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From dialup dreams to digital enclosures: Epistemological frameworks of the modern internet

Dear friends,

🧸 Bear with me, I swear this is cultural studies.

I've been thinking about how internet topologies shape the nature of communications, and the culture of 'place' in the hyper-online world. This started with me reminiscing about the dialup years, impatiently waiting for awkwardly themed phpBB forums to load, the disconnect mid-download from a phone call, and the internet being a place[1]. The early foundations of internet technology arose from a desire to network, specifically to network beyond the intranet (i.e., the office, your house). There were competing modes of connecting, from different cables, standards, and approaches to different protocols and communication stacks (particularly across operating systems: UNIX, MacOS, Windows for Workgroups, Novell, etc.)[2]. But somewhere in these early days standards were achieved™ and computers could talk.

But I don't want to write a history of internet communication protocols and methods. That's been done, and it's really that interesting... except to consider how late-stage capitalism would approach that problem today. Can you imagine the micro-quantifications of connectivity shaped with mandatory advertisement viewing, cost per click, commercialised interconnection, concentration of services onto oligarchic platforms, propaganda and information filtration, god it makes me feel sick just thinking about it. Oh, that's the current internet. But the foundations of the network is the computer gave us great freedom of connectivity, even if it was and remains largely bourgeois. Information passage and collectivity fundamentally underpin the computer today – what is a computer without the network in 2025? Can you imagine not having internet access now?[3]

Getting funky, and applying some philosophical concepts to technology I'd like to ask: what assumptions have we made about the internet? Does it really offer universality, human connection, ease and convenience, and what might we be letting go of to allow this? How do our assumptions influence (or otherwise) our thinking about the largest non-organic connection in our lives? And, importantly, what ontological necessities frame our communication modes? See, I told you it was cultural studies[4]!

The modern internet depends on quite a few "layers" of technology. First, we have a physical layer the actual cables, infrastructure, satellites, switches, routers, servers, and storage (and many other bits and pieces). This layer makes some assumptions about place, politics, and physics. In order to have a physical layer, we might say, the ontological space requires:

  • Reality to have measurable physical phenomena – for instance transmission of electrical pulses, flashes of light, or radio waves.
  • Relatively reliable tools which enable construction and transmission across place and time.
  • Reality as non-abstract: photons, electrons, electromagnetic fields, cause and effect.
  • Human labour to construct the network: the hardware and the installation of that hardware.

We also have certain epistemological assumptions embedded in this layer. These include:

  • Even if none ontological assumptions are "real", we must hold a belief that the above are somewhat real which underpins the infrastructure (let's not get nihilistic about it).
  • We can know the physical world well enough to engineer mostly reliable transmission of signals.
  • Those signals can be measured, noise can be distinguished from data, and errors can be understood and corrected.
  • This knowledge foundation is largely quantitative, empirical and replicable.

Jumping up a few steps we have a protocol layer. The protocol layer enables the machines to talk (we're not quite at the level of human interaction, though some talented humans know far too much about this). In 2025 we mostly use Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) at this layer[5]. On an ontological front we could assert:

  • Communications can be broken down into packets (described and relatively stable units).
  • Networks, building on the physical layer above, are about connecting separate entities, these entities remain "separate" but connected.
  • Implicit atomisation, the network is made of nodes (mostly computers, etc.) which have boundaries based on the physical.

On the epistemological front, we might say:

  • There are "universal" protocols which allow different types of systems to communicate.
  • Strong beliefs that there is possibility of unambiguous communication, that standardisation, specification, and protocols can be made and, to an extent, enforced.
  • There are methods which can enable us to detect what information is correct and what is corrupted.

At the application layer (not to be confused with apps), we start to see a more human organic nature emerging. This space has more 'tribes' and diverse standards, rather than requiring one agreed approach. For the web (http/https) there are some more interesting ontological concerns:

  • Information can be separated from context.
  • Information can be transported to different environments.
  • Information retains a coherent identity.
  • Information has (relatively) stable identifiers.
  • Resources (combinations of this information) may have stable identities and identifiers.
  • The presentation of resources can be separated from the resource itself (think different web browsers, email clients, etc.).

Epistemologically, then, there is an assertion of certain cultural aspects:

  • Hypertext, this page you are reading for instance, is an associative model of knowledge.
  • "Understanding" hypertext emerges from relationships. Finding this page, for instance, requires me to either communicate with you in the meat suit world: offering the link, or you use another linking service (i.e., search engine) which brings you here.
  • Hierarchies and taxonomies are largely moot – links may receive "preference" based on search algorithms, but these aren't fundamental to how we know in application spaces.
  • These relationships, the "world wide web", embeds assumptions about how humans navigate information and what constitutes meaningful connection between ideas.

Cool, so we've given a genealogy of knowledge to the internet. It's so academic that it hurts. But, I think there's some use in trying to understand what conditions our communications. These building blocks, while clearly contestable and very surface level, might help us to understand the socio-cultural construct which sits atop them, similarly to how ontological and epistemological examinations give us necessary context for positioning theoretical understandings – and the politics therein. And on that note, let's briefly examine the politics of network construction.

The politics of these technological layers is probably more visible when we think about who controls the infrastructure, how access is distributed, and what assumptions about our behaviour are present in these systems. Let's consider the seemingly neutral act of laying undersea fibre optic cables, rather than 'construction projects', we could see decisions about physical routing as geopolitical relationships. Our communication infrastructure reinforces existing knowledge power structures. The quantity, for instance, of optic routes between Australia and the US is much higher than between Australia and Vietnam. Increasingly as corporations fund these constructions, they are not doing so because they are benevolent, rather they are literally reshaping the topology of information flow according to their commercial and political interests.

At the protocol level, the apparent universality of TCP/IP masks its (western) cultural heritage. The packet-switching paradigm assumes that information can be meaningfully decomposed into discrete units and reassembled elsewhere. Intriguingly this is based on enlightenment ideas, fundamentally Eurocentric, an analytical approach to knowledge which has not been fully critiqued in relation to, say, high context ways of understanding information. Moreover, the "robustness" of the internet, its ability to "route around damage", embeds military thinking about decentralisation and resilience, carrying those assumptions about threat and survival into civilian communications decades later.

The application layer is more overtly political, it promises universal access but collides with the reality of platform capitalism. The epistemological shift toward hypertext and associative knowledge, above, has been commodified. Google's PageRank algorithm manufactures hierarchies based on what serves advertising revenue. Google's platform dominance as the search engine centres this even further (though threat from ChatGPT as the new information synthesis machine threatens this dominance, even if it is stupid). The democratisation of publishing offered in the early days of the internet to bourgeois folks, through blogs and web publishing tools, enabled new voices, but social media has conversely concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of a few platform owners who frequently amplify and suppress content to feed their priorities.

Each of these layers politics shape the kinds of subjects, agents, or people we are online. The atomised nodes of network topology, in 2025, reinforce neoliberal conceptions of the individual as a discrete, competitive unit seeking optimal connections. What emerges across these strata is a constellation of philosophical commitments that are not made explicit, or really examined. The entire edifice rests on profound faith in reductionism. Quite literally a belief that the irreducible complexity of human communication can actually be decomposed into standardised packets, protocols, and formats without losing what makes it meaningful. This assumption underpins everything from the way TCP/IP breaks messages into fragments to how HTML separates content from presentation. Alongside, a commitment to universalism show us that technical standards can transcend the messiness of cultural difference (ha!), that a protocol designed in California can seamlessly facilitate communication between contexts as different as a Scandinavian internet café and a Nigerian research lab. There's also an extraordinary optimism about mediation embedded in these systems. A belief that technical infrastructure can serve as a neutral conduit for human intention and that meaning can traverse fibre optic cables and wireless signals without fundamental distortion or transformation. Perhaps most significantly, the network architecture enshrines liberal individualism as its organising principle, positioning discrete agents as the primary locus of choice and value creation, even as it enables unprecedented forms of collective action and emergent social phenomena that exceed individual intention.

And we've barely even scratched the surface of how the entire architecture of the internet is based on colonial capitalism.

Each assumption is thrown in to stark relief when viewed through the lens of plural Indigenous epistemologies. The internet's foundational logic reproduces colonial patterns of knowledge extraction and appropriation. This extraction logic operates across the internet, euphemistically called data mining, and betrays the colonial underpinnings at work. Heck, just think about how AI training complicates this ever more. Just as European colonisers extract gold, timber, and other resources from Indigenous lands while treating those territories as empty space available for appropriation, platform capitalism extracts value from user-generated content, social relations and behavioural patterns, treating these as freely available resources.

The internet's assumption of placelessness, that information can be abstracted from its context and transmitted anywhere without loss of meaning, directly contradicts Indigenous ways of knowing that understand knowledge as fundamentally relational, emerging from specific places, communities, and responsibilities to the land. Not to mention the internet's modern transience – following us everywhere we go, even when we don't carry a smartphone. When ecological knowledge is synthesised into Wikipedia articles, or cultural practices are subsumed into virtual reality experiences, there's no preserving of context, culture, knowledge genealogy, and these practices are regularly forms of epistemological violence that severs knowledge from relationships – even when the internet offers ways to preserve this. Such extraction renders knowledge meaningless, as the process remains colonial and harmful. The evolution from early internet collectivism toward extractive platform capitalism sits with deeper transformation (late stage capitalism) which informs how we understand knowledge. No room for "collectively held" and "contextually bounded" ways of knowing with Facebook on the scene, everything is individual property that can be owned, traded, and accumulated – by Facebook.

Indigenous knowledge systems remind us all that knowledge carries responsibilities as much as or more than rights, that certain understandings are meant to stay within specific communities and contexts, and that the commodification of knowledge is a categorical error about what knowledge is and how it should circulate. Not to say there should be no trade of ideas, ways of working, and ways of being. But that these should be bounded in place, community, and context. Not promulgated as advertising material, hypercapitalist money grabs, and fear mongering to drive engagement metrics.

The concentration of our collective digital life onto a very small handful of platforms is tantamount to the enclosure movement across Europe, then around the world, which displaced Indigenous peoples globally, rendering many no longer Indigenous to place[6], and converted communal resources into private property – HELLO CAPITALISM. What began as a decentralised network has been systematically enclosed by Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Alphabet (Google, Gemini), Amazon, and so on. Their privatising has captured in hegemony the commons of human connection and knowledge-sharing.

The vague and naïve pioneering promise of the internet's relatively equal peer-to-peer communication has been replaced by platform-mediated relationships where our most intimate conversations become raw material for algorithmic processing and targeted advertising. The emergent fiction is that unenclosed resources are waste, that can be more efficiently managed through private ownership, and that Meta should be the ones to do it.

Golly this really became a spread of arguments. Let's wrap up before we become a puddle of plato on the kitchen floor.

Emergent critiques, in whatever my ramble is above, can still point us toward alternative possibilities. All hope is not lost. We are seeing the emergences of different philosophies of knowledge online – just look at federation[7]. Perhaps we can move toward "access to vital information" which recognises praxis in relation, in right relation. Knowledge sovereignty demands recognition of community ownership of information and ways of exchanging it, while embedded reciprocity challenges extractive data relationships. Perhaps we might consider the internet itself as a kind of Country that deserves care and respect, where communal proppa protocols govern our connections and enable us to know and respond to place. Not to scream at each other over deliberately divisive micropolitics while Zucc sleeps soundly on his pile of money built on genocide and expropriation. This work of reimagining digital relations isn't individualist – it is based on reframing ontological and epistemological foundations of our networks, to build new forms of digital practice that recognise the relationships between knowledge, place, and community that sustain us, as social animals. And I don't even have to leave us on a negative note – new ways like this are happening, right now, probably somewhere near you.

And, as a last word, if we reconsidered each of these epistemological and ontological frames through a different meta-theory, we could already point to the ways that computer networking gives rise to respectful and proppa ways. Go on, think about it[8].

What a time to be alive,

Aidan

  1. c.f., https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/18nmyef/the_internet_used_to_be_a_place/ ↩︎

  2. Here's a low effort Wikipedia article for this. ↩︎

  3. Many can, because they are still denied access by extreme cost floors, genocidal regimes, and outrageous filtration, but if you're reading this, it's not that likely to be you. ↩︎

  4. A quick sidebar: The way we think – something we label as epistemology – is assembled through social processes. This reproduction of our ideas, thoughts and ways of being is quite deliberate. In the dominant western system, education has been formalised and mandated for all children from around the age of 5 to around the age of 17 (with a handful of exceptions). This education process, something which we often take for granted in itself, delivers a curriculum derived from a fragment of the status quo. Teachers may have some capability for autonomy (agency) within this (though, this is increasingly stripped away) to change how the curriculum is delivered, but it remains imbued with a western middle class way of thinking, working, being and doing. The difficulty with examining epistemology (or epistemologies) is that they are an endless cascade of ways of thinking all the way down. If we even begin to trace back the origins of the thinking which underpins education, as above, we get trapped in a cycle of “whose thinking” all the way back to Aristotle. Lest we accidentally stumble on the prehistoric, the internet is also framed in epistemological and ontological assumptions and ways of working which, just like a teachers' agency, shape the way we learn, interact, and act. ↩︎

  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite ↩︎

  6. https://doi.org/10.1017/jie.2017.25 ↩︎

  7. https://jointhefediverse.net/learn/ (and hey, surprise, this blog is federated like a cool cat) ↩︎

  8. Or I could do it, I guess:

    The physical layer recognises that knowledge cannot exist without material grounding. Like Aboriginal epistemologies that understand knowledge as inseparable from Country, the internet acknowledges that information requires physical substrate, that there is no "virtual" without the material. The ontological requirements of this layer resonate with Indigenous materialism: reality manifests through measurable phenomena, requires reliable tools for transmission across place and time, and depends fundamentally on human labour and relationship to construct the network. The epistemological foundations here parallel Indigenous empirical traditions that read Country through careful observation, pattern recognition, and intergenerational knowledge-testing.

    The protocol layer holds potential for deeper affinities with relational ways of knowing. While TCP/IP appears to atomise communication into discrete packets, it actually demonstrates that meaningful communication requires constant relationship and reciprocity. Packets acknowledge receipt, negotiate transmission rates, and adapt to network conditions, a dance of mutual recognition. The ontological identification that networks connect separate entities while maintaining their distinctness echoes understandings of autonomy-in-relationship, where individuals and communities maintain boundaries while participating in larger webs of connection. The epistemological commitment to "universal" protocols that enable different systems to communicate reflects Indigenous values of translation and diplomacy, literally the belief that different ways of knowing can find common ground without losing their specificity.

    The application layer has striking alignment with Indigenous knowledge systems. Here tribes and diverse standards abound, not monolithic approaches. The web's ontological assumptions about information connect with knowledge systems which travel between communities through story and practice, expertly tailored to to local contexts. The epistemological foundation of hypertext as an associative model of knowledge directly mirrors Aboriginal ways of knowing which have long understood truth as emerging from relationships rather than hierarchies. The recognition that understanding hypertext emerges from connections, that finding knowledge requires either direct communication or following networks of relationship, perfectly fits with how Indigenous knowledge systems operate through kinship, cycles, and connections that link particular places to broader patterns of meaning.

    There, I did your homework for you. ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
capitalism, internet, technology, federation, decolonisation, digital literacy, hegemony, philosophy of science

The cart or the donkey? Social media ownership and the battle for attention

Dear friends,

As usual, I've spent a bit of time thinking about our current, largely accelerationist, political milieu and its relationship with the (news/social) media. Of most interest to me, at least at this particular moment, is how quickly the cycle changes, and how obvious the political bias of the media truly is. This is exacerbated, particularly here in Australia, by the fundamental lack of diversity of media ownership. It's a Murdoch town here, and he's got goons and crowbars ready for any serious start-up contender. Perhaps I should quickly clarify, in case any of the litigious media cronies are loitering, they have "earned" those billions of dollars of surplus funding, and their dominance begets them a naturally (out)sized influence in the chambers of parliament. Digressing, we are in a bit of a tangle. Social and traditional media ownership concentration is rife, the news cycle is attention grabbing shorter and shorter attention spans, and fascism is rising.

We've talked about social media, and the ways algorithms focus people's attention, and we've thought on media hegemony and the concentration of media ownership as a soapbox. But there's a schematic, here, emerging for us to consider worth further analysis. Media, in the varied forms which exist, have an extreme influence on civil society ideology and practice, and this requires examination. In particular we should ever examine our media in light of current events, as wars, ideological battles, and genocide become normalised, it is ever more important. Gramsci offers us a framework for understanding power and the relationship between capitalist/worker coloniser/colonised, and more, and emphasises the power of the media:

"The press is the most dynamic part of the ideological structure, but not the only one. Everything that directly or indirectly influences or could influence public opinion belongs to it: libraries, schools, associations and clubs of various kinds, even architecture, the layout of streets and their names"
- Gramsci, 1971

There is a significance in the way media, or in Gramsci's time the press, has influence over public opinion. For Gramsci the thinkers and workers in those institutions, those responsible for writing the news for instance, are 'traditional intellectuals'. These educated folks work in knowledge production but are utterly subservient to the capitalists and narratives which benefit them. Yet Gramsci compels us to determine ways to redirect their efforts from pro-capitalist production towards emancipatory ends. But let's not get overly sidetracked – we'll come back to Gramsci at the end. For now, let's examine some 'common sense' perspectives and offer some good sense retorts to help us solidify our thinking in relation to theories of knowledge. For our consideration today:

  • News cycles are operated in short terms;
  • Some (counter-hegemonic) stories are are deliberately phased out of those cycles;
  • Social media vies for and directs attention of multitudes towards popular narratives;
  • Most hegemonic narratives drive individualist pro-capitalist thought; and
  • All media sits atop a consumerist, colonial and pro-capital base and is imbued by this way of thinking.

In an effort to be somewhat systematic, let's start with news cycles. In the United States, television news is notoriously set in 24 hour cycles, or perhaps 12 hour cycles, with attention spans increasingly shortening. Simultaneously attention as a metric becomes foundationally desirable[1]. There are events which may increase or decrease the total number of news stories covered, but largely there is a constant feed of new material for news media to ensure novelty. This novelty – the demand for new news – is political. The stories shared are tinted with a way of knowing which drives a consumerist, colonial and pro-capitalist agenda. For instance, for MSNBC, a constant soft critique of Republican "decision-making" without proper reflection on Democrats failings, for Fox News a constant libellous critique of anyone ... anyone but Trump. But at both ends of a political scale these news corporations follow a common pattern: amplify a particular issue (related to a spin of hegemonic ideology), monetise attention (the level of this attention is now gaged by social media interactions), persist political narratives, move on to the next story. Throughout the cycle of introduction, monetisation, politicisation, and constant movement there are subtler themes. These largely relate to the monetisation of a particular channel – i.e., Fox News wants to retain angry viewers, and to direct their fervour into consumerism for Murdoch-friendly enterprises (read: sell shit).

Relatedly, during this clamouring for new news, stories which shed negative light on the cable news company's view of capitalism are silenced and phased out. Equally, and muddying these waters, stories which do not appear to capture the audience's attention are also phased out. Let's move to an example. Take for instance the rapid turn away from coverage of the largest protest movement in American history. This was covered quietly for about three days. For an event of such scale, this coverage is extremely short in terms of news cycles. If we were asked to decide between the two reasons for this story to be phased out, which would you select as a more likely reason? Limited newsworthiness or limited commercialisation opportunities. The politicisation of attention continually demands new stories, but never those which might challenge the dominant ideology – colonial capitalism. And with the large-scale monetisation of attention and emotion for consumerism under capitalism, disruption that verges anywhere near a critique of the hegemony is preordained as danger. Even in important could-be news stories we can see the political protection of colonial capitalism, take for instance Trump featuring heavily in the Epstein files. This challenges Trump, but also draws attention to the systemic failure to bring justice to young people exploited directly by capitalists. A story like this, a threat to capitalist hegemony, if even covered would be made to seem irrelevant and boring. The media use a handful of techniques here to balance "doing the job" and not challenging the status quo: overdoing charts, numbers and statistics, speaking in a disengaged tone, burying the article, not sending a push notification, or keeping just the anchor on screen for a segment read. Here, we'll see the news delivered while allowing the media to direct attention the way the hegemonic political agenda demands.

As traditional media languishes, relatively unable to capture attention during the TikTokification of news, new exaggerated attention-seeking practices emerge. Social media is repositioned as the most important space for that attention, while simultaneously fracturing it and directing it elsewhere. Even the news cycle itself has accelerated to "real-time" blogs and image+text formats to vie for a share of acknowledgement in a crowded market of diminished attention[2]. We also see increased sensationalisation and accelerationism which does more than grab at attention, it fundamentally shapes the pitch and tone of stories and may warp the truth of events just to stand out amidst users ad-ridden social media feeds of hundreds of news sources, comedy artefacts, and maybe the occasional family photo. Social media algorithms (often manipulated by billionaire fiefdom kings) then amplify the most successfully sensationalised story, which in turn feeds new garbage and extreme perspectives back into the 24 hour news cycle. Similarly to Elon re-training Grock on the right-wing misinformation echo chamber that is Twitter, the ouroboros of extremist shit masticates yesterdays garbage back into today's headlines. As though this weren't indictment enough, media moguls and pro-imperial think-tanks continue to cycle "in" meaningless pro-genocide, pro-war, and pro-military industrial complex propaganda as though it were news. This blend becomes digital noise, impossible to permeate. Moreover, discerning fact from fiction, ideology from representation of reality, becomes a mammoth task, particularly for those whose digital literacy was (is!) never developed. Do I sound like Žižek? Ideology[3]!

If we consider social media to be the 'new' media kid on the block, it's worth examining its thematic ideological structures too. Following our assertion above that (cable) news media seeks to craft pro-capital consumerism around increasingly irrelevant news stories, then social media's primary drive is most likely for attention. This attention (seeking), naturally, is political too. And the political choices made by platforms are highly ideological, and gatekeep audiences[4], to craft a deliberate global narrative. Between these two medias ('traditional' and 'social') there is often collusion, traditional news driving engagement in sensationalised discussions on social media, exposing users to more interaction-based advertisement. Thereby driving up "engagement" statistics for social media companies, who then sell ad spaces back to the traditional news providers. Hang on... where are the benefits for the traditional media organisations?[5]

Traditional media cannibalises itself to drive engagement on platforms which, by their nature, put traditional media out of work (extreme example of this in Australia where our news media was largely blocked on Meta while News Corp attempted to force them to pay for linking to their articles). Here we are seeing a thinning of traditional media as they suffer with advertisers moving to the new media platforms. And, with social media giants increasingly consuming their competition (Facebook buying Instagram, anyone?) we are seeing a gentrification of all media – robbing a plurality internet forums to feed a singular behemoth (Meta). This meta (get it, ha) amalgam of social medias, strip mining the internet and traditional media and asserting itself as king has created one giant entity. In a cruel twist of fate this singular overlord of a platform heavily promotes an ideology of individualism. And its not just individualism for you[6]. This individualism coalesces around the attention drive, but it would be foolish to suggest direct causation. There has, however, been a rapid intensification of content which spurs self interest – perhaps psychologically there's a connection? Narcissus shines again.

Contrary to assumptions about social media democratising information access, the handful of dominant platforms have been shown to operate through curation systems that actively shape what content receives collective attention[7]. An attention economy has emerged, one tightly controlled by Meta (the conglomerate owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and others), and their vested interest is driving consumer engagement in advertising (particularly targeted advertising) and in an oddly non-paradoxical way, content gains attention based on already-received attention[8]. When studied, however, even aggregation platforms, which arguably help shape which stories gather attention, such as Reddit, made use of human ranking algorithms that direct which posts climb feeds (subtle, here, read the footnote)[9]. In essence, platform owners determine which voices gain visibility and which remain marginalised by their initial promotion (or lack thereof) in feeds. While engagement-forward and clickbait content has some affect, the initial filtration and ranking system which is deliberately opaque on corporate social media platforms has a remarkable influence on popular attention – and rarely is it not advertiser-friendly[10].

You may also have noticed, here, that there is an underlying thread of 1:1 relationships. The user has a relationship with the platform. The viewer has a relationship with the platform (subscription service). The advertiser with the platform. The traditional media? The platform. But it's not just the platform redefining relationships with media such as the infamous Web 2.0 (RWW), its a fundamental rewrite of human social interaction. In research in the above[10:1] a term emerged: "individuals-in-the-group". Rather than being "social" media, these platforms are attention-seeking individualising platforms above all as they seek monetisation and profitability. Not a "social" platform, but an advertising platform. We could, therefore, extend our argument, social media sites function as spaces to internalise competitive values rooted in "performance metrics", "(anti)social consumer behaviour", and perpetual "self-optimisation". One literally needs look no further than the ads. But it's not just our argument. Research has shown this is not only the case, but deliberately the mission of the platform[11]. The platform acts as a hegemonic organ shaping neoliberal identities, encouraging people to adopt individualistic mindsets[12] and seek personal remedies[13] for what are usually fundamentally macro social challenges. Through constant engagement with these sites, users gradually embrace a worldview which prioritises individual achievement and self-improvement over collective action and systemic solutions.

Concerningly, social media also contributes to "depoliticisation" by transforming political issues into individual lifestyle choices rather than collective action problems. Climate change becomes just a personal consumer choice problem, economic hardship due to wealth inequality becomes personal loan fodder, identity becomes politics. Even as far back as 2011 research into social media's effect on collective vs personal ideology and values in online political spaces was being investigated[14]. Though the media broadly has been interrogated for its role in promoting individualism and other neoliberal colonial capitalist attitudes for decades. The movement from collective to individual organisation of society feeds that very consumerism, colonialism, capitalism, and elitism. From media ownership concentration to all eyes on advertising revenues, systems continue to confine acceptable discourse to consumerist capitalism. Human suffering, in this space, is theatre – grist for the mill, and sensationalisation, 'civil' debate, and influencers simply keep the advertising machine rolling. However, there are models which ease our understanding of this system, and even offer opportunities to challenge the hegmeonic thinking.

Famously Herman and Chomsky developed the 'Propaganda Model', which argues that mass media in democratic societies primarily serves already powerful interests. It achieves this through five filters: (1) concentrated corporate ownership of media (massive capital investment), (2) dependence on advertising revenue that favours content appealing to affluent audiences, (3) reliance on official sources from government and business for news, (4) organised criticism that disciplines media deviating from elite interests, and (5) historically, anti-communism as an ideology that limits acceptable debate. These filters work together to create a propaganda system where news appears objective but systematically favours establishment views and marginalises dissent[15]. This model is particularly relevant to the construction of the US media, but is also growingly relevant as the US owned social media platform (Meta) subsumes any local/global alternatives. As it was with the media when this model was divined, social media also operates to secure and promote the agenda of an unelected wealthy elite, a wealthy elite profiting from human suffering and the destruction of our planet. As we consume ourselves to death, and intellectually backflip to make this our problem, we're eased by the comfort of advertising which suggests its all within our individual narcissistic power to change the world. Just lie back and stare at Instagram, and ignore those increasingly despotic capitalists over there, they're harmless.

So, where are we? We've seen that the acceleration of news cycles creates temporal conditions favouring simple reactionary narratives over complex systemic analysis [16]. This temporal pressure combines with systematic exclusion of counter-hegemonic perspectives to create an information environment dominated by establishment viewpoints. Social media amplifies this by directing collective attention toward content optimised for engagement rather than democratic value, while simultaneously promoting individualistic responses that depoliticise collective problems. The entire system rests on consumerist foundations which require media to serve capital's interests rather than democratic functions [17]. Digital platforms function as mechanisms of ideological reproduction that atomise collective solidarity while concentrating power in technological and financial elites[18]. Amazing. What a time to be alive. Let's return to Gramsci for some clarification about what we might do about all this.

Gramsci's "hegemony" shows us that this media apparatus functions as both propaganda and fundamental architecture of common sense. The accelerated news cycle, algorithmic curation, and individualistic framing we've examined constitute what Gramsci critiqued in examining the colonial capitalist hegemonic project. This project is one that secures ruling class dominance through coercion and rewriting human relations through capitalist logic emphasising that these are natural, inevitable, and personally beneficial (surprise: they aren't). The traditional intellectuals working within these media institutions, from journalists to platform engineers, are (often unquestioning) architects of consent to this reality, their technical expertise enlisted in service of maintaining the existing order. But Gramsci also offered us illustration of the contradictions within this system. Technologies which atomise us also offer possibilities for organic intellectual development and counter-hegemonic organisation[19]. The challenge, then, is to develop alternative forms of cultural and intellectual leadership that contest the dominant narratives at their root – not at the symptom. We need new "institutions", new forms of governance and collective knowledge production which nest in understanding our shared reality; a war of position which recognises media as a crucial battleground in the struggle for egalitarian social transformation. Or something, I don't know, it's Wednesday. Go out and touch grass.

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09311-w https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103243 ↩︎
  2. https://dhq-static.digitalhumanities.org/pdf/000582.pdf https://doi.org/10.1145/1557019.1557077 ↩︎
  3. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_3 ↩︎
  4. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544391199.n177 ↩︎
  5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.20851/j.ctt1t304qd.13 ↩︎
  6. Its everything from "coaches" to influencers, it's all about you. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/24/what-i-learned-following-400-online-instagram-gurus ↩︎
  7. https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2024.59619 ↩︎
  8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19283 https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwae035 ↩︎
  9. This study "highlight that the order in which content is ranked can influence the levels and types of user engagement within algorithmically curated feeds" - https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.20491 ↩︎
  10. i.e., https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115622481 ↩︎ ↩︎
  11. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia4020041 ↩︎
  12. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7673976/ ↩︎
  13. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia4020041 ↩︎
  14. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.579141 (yes, 2010 was 15 years ago – the horror) ↩︎
  15. https://chomsky.info/consent01/ ↩︎
  16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103243 ↩︎
  17. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8040497 ↩︎
  18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520918562 ↩︎
  19. c.f., lemmy; mastodon; etc. ↩︎
,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
meta, organic intellectuals, digital literacy, neoliberalism, curation, hegemony, social media

The kids aren’t alright – they’re banned

Dear friends,

Yesterday the ALP passed into law legislation that bans all young people from social media [1]. This has been widely regarded as a bad move [2]. Without wanting to sound like a broken record, this is another step towards fascism from a supposedly union-supporting party – populism anyone? As mentioned a few days ago, social media bans for young people are not Lovejoyesque “won’t somebody please think of the children”, but rather a sinister configuration of common sense that seeks to shape and control the development of class consciousness in the digital age – amongst those most likely to see that there’s something really very wrong with our social order. This enacted ban, dressed up in the language of protection, is nothing but an attempt to forestall the development of digital literacy and thinking skills among young people. In 2024 the best tool the ALP and LNP can dream up together (yeah, those two supposedly opposed parties) is banning – this is simply because they can’t force US tech giants to capitulate to their will and enforce their particular brand of fascism.

So, to get to the bottom of this, we need to understand what social media actually represents under contemporary capitalism. These platforms aren’t spaces for connection. In fact, I doubt anyone is “connecting” on any tech-bro founded social media (and if you’re on social media, odds are you’re on social media not the fediverse). No, contemporary social media platforms, of which there are ever smaller numbers not subsumed by Meta (Zuckerberg), are a human-machine hybrid of mechanisms to enforce hegemony. They simultaneously atomise users while harvesting their data for profit. Does that make you feel good about your social media use? Nah, me either. Meta, Twitter, “Truth Social”, Bluesky and their ilk function as digital fiefdoms – we talked about this earlier today [3] – where interaction itself becomes a commodity. The “social” in social media is a cruel joke. What’s actually being cultivated is a form of managed isolation that serves capital’s interests. So, not a great place to exist if we can agree on the toxicity of these systems and their owners. So what, banning this is a good thing now?

The trouble here is young people are being systematically denied access to even this hollow form of connection, while simultaneously being prepared for lives of digital exploitation. And more importantly, because social media is such a “thing” their ability to navigate these spaces is forestalled, and appropriate forms of engagement aren’t suitably developed. At least, that’s what this bill would prefer. Remember the “digital native” narrative? I was supposed to be one of those, computers were just accessible enough during my youth that I pretty well had access to one from birth, and this made me a digital native – no questions asked. Except I’m the exception – most of my peers have no clue how a computer works, how to navigate digital spaces critically, or engage with thinking about the problematic nature of platform concentration. No, they were too busy seeing the opportunities presented by MySpace to cyberbully each other. I’m not helping here, am I?

But this is the fundamental trouble.

Young people either learn to be consumers of technology, and particularly today’s youth are directed almost exclusively towards consumerism. YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, it’s all “consume” with very little create – beside perhaps performative selfies. This doesn’t build technical literacy, actually it seems to do the opposite. Young people today can’t touch type on a keyboard (maybe on a phone screen), they don’t know what a CPU is, and they certainly don’t understand TCP/IP. Yeah, so the last one is maybe not so necessary – but my point here is about deliberate mystification of technology. This mystification only ever serves capitalist interests – it reinforces the exploitative status quo, and by denying young people access to digital literacy, it reinforces digital sheep – giving up all their personal information and attention, numbing the existential pain of knowing we are all dying from human-made climate death. Weeeee.

The intersectional impacts of this ban also demand our attention. For young people already marginalised by race, class, disability and other axes of oppression, being cut off from digital spaces means being denied access to community, support networks, and critical information about identity and resistance. The bourgeois fantasy that kids will just “go outside and play” ignores how digital spaces can provide vital refuge and resources for marginalised youth – particularly LGBTQI+ kids who are at incredible risk of “vengeance” from their right-wing moron parents. When the ALP talks about “protecting children”, they tacitly, and deliberately, mean only the straight white middle class children. Certainly not working class kids, Indigenous kids, or queer kids who rely on digital connections to find community and survival strategies. They also deny knowledge of how these systems operate, are governed, and whose interests they serve – the real educational piece needed today. We know creating communities is a threat to the ALP. Because anything that’s not one of “theirs” is a threat to their hegemony, and they are viciously and disgustingly protective of their “community” (cult). Probably something to do with the ban, ey.

Rather than dwelling in doom and gloom, let’s think about the interesting aspect, and perhaps hopeful corner offered by this ban. The very attempt to lock young people out of mainstream social platforms could create opportunities for new forms of digital resistance and community-building. And I don’t mean because Meta will basically refuse to enforce this (unless they see it as an opportunity to force you to tie your social media profile to a drivers license, etc. so they can extract more real-world data from you, the opportunities are endless, if you’re a sociopath). No, as a response to the “enshittification” of mainstream services we have already seen the emergence of federated platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy that operate on fundamentally different principles than the corporate social media giants. Different, but still susceptible to human problems. These spaces, governed by communities rather than algorithms, suggest possibilities for social interaction that isn’t primarily oriented toward data extraction and profit generation. As long as that’s what the communities focus on (and ignoring those problematic fascists purporting communism over in the .ml TLD).

Okay, back on the constructive bandwagon. Our questions become: how might we support young people in developing the technical literacy and the critical consciousness needed to build and maintain alternative spaces? Not “teaching kids to code” (though it probably wouldn’t hurt). What I’m pushing here is fostering forms of digital literacy that help them, and frankly everyone else, to understand and resist the mechanisms of control embedded in mainstream platforms. We need to craft tools and practices that support genuine community governance, intersectional equality, and meaningful dialogue rather than engagement metrics and algorithmic manipulation. The systems we have now either started as and became perfected under capitalist ontology, or are late-comers who go full throttle capital accumulation and propaganda out the gate. Where community run systems exist, we need safeguards that prevent hijacking on the basis of popularity, attention, and ad sales.

Let’s get into the construction zone – pouring some concrete here, we could:

  1. Develop open-source moderation tools that centre harm reduction and community accountability rather than automated content filtering
  2. Create educational resources that teach both technical skills and critical analysis of platform capitalism
  3. Build infrastructure for local, community-controlled social spaces that can’t be easily co-opted by capital
  4. Support young people in understanding and creating their own governance structures for digital spaces

But we should also be clear-eyed about the challenges. Capital is proven at co-opting and neutralising resistance movements. Any alternative platforms or practices we develop will face intense pressure to either conform to market logic or become irrelevant. Or worse, be legislated out of existence. The history of the internet is littered with promising experiments in digital democracy that ended up serving as research and development for corporate platforms. Remember when that soccer club setup a digital platform for making all their corporate decisions? Neither does capitalism, but the emergence of investor decision centres based on the same principle – just tailored for accumulation rather than public good – certainly go strong even today.

The likely immediate effect of the social media ban will be to push youth interaction into even less accountable spaces – private Discord servers, anonymous forums, and encrypted messaging apps. While this might temporarily evade state and corporate surveillance, it also fragments community and makes collective organising more difficult. The ALP knows this – again, the goal isn’t actually to “protect” young people but to prevent them from developing the digital literacy and class consciousness needed to resist exploitation. Added bonus points if adults forced into validating their age also have to hand over 100 points of ID to Zucc to expand his surveillance propaganda machine. And a big glaring reminder that Zuckerberg recently “bent the knee” to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, granting the dictator platform control [4].

We can’t ignore how this ban fits into broader patterns of surveillance and control – and a space of continued interest to the ALP who seek to regulate anything “private” into their domain. A friendly reminder that the Australian Labor Party is the very same current government who are expanding police powers, criminalising protest, and maintaining some of the most draconian digital surveillance laws in the supposedly “democratic” world. It’s never been about safety. It’s all about maintaining hegemonic control as capitalism enters an increasingly authoritarian phase. Of course, the very intensity of these control efforts suggests their underlying fragility. Capital wouldn’t work so hard (they rarely work at all) to prevent young people from developing digital literacy if it wasn’t afraid of what they might do with it. The challenge is always using moments of crisis to build genuine alternatives. Letting corporate social media platforms win is just a modern system of “digital enclosure”. Instead, we can, and are, finding better ways of community building.

This means thinking beyond individual platforms or technical solutions to consider how we might fundamentally reshape human interaction in digital space. Instead of engagement metrics and data extraction, what if we oriented digital tools toward mutual aid and collective liberation? Instead of algorithmic manipulation, what if we developed practices of genuine dialogue and democratic decision-making?

We already see, globally in forums, fediverse tools, and other digitally-mediated social spaces:

  1. Networks of community-controlled servers and services
  2. Educational programs that combine technical skills with political analysis
  3. Tools that support consensus-building and collective decision-making, and
  4. International solidarity networks that can resist state and corporate control.

Ultimately, though, the question of youth access to digital spaces can’t be separated from broader struggles against capitalism and fascism. The ALP’s social media ban is just one front in a larger war being waged against the possibility of collective resistance and alternative futures. Our response needs to be equally comprehensive – not just “building better platforms”, but developing new forms of governance, engagement, solidarity and struggle that can effectively challenge capital’s control of digital (and physical) space. The fascist creep doesn’t just happen in parliament or the streets – it happens in code, in algorithms, in the architecture of our digital lives (and we choose who the architect is). Resistance means developing not just alternative platforms but alternative ways of being together online, of making decisions, of building power.

They want to deny young people access to digital literacy and community? Fine. Let’s build something better – something they can’t control or co-opt. The future isn’t in the Metaverse or government-approved platforms. It’s in the spaces we create.

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/28/labor-passes-migration-and-social-media-ban-bills-after-marathon-senate-sitting ↩︎

  2. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/26/australia-social-media-ban-expert ↩︎

  3. https://mndrdr.org/2024/on-immunity-and-the-ruling-class ↩︎

  4. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/mark-zuckerberg-visits-mar-a-lago-after-trump-threatened-him-with-imprisonment/ ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
social media, labor party, fascism, corporate control, meta, digital literacy