A Libertarian Socialist Response to the Enclosure of the Internet (and Digital Technology in General)
Dip explores what organizing against restrictive internet policies might look like.
Discord is expanding its sketchy AI-based age verification requirements; the restrictions for “adult content” will be required across the world–with accounts designated as “teen” by default. This follows the lead of legal mandates in the UK and Australia. Here in the States, there are a lot of Bad Internet Bills that have been floating around or are coming back up in Congress. Many of them revolve around repealing or amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, attacking both what is allowed to be posted online and online privacy in general. These bills would undermine encryption, encourage the gathering of even more sensitive data, and incentivize speed over accuracy, leading to shoddy identity and age verification systems.
An example of what these bills can do can be found in the FOSTA/SESTA, which amended Section 230 and was signed into law on 4/11/2018, during Trump 1.0. It was “meant” to stop sex trafficking, but–in reality–it made things more dangerous, limiting speech online, as evidenced by sites like Tumblr removing all of its adult content. It has nullified free speech “protections” for the transgression “promoting prostitution”. The subjectivity in such a proclamation has led to more dangerous conditions for sex workers, and more sex trafficking; pre-amendment online spaces allowed them to work with more (relative) safety.
Responding to all of these bills–and the companies preemptively complying–by asking for accountability from electeds is a losing proposition. These initiatives have bipartisan support. Maybe it won’t work, maybe it will, but if we have to bet and gamble, why not shoot for what’ll give us the highest odds?
Currently, we are staring down the results of a year of Trump 2.0 that speaks for itself. Around half of the goals of Project 2025 have been accomplished. The general trend of the current admin is not to relitigate the 20th century, but the 19th. You know, the century of naked imperialism and the generalization of slave rebellions to bring about Emancipation, that resulted in a civil war?
All to say, things are not looking good. They haven’t been for a bit, especially if you’re not middle class+, cis, straight, and/or white, but now things are getting bad for them folks too.
Photo by Robynne O on Unsplash
I’m going to advocate against betting for the government that is eating itself while it spins into obvious-to-white-people levels of fascism to be able to manage the crisis.
This is especially prudent because what we’ve done in the past has not worked; otherwise we wouldn’t be staring down the polycrisis. To zoom back into the “Bad Internet Bills”, we can see that the public responses to them rely on a combination of apathy (especially before the discord announcement), ignorance, and a shoddy theory of change–found in calls that center around yelling at electeds–which I find to be the biggest issue.
When these work together, it’s not just hard to protect things like free speech, it’s impossible to see that free speech is like a couple of floors underground from what we should have as our baseline. I will refrain from going into a breakdown of all of the contradictions that come with seeing that “right” (or any discrete “right”) as a pivot point for action. What I will say is that we should be very skeptical of “rights”, since they seem to always exist somewhere that we can’t access, able to be revoked and invoked at the will of those who lord over them.
It’s not a good idea to try something over and over again, hoping for different results. It’s also not a good idea to assume that everything is determined by systems and structures, and that people have no agency within their situations. We should both try things that we haven’t before, or try things in different ways/contexts, and we should understand the systems that we’re going up against so that we’re able to decide those actions with some intention.
If we want these bad bills to stop, and if we want to be able to relate to the tech we rely on beyond being jostled, we have to build power.
Here, I’m referring to popular power: the ability for non-elite non-specialists to organize and steward land, labor, life, and living. This is what people are getting at when they mention democracy, taken to its most logical and serious conclusion.This also acts against the idea of “power” as control and coercion, which revolves around getting “the right” people elected (ie progressives).
The order should be flipped. We should build up from the grassroots, and then decide from a position of power how to relate to the governmental structure. My personal hope is that we take hammers to the whole thing, but alas.
The basic idea would be to build up economic democracy through cooperative businesses, banks, and organizations, while building up communal democracy through assemblies at the same time. These economic and communal units would link together, collaborating for the shared aims of building communal power. From there, if we really have to (and, as an anarchist, I advocate against this being a priority), politicians can be engaged in increasingly accountable ways: first as voting blocs or interest groups, then as larger and larger contributors to their economic base, working towards to being able to divest and revoke support from them, if not them from the position, if they do something that goes against what the community wants and needs.
The shitty thing about building power in this way is that it takes a while; it’s slow and steady work. These bills have been held off for a few years, but who knows how long that’ll last. As we’ve seen with Discord and Roblox, companies won’t wait, applying the mandates from the most draconian legislation more widely, outside of that jurisdiction. So, in the meantime, we should do the things I mentioned: build cooperatives and spaces for communal deliberation. That’ll make this easier anyway.
Alongside that, campaigns should be run that, instead of targeting the elected officials passing these bills, target their material base of support in the organizations that benefit from these bills, whether they be NGOs, PACs, social clubs, and especially corporations. This would require power mapping these bills + initiatives, seeing who’s connected to them, and targeting them, and/or any secondary and tertiary targets that support them, a la the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign.
Working to do analysis that informs action will allow for that action to be effective, targeted, and influence power until people have power themselves. If this is combined with care work, that is to say, the labor that allows people to do labor (the cooking, cleaning, clerical tasks), then the analysis and action can act as a bridge to more robust analysis and action, tying immediate tactics not only to medium term campaigns, but long term goals as well.
Speaking of long term, we should prevent these shitty bills from passing, Gandalf style. Children are being used as a primary scapegoat in this initiative. That needs to stop, with us adults doing work to build, inspire, and empower spaces with kids that are not predatory, while maximizing autonomy, which includes giving kids the tools to understand consent, power, critical thinking, and health. Alongside the popular power push, or as part of it, there should be structures of genuine accountability built so that all of us, but especially electeds, who wear the veneer of public servitude while being parasitical, will have an avenue to become less so. This could be something to hold us over while we figure out how to do something that works for us rather than against us.
This more radical take on accountability would be, on one hand, informed by various anti-carceral approaches and practical concerns meant to shed the faults of a liberalist approach; “rights” are both too rigid and too contextual to have a useful heuristic for application. Accountability in this context would be about cultivating a sense of obligation to one’s actions, acknowledging harm, and taking emotional and practical steps to provide redress, along with a commitment to play a role in undermining one’s own ability to cause that harm again, alongside working for the same goal at the communal scale.
On the other hand, it would be informed by that fact of antagonism and parasitism mentioned earlier. That is to say, for the system itself, and not the popular power anti-system(s)/network/whatever we call it and however it looks, anyone who works in that (from the leaders of tech companies, to the politicians, to all of their functionaries) is seen as opposition and will be treated as such. This would mark them as potential organizing targets or as people who can become double agents.
Through money, morals, or whatever else the movement decides to do, this would be about that agent working within their capacity to undermine the functions of the system for the sake of bolstering the anti-system’s position and aims. This could be as basic as creating favorable conditions by not working against the anti-system, or as extreme as actively impeding the system.
These ideas are general because the specific problems we’re staring down with these bills are general problems of power. That is mostly true of most things, but that just means that any communal anti-systemic infrastructure we build for taking down these specific things can play a role in other social change efforts. Regardless, we have to start somewhere; getting together and working with people you trust is a great first step. Following Little Sis, some concrete steps are to:
- Find other folks in your community that are interested in taking action and see that there is an issue;
- Set a frequent meeting time, place, and format. It should be accessible in multiple dimensions, parent friendly, and ideally have food. There should also be time to do a “gifts, skills, and interests” assessment to see what folks can do and how that might factor into an action. Once the crew has been assembled, folks can;
- figure out what the project/campaign is going to be. This will basically be meant to answer the questions of “Who governs? Who benefits? Who pays?”, where the local power structure is traced as it relates to these bad bills and company initiatives, along with potential allies (and adversaries) in the community, like NGOs, community organizations, advocacy groups, and other coalitions. This will prevent the group from “reinventing the wheel” and;
- allow the group to take action! The first step will likely be to make whatever research that’s been done public, so as to expose the targets and allow for other folks in the community to know what’s going on. It can also galvanize folks to action by giving them context, and might even put a bit of pressure on the targets. This will also create a space for objectives and/or demands, leading to further action.
The big issue with the bad bills is not just that the bills are bad. The system itself is working as designed, to the detriment of us all. We need to do something different. Anti-systemic anti-politics are a path forward.
