It’s almost like a large-scale social experiment, with the result that there seem to be many profoundly evil people whose malicious beliefs are artificially pushed by billionaire “gatekeepers” to a point where they can appear socially acceptable, a few good people who have less and less say due to social media logic and content overload, and a large majority who just stand by and watch civilization go down the drain because they’re too lazy to change their habits and just rely on someone else to fix this mess, if they even recognize the problem in the first place.
In this context, I think the definition of public opinion established by political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann back in the 1980s is once again highly relevant:
“Public opinion is the opinion dominant in public which can be expressed without risk of social isolation.”
Noelle-Neumann emphasized that public opinion is not just any opinion, but specifically those views that are visible, vocal, and supported by the majority, making them safe to express in public. This ties closely to her “Spiral of Silence” theory, where individuals may refrain from expressing minority views due to fear of social isolation.
The great problem of our current media situation seems to be that these public opinions are increasingly artificially constructed since they just seem like majority opinions, even if they are not, because they get pushed so hard by the influential crooks controlling major parts of the Internet (social media and search engine monopolies and so on).
So I think today’s web has become almost the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind.
I hope that doesn’t sound too pessimistic. I wouldn’t say all is lost, especially since there are definitely positive developments, of which the Fediverse is just one example among many.
Overall, however, I fear that technology alone will not change society, since it is always embedded into society itselfs and therefore functions according to its inherent logic.
So in Western countries, I unfortunately have little hope for the “mainstream internet” with its ruthless platform economy, because real change for the better would either require meaningful antitrust regulations or has to be forced by the consumers themselves —both seems highly unlikely, as the past 20 years have clearly shown in my opinion: Today, there are even more and even more powerful global monopolies, while people just won’t stop to buy their stuff at Amazon because it is usually a little cheaper and so convenient that hardly anyone is willing to even consider all the comparable offers that do exist.
The same seems to be true of the media: fewer, but even more powerful conglomerates with significantly greater reach than before and platforms that can pretty much do whatever they want without losing too many users (x obviously censoring many viewpoints and run by a open fascist, reddit killed it’s API as if it wasn’t important so on and so forth).
In short, I fear that unregulated turbo-capitalism has done to the internet what it always does once monopolies have formed: Enshitification.
And this “enshitification” of our most important media channels is now showing it’s ugly face in all the negative impacts on most democracies worldwide. I mean democracy only works with free discourse, the willingness to compromise, and reasonably informed voters. Unfortunately all of this contradicts the logic of today’s so-called social media—at least when it comes to the few major platforms with their own political agendas and their greed for profit.
It’s almost like a large-scale social experiment, with the result that there seem to be many profoundly evil people whose malicious beliefs are artificially pushed by billionaire “gatekeepers” to a point where they can appear socially acceptable, a few good people who have less and less say due to social media logic and content overload, and a large majority who just stand by and watch civilization go down the drain because they’re too lazy to change their habits and just rely on someone else to fix this mess, if they even recognize the problem in the first place.
In this context, I think the definition of public opinion established by political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann back in the 1980s is once again highly relevant:
The spiral of silence : public opinion, our social skin (1984)
Noelle-Neumann emphasized that public opinion is not just any opinion, but specifically those views that are visible, vocal, and supported by the majority, making them safe to express in public. This ties closely to her “Spiral of Silence” theory, where individuals may refrain from expressing minority views due to fear of social isolation.
The great problem of our current media situation seems to be that these public opinions are increasingly artificially constructed since they just seem like majority opinions, even if they are not, because they get pushed so hard by the influential crooks controlling major parts of the Internet (social media and search engine monopolies and so on).
So I think today’s web has become almost the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind.
Really well put. Thanks, as a fellow early internet utopian, I’ve had a lot of thoughts on this.
I hope that doesn’t sound too pessimistic. I wouldn’t say all is lost, especially since there are definitely positive developments, of which the Fediverse is just one example among many.
Overall, however, I fear that technology alone will not change society, since it is always embedded into society itselfs and therefore functions according to its inherent logic.
So in Western countries, I unfortunately have little hope for the “mainstream internet” with its ruthless platform economy, because real change for the better would either require meaningful antitrust regulations or has to be forced by the consumers themselves —both seems highly unlikely, as the past 20 years have clearly shown in my opinion: Today, there are even more and even more powerful global monopolies, while people just won’t stop to buy their stuff at Amazon because it is usually a little cheaper and so convenient that hardly anyone is willing to even consider all the comparable offers that do exist.
The same seems to be true of the media: fewer, but even more powerful conglomerates with significantly greater reach than before and platforms that can pretty much do whatever they want without losing too many users (x obviously censoring many viewpoints and run by a open fascist, reddit killed it’s API as if it wasn’t important so on and so forth).
In short, I fear that unregulated turbo-capitalism has done to the internet what it always does once monopolies have formed: Enshitification.
And this “enshitification” of our most important media channels is now showing it’s ugly face in all the negative impacts on most democracies worldwide. I mean democracy only works with free discourse, the willingness to compromise, and reasonably informed voters. Unfortunately all of this contradicts the logic of today’s so-called social media—at least when it comes to the few major platforms with their own political agendas and their greed for profit.
That was interesting read, thank you. You make excellent points.