is well worth reading – but it is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of the conversation.

And it is a conversation that is desperately needed.

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The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Metropolitan Books, 2014

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Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, alternative forms of technology, and libraries as models of resistance. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian” Loeb writes at the blog librarianshipwreck, which is where this review originally appeared.

May 27, 2014

Tag: materiality of internet

The Ground Beneath the Screens

The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor