StudioFeed

This ethos of personal freedom coexists with a digital environment dominated by huge, multinational, oligopolistic corporations: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. That they use their power to manipulate users for their own gain is unquestioned. What the ideology of the internet allows is for that manipulation to be seen as in our interest. What’s communicated by open standards and cooperative development is that the best thing will win out, and that innovators must be allowed to continue to innovate—which is to say that our objections to the actions of the powerful are simply an expression of an erroneous preference for lesser options. The internet has been so built up rhetorically that it has approached utopian status itself, a commune that never ends. Any problems will be solved, generally by users spontaneously getting together to fix it and then dispersing. We spend a lot of time concentrating on the instances when that did happen. We don’t generally pay attention to all the times when it didn’t.