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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 labour process, atomisation and social media

Dear friends,

As I grow increasingly concerned about the level of influence Zucc has with his near monopoly on social media, I concomitantly grow concerned about the atomisation of workers and mystification of the labour process. Today, I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about social bonds, and the “cohesion” of society. In particular, I think we need to spend some time truly attending to how the common sense has shifted to a worship of individual billionaires, giving way to a rise of front-seat oligarchs directly in control of abstracting worker connection to production, and to direct control of the machinery of government [1]. Naturally, I’m also concerned with how this will play out in Australia given the commencement of Albanese’s campaigning, but let’s take it one step at a time [2].

The atomisation of workers in contemporary times is extreme. Capitalism benefits when solidarity is eroded, and it has played the long game to get here — gradually loosening social bonds outside production since the 1980s as tightening hegemony ensures compliance [3]. Where once workers might have gathered in union halls, community centres, and especially pubs to discuss our shared conditions and build solidarity, today’s “flexible” work arrangements and digital mediation of social life have effectively isolated us from genuine collective experience.

The 2020s have ushered unprecedented shifts in how work, ownership, and accumulation function under capitalism. Remote work, platform-mediated gig labour, and algorithmic management have created new forms of alienation and control that Marx may only have had nightmares about [4]. Ownership itself has become increasingly abstract, with workers now renting rather than owning everything from housing to software licenses to the tools of their trade, while capitalists accumulate wealth through increasingly financialised means nearly devoid of ‘traditional’ production. The capitalist class has evolved from factory owners to tech oligarchs and financial speculators who control not just the means of production but the very infrastructure of daily life. The rise of management consultancies has added another parasitic layer to this exploitation, with firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte extracting massive profits by telling companies how to squeeze more value from workers while simultaneously deskilling the professional class through the outsourcing of strategic thinking. Oh, and let’s not forget, literally changing legislation to be more favourable to outsourcing to consultancies [5]. These consultancies serve as high priests of capitalism, legitimising mass layoffs and worker surveillance while building dependency on their own services. Hot.

The ever shifting landscape of contemporary capitalist life hasn’t, however, changed the fundamental relations of exploitation. It has only intensified them. We’ve talked about how this has fed configurations of what Varoufakis calls technofeudalism, where digital platforms function as fiefs extracting rent from all social activity [6]. The resulting workforce is more precarious and atomised than ever, scrambling to piece together livelihoods through multiple ‘side hustles’ while the capitalist class accumulates wealth at historically unprecedented rates.

The fragmentation, atomisation, and espoused individualism is not an accident, though little is under capitalism. These are tools which serve capital’s need to prevent class consciousness from emerging through shared experience. Something that the internet briefly offered, at least for western nations. As Marx noted in the Grundrisse, capital must constantly revolutionise not only the means of production, but also the social relations that surround them. What we’re witnessing now is the culmination of this process, where even our non-work time has been colonised by capital’s logic of individualisation and competition. Work by Fuchs [7] has shown how platform capitalism has accelerated this atomisation, creating new forms of alienation where workers feel “more connected” yet are in reality more isolated than ever before. Look no further than Meta’s AI profiles, you’ll never know if content on any of Zucc’s platforms is from an actual human again.

Social media platforms, far from bridging isolation, intensify it through use of sensationalised timelines, manipulation of content, and broadly just ‘attention seeking’. The feeds we scroll through distracting us from our material conditions, something humans are very good at overlooking after years of conditioning, and now social media — from a very young age, despite Labor’s attempts to ban young people — actively training us to view ourselves as personal brands competing for attention in a marketplace of identity. This militant individualism, amplified by engagement-driven algorithms, transforms legitimate class grievances into personal challenges to be overcome through self-optimisation rather than collective struggle. We’ve cited Zuboff heavily on this in the past, where she argues that surveillance capitalism isn’t just interested in our attention, but actually epistemic reshaping such that our conception of social relations fits in a digital consumer / individualistic / market-driven framework to enable exploitation on all fronts at all times [8].

The social division of labour here has evolved — and not in a good way. Today’s workers are not simply alienated from the products of our labour but through layers of hegemonic coercion, we are taught to look away from any kind of understanding of production, let alone social production. The totality of these systems, functioning together — hegemony and specific capitalist enforcement — has created conditions for the working class that obscures any solidarity. Digital platforms spewing toxic pro-capital narratives, intensified automation of systems, deskilling of workers, deprofessionalising technicians and so on all serves as the latest in obstructions to understanding the real relations between workers, between workers and production, and production and capital accumulation, making it ever more difficult to recognise our shared conditions of exploitation. When an office worker orders lunch delivery through an app, the social relations between them and the delivery worker are mystified through digital mediation. Naturally, this mystification serves capital by preventing workers from recognising our common interests across these artificially created divisions.

Social media’s role in managing workers’ understanding of our own labour power cannot be overstated. Platforms ­— and increasingly “platform” as Zucc takes over and outstrips the remaining ‘others’ through legislative lobbying — are now simply instruments of hegemonic control, manufacturing consent for capitalist relations through a constant stream of content that naturalises exploitation, promotes individualistic solutions to collective problems, and SELLS PRODUCTS! When we spend our free time scrolling through “hustle culture” content or “financial literacy” advice — god help you if you spend any time on LinkedIn [9] — we are being conditioned to view our exploitation as a personal challenge, nothing that would need a collective response.

The recent trend of CEO capitulation to increasingly extreme right-wing positions, particularly visible in figures like Musk, Cook and Zuckerberg, just proves how alive and well anti-worker sentiment is amongst the capitalist class. Yet does this despotism phase users? Are you still on Facebook? Do you still buy Apple products? Then you are supporting fascism — and yes, there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, but we now see these figures directly in bed with neonazis, and that should give us more than pause. These figures no longer feel the need to maintain a pretence of caring about workers, instead openly embracing authoritarian politics that promise to cement their control. Importantly, the shift isn’t about individual CEOs, rather it is indicative of the whole capitalist class becoming more bold in their authoritarian turn. To put it clearly: we are seeing capital’s recognition that maintaining hegemony through consent is becoming increasingly difficult as contradictions intensify. The mask-off moment we’re witnessing, where billionaires openly support fascist politics, shows how capital will readily abandon democratic pretences when its accumulation is threatened — or when individual capitalists (and their boot licking managerial class) are threatened [10].

What strikes me about the latest reactionary moment, here, is how social media platforms themselves have become key instruments for advancing this anti-worker agenda. “Mainstream” platforms (read: FB, Insta, Snap, etc.) are safe harbours for pro-capitalist content, while anything counter-hegemonic is quickly demonetised, downplayed or blocked. When Musk purchases Twitter or Zuckerberg shapes Facebook’s algorithms to promote right-wing content, they’re not expressing personal political preferences, in fact I’d be surprised if they had them, they are simply deploying their control over digital infrastructure to actively suppress class consciousness and promote reactionary politics. Can’t fight them if we’re fighting each other. And this is the fundamental issue of platform monopoly ownership. Can we just go back to everyone having blogs? (I’m giving it a shot!)

Again, we’re just on the latest page in the long line of class warfare tactics. Nothing here is new, and nothing here is revolutionary. The capitalists and perhaps more importantly their petit bourgeois boot licker enforcement class are out to ensure only the ultra-wealthy have any kind of quality of life, based on our work. The means of digital communication themselves are increasingly weapons in capital’s arsenal against worker solidarity — and only through decentralising (i.e., not using FB, Insta, Snap, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) and returning to diverse platforms and perspectives can we hope to combat these tools of hegemonic enforcement.

Go write a blog!

In solidarity,
Aidan

  1. c.f. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/04/elon-musk-uk-germany-canada-far-right/ ↩︎

  2. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/06/anthony-albanese-switches-to-election-footing-with-blitz-of-three-campaign-battlegrounds ↩︎

  3. also, interestingly, c.f. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003687022002174 ↩︎

  4. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/98056652/Labour_process_theory_and_GANDINI_Accepted25June2018_GREEN_AAM.pdf ↩︎

  5. For lucid analysis see https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-big-con/ ↩︎

  6. https://www.penguin.com.au/books/technofeudalism-9781529926095 ↩︎

  7. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003222149 (and several other books, dude’s prolific) ↩︎

  8. https://shoshanazuboff.com/book/about/ ↩︎

  9. https://sh.itjust.works/c/linkedinlunatics ↩︎

  10. https://archive.is/2025.01.05-014335/https://medium.com/@kimpistilli/before-luigi-mangione-there-was-fred-hampton-f55a2728de13 ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
labour process, atomisation, social media, zucc, fb, hegemony

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

On immunity and the ruling class

Dear friends,

I woke to news that France was refusing to arrest Netanyahu despite the ICC’s ruling on his creation and maintenance of genocide. So yes, in one fell swoop, France declares a law of its own and renders the ICC as a theatre for political drama, not action – same as it ever was I suppose. This movement gives us yet another lens, in what has basically become a camera store or optometrist, through which to examine how the ruling class protects its own. This isn’t surprising, after all when was the last time you saw a billionaire or war criminal actually face consequences for their actions? But what makes this moment interesting is how this protection is being reinforced in mainstream society through broader political moves – once again creating opportunities to climb and hoist up the ladder. What we see, here, is concomitant and frankly thus far unprecedented control of digital information to manufacture consent.

As always, let’s delve into a little theory first. Gramsci (hello there) gave us a robust understanding of how the dominant group in society controls and maintains their power – hegemony – which helps us understand how ruling class power is maintained not just through direct state violence, but through cultural control and manufactured consent. In our digital age, this hegemonic control manifests equally through cultural institutions – now reconstituted to include social media companies – and through use of force when this manufactured consent fails. The ruling class isn’t just controlling traditional media anymore, in fact they are actively shaping the architecture of digital spaces to prevent class consciousness from emerging. The newspapers, radio stations, and cultural organisations of Gramsci’s time served to normalise fascist ideology and make it appear as “common sense”, today’s social media platforms serve the exact same function – personalised propaganda for fascist ends.

Consider how platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube have “evolved”. What began as seemingly neutral spaces for connection and information sharing have become (badly tuned) instruments of ideological control. The concentration of power in the hands of a few tech oligarchs – looking at you Musk and Zuckerberg – is an extension the media barons of Gramsci’s era, hell of our era – looking at you Murdoch. These modern-day Hearsts (or “Johnny Newspaperseed” if you like) don’t just own the platforms, they shape what information users can see – right so history repeats itself, got it? The “freedom” – that brief flash of democratisation – to post whatever you want is, now more than ever, utterly meaningless when “the algorithm” ensures only certain viewpoints gain traction. This hasn’t “changed” because the technology itself changed – rather the technology is now more fit for purpose. Capital recognised the threat posed by truly “open” digital spaces and moved aggressively to capture and reshape them. That’s why there’s so much platform monopolisation and so many moves to lock down hosting, platform providers, and fundamentally “open” parts of the internet. The early internet’s potential for activist organising and counter-hegemonic discourse was precisely what made it dangerous to ruling class interests. And now it’s nice and Musky instead — and what’s left in the open web is not substantial enough to shake Meta’s exclusivity.

Modern digital hegemony is not a major departure from previous forms of platform control. Nothing truly innovative has ever emerged from capitalism, it is capable only of subsuming peripheral ideas that benefit control and manipulation tactics. But its propaganda machine is enviable and terrible – the modern Web 2.0 internet was a con to pull democratic voices and conglomerate them under tech giants. The aura of “open” remains in forums like Facebook, where people feel a sense of broad connection because their once upon a time physical network of actual friends migrated there (and then promptly stopped interacting in the real world). Mediation of friendship and human connection through technology could have been a wonderful thing, instead it’s an intensification echo chamber that amplifies the worst of humanity to serve capitalist ends. Users feel like they’re freely choosing what content to engage with, but the choices themselves are curated by algorithms designed to promote ruling class interests. This is Gramsci’s “spontaneous consent” operating at a deep level of sophistication.

Varoufakis offers a compelling framework, here, for understanding this transformation through his concept of technofeudalism. He argues that we’re seeing the emergence of a new form of economic domination where tech platforms function as digital fiefs, extracting rents from all social and economic activity that occurs within their domains. Much like feudal lords who could demand tribute from anyone living on their land, companies like Meta and Twitter can extract value from any interaction that takes place on their platforms. Look no further than Twitter’s claim that it owns Alex Jones’ profile and therefore criminal action cannot seek to sell it to reclaim damages. This isn’t traditional monopoly power - it’s a restructuring of social relations where tech oligarchs function as modern-day lords, determining what information can flow through their digital fiefdoms while demanding tribute (in the form of data and attention) from their users. The parallel to feudal power structures is apt when we consider how these platforms have become essential infrastructure for modern life. Just as medieval peasants couldn’t simply “opt out” of their local lord’s domain, today’s workers can’t realistically withdraw from these digital spaces without facing social and economic isolation – though, I’m happily Meta free for 6 months and counting and my mental health has significantly improved.

When we couple these background pieces with our key point – bad people can do what they want, as long as they work for capital, and legislature, public opinion, common sense and judiciary will be turned on anyone who doesn’t agree – we see hegemony in action with all its warts. What better capturing of coercive control than the Australian, particularly South Australian, Labor government’s utterly insane legislation to ban under-17s from phones in school and social media altogether. As always, this isn’t about “thinking of the children”. It is about preventing young people from developing critical digital literacy skills that might help them see through ruling class propaganda. Rather than teach young people how to critically engage with digital information, the response is to simply cut off access entirely. The message is clear: better to prevent access than risk class consciousness emerging through digital means. That’s what TikTok was fostering – communist awareness, even if it was the Chinese brand of capitalist communism (yes, that’s an oxymoron folks – and also another form of international state actors creating dissent).

All this legislature to dumb down the working class nests within a broader pattern of global control. The ruling class clearly recognised that Gen Z’s unprecedented access to information posed a threat to their hegemony. For a brief moment, young people had the ability to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and access unfiltered information about capitalism’s contradictions, imperial and intersectional violence, and class struggle. The response has been swift and brutal: the algorithmic promotion of fascist content, the strategic purchase of Twitter to control discourse, the flooding of the internet with AI-generated slop, and the deliberate degradation of search capabilities. There’s a reason Google only offers you mainstream news, social media posts, and “Reddit discussions” (read: AI bots screaming at each other; and sadly the other dominant search index is not much better).

The purported “neutrality” of algorithms provides perfect cover for the neo-Nazi ideological project (sorry, “Labor Party”) – the rise of fascism to cement capitalism under fire. When YouTube “randomly” promotes far-right content, or TikTok faces bans for allowing anti-hegemonic narratives to spread, we’re supposed to believe these are natural or necessary technical decisions rather than deliberate acts of class warfare. This is what manufactured consent looks like for the digital age. No longer just filtering information through corporate media ownership as Chomsky described, but actively manipulating the infrastructure of digital spaces to fragment class solidarity – and then enacting laws that ensure this is the only way to engage with politics, society, and critique. Meanwhile, the traditional protection racket continues unabated. France’s refusal to arrest Netanyahu follows the same logic as America’s refusal to prosecute war criminals from its own imperial adventures, or Australia’s protection of mining executives who destroy Aboriginal land. The ruling class doesn’t arrest its own – whether they’re genocidal leaders or billionaire exploiters. What’s changed is their ability to couple this direct protection with digital platform manipulation to preempt and prevent resistance from forming. This is what Marx would recognise as the intensification of class warfare through new technological means. The current axis of economic exploitation coupled with maintenance of “correct ideology” prevent workers from developing the consciousness needed to recognise our shared interests.

I think the worst part is that this all seems to be working. Despite having theoretical access to more information than any generation before, many young people are being systematically channelled into reactionary politics through carefully curated digital spaces. From PragerU propaganda to algorithm-boosted fascist content, the ruling class has turned digital spaces into machines for manufacturing consent. It’s a nazi’s world out there, or rather the new nazis, zionists, cryptofascists and other bullshit peddlers. The fact that they’re working to control digital information flows reveals their fear of what might happen if workers could freely share information and recognise their common interests. As always, all it takes is looking at how the 1% destroys the souls of the 99% and using these tools against them … not that that ever seems to happen.

Is there an opportunity here, now, to use the open technologies of the modern internet to undermine their propagandist, ecologically destructive, and toxic ideology? Of course there is, and there are a litany of open source projects that promote free platforms moderated by communities not tech oligarchs. There are many ways to learn digital literacy, to be critical of information that appears in front of you, and to reject racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic and hollow explanations for exploitation. The real problem is very simple – capital is destroying us as a species, and all those trapped in this jail with us. If we, the vast majority of people don’t take meaningful action to change course, we’re doomed – we are already doomed, even with traditional intellectuals sounding alarms of no return. If it’s so bad that the ruling class is divided on it, the urgency of working class action has never been clearer.

We can use our own digital infrastructure, we can find ways to connect with fellow humans, and we can reject the laws, propaganda, and bullshit the ruling class has cranked up to 11. From critiquing the colonial-capitalist project, to teaching our communities how to understand information that is presented to them, there are better ways. And if none of that sounds like you, the least you can do is get off Meta’s platforms – it’s actually as simple as just deleting the app. The ruling class is betting everything on their ability to control digital spaces and prevent class consciousness from emerging through these channels. Our job is to prove them wrong.

In solidarity,

Aidan

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
genocide, fascism, capitalism, israhell, literacy, social media