How the Internet Went From Counterculture to Technofeudalism | Douglas Rushkoff

26:50there's something coming in somewhere every 10 seconds. How am I supposed to live like that? And the problem for me, I mean, partly because I've got a codependent type personality, but partly because this is just life, is I still feel the human social obligation on the other side of each one of those messages. And not all of them are even from humans, I'm sure. But the surface area of our accessibility is so great that we can no longer respond in the human way we might want to. And then that requires us to depersonalize. You know, so in some ways, it's not just social. It is social in that sense, but it's that the scale at which it's happening makes it impossible.

27:42Whereas the scale you were describing before and the speed, which was like chess by mail, it's the way I experienced it. These were bulletin boards. You would use a modem and log in and use your Telnet and get to it. Use net. You'd see what was talked about. You'd spend an overnight crafting the paragraph that you're going to upload to the conversation. and then wait a couple of days until you see how people responded. That was sort of a delightful pacing.

28:09Demetri Kofinas:Right. And many of us spent more time in internet cafes or in computer rooms than we did at home on our computers, which meant that for a long time, getting on the internet itself was a very social experience because you were physically around other people when you were sending emails or visiting websites. When do you feel like that culture began to meaningfully change? because I still remember in the early 2000s when I was sitting in my dorm room using Napster or Kazaa to share and download pirated music files peer to peer off the internet. There was still a sense of experimentation and anarchy.

28:49Demetri Kofinas:I mean, I remember when Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster went to the MTV Awards. This was also, I think in 2000, wearing a Metallica t-shirt, making fun of the band because they were suing him and his company for copyright infringement. I mean, that's radical by the standards of what we think about today. You just wouldn't see that kind of assault on such a powerful industry by a punk 20-year-old kid. No one would stand for it. But who was the radical one in that case? Was it Napster or was it Metallica? Because now in hindsight, Metallica took a stand against what turned out to be the big business of Napster and Smartify.

29:31Demetri Kofinas:It is true that that's how it involved. And that's an important point to note. But simply in terms of what the conception was at the time at the very least was that there was still a sense that the internet was for the rebels. It was for the people that were pushing boundaries. Right. And now the most reactionary wealthy billionaires on the planet are still casting themselves as the rebels. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and - 100%. Sam Altman, they are acting as if they're the great agents of change, pedal to the metal revolutionary ideas. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, where the reason why they want to accelerate the development of AI so quickly is so they can maintain their own monopolies, that they're reactionary.

30:19They are not revolutionary at all. They're going to keep the balance of power the same or worse.

30:25Demetri Kofinas:So Jillian Tett, who's also been on the podcast, I remember her telling me on the show, and this was in 2017, I think, that the internet was beginning to feel like, or not the internet, Silicon Valley rather, was beginning to feel like the financial industry pre or slightly post-2008. And that definitely tracked for me too. There was, I mean, because post-2008, Silicon Valley still felt avant garde. It still felt like it was where innovation was happening. It's where real investment was happening, where all the real entrepreneurs were. And the people that are disillusioned with the financial sector and with what happened during the great financial crisis could find some hope in what was going on at Elon Musk's companies.

31:13Demetri Kofinas:This was also around the time, 2014 is kind of when I put it in my head, where 2012 maybe actually would be better. when I began to feel like something changed. And for me, it was like the combination of ubiquitous connectivity through mobile and social media. And maybe this was around the time that Facebook innovated with its like features. I don't remember exactly, but that's kind of around the time that I feel like things changed. I would agree that that may have been the moment that the disastrous pivot of the internet from a cultural to a business phenomenon became palpable and damaging to people.

31:55I mean, for me, it was earlier, but again, that's because I was thinking about the fate of the internet itself. So for me, it was the day that Marc Andreessen took Netscape public in 1995. This was shareware. This was something that was developed at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. And here's a guy who didn't even make the thing, said, no, no, no, let's not go with that shareware model anymore. Let's go big business. And he did a big IPO and all these people invested in this thing. And when that happened, I realized, oh, wait a minute. If they're investing in this thing, then they're going to want to make money off this thing.

32:40They invested in something that already existed. So this is not capital going into the development of a product. That's traditional capitalism. Oh, I want to build cars. Oh, we'll give you the money to make the factory and get the metal to start building those cars. And then once you make profit, you pay us back. This wasn't that. Mosaic existed.

33:07Demetri Kofinas:Right. Mosaic was a browser that was developed out of Urbana Champagne. Yeah, for free, shareware, like a school. And a guy says, oh, I think I can somehow flip this into a marketplace where I can make money off this thing that's already basically in the public domain. And it was interesting because the day that Netscape went public was also the day that Jerry Garcia, the guitarist of the Grateful Dead died. So I took that kind of symbolically as the 1960s radical revolutionary hippie values that had been responsible for internet culture were now going to be left behind. And the libertarian values of Wired Magazine, who announced that we're now living in a long boom, which meant that thanks to the internet, the global economy would grow exponentially forever, uninterrupted.

34:11And that seemed like a big, tall order for the market to grow exponentially uninterrupted forever. But that's what these folks were buying into. That's still where Marc Andreessen is with his sort of insane proclamations of crypto optimism and AI and libertarianism and growth as if this is an infinite realm.

34:34Demetri Kofinas:Is this the product, the inevitable byproduct of any technology's maturation, or is it actually a very specific reflection of a particular form of capitalism that's especially rapacious and whose outcomes are exceedingly lopsided in their distribution, specifically in terms of the ownership of the means of production? Yeah. Industrial age capitalism was good for some people, but bad for a whole lot of people too, right? It was good for the people, for some of the people in the colonizing regions, but really bad for the people in the regions that got colonized. And it was ultimately really difficult for workers because industrial technology was used to de-skill labor and make everybody interchangeable in the company rather than enhance labor and develop cultures of competence and expertise.

35:34When we apply those same industrial age principles to digital age technologies, it gets a little scarier, a little bit worse. So I think that's what we're seeing. Industrial capitalism was stocks in companies. It was everybody who made money was once removed from the labor. Digital age technology allows you to be hundreds of steps removed through derivatives of derivatives of derivatives. And the derivatives of business are leveraged much bigger than whatever is actually going on. Can you elaborate? I'm not sure I followed there. What do you mean? It allows us to be more removed. Okay. So a person digs a ditch, right?

36:21And that worker is creating value by making a hole for a well. What capitalism taught us early on is it's better to be the boss of that person digging the ditch than the person who's digging the ditch itself. Well, rather than being the boss of the person digging the ditch, what if you're a shareholder in the company that hires the boss. That's really good. Now I can do whatever I want to do and passively collect that. Well, what if instead of being the shareholder who has to wait six months for returns and dividends, what if I buy a derivative in the shares of stock that that shareholder owns?

37:03That way, I can compress the six months and I can own that stock six months from now today. Well, what if instead of being the derivatives person, I buy a derivative of that derivative? So now I can have that derivative six months in the future. So the way that digital technology assisted this process is it created new kinds of computerized record keeping systems that allowed you to have derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, baskets of mortgages, credit default swaps on a basket of mortgages. So you can keep moving into more and more abstract and highly leveraged forms of value extraction.

37:43And it got to the place where the New York Stock Exchange, which understandably is an abstraction of business, ended up being purchased by its own derivatives exchange. ITEX, the New York Stock Exchange derivatives exchange was so much bigger than the stock market itself. So the stock market was purchased by its own abstraction. And that's very common in the digital age where symbol systems start to matter more than the things themselves. An MP3 is not a song. An MP3 is letters that can recreate the experience of a song, but it's not actually music. It's steps and steps away. Right.

38:22Demetri Kofinas:It's the encoding of music into binaries so that your MP3 player can read that music and replay it to you based on what your phone thinks it sounds like. Right. And information is like infinitely scalable and abstractable and all that where people and the planet are not. I mean, that's another interesting dichotomy between the digital and the analog world, which is that we used to call people on the phone and you'd actually hear their voice. You don't actually hear their voices anymore. That's an important distinction. It's why calls overseas sounded different. And in fact, the person sounded like he or she was further away than calls to your neighbor because frequencies had to be compressed.

39:01Demetri Kofinas:Voices also had to be amplified and repeated, which meant more noise would build up in the channel. Now that's not what you experienced. What you experience now is packet loss and latency. Even the way in which the signal is compressed is different, which is a very different experience and further removed from the physical source itself. And while someone might chalk that up as being largely insignificant, when you view it in the totality of what we've been talking about today, it is part of this larger move toward increased intermediation of experience where we are quite literally physically less in touch with each other than we used to be.

39:38Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. There's a place where, and I don't know if it's true on a spiritual or whatever level, but I feel like Like digital music has finally gotten to the place where with a dedicated$1 ,000 digital to analog converter, I feel like digital files now sound as good as records. CDs certainly did not. These 44 ,000 hertz sampled, whatever. Those always sounded like sawtooth waves to me. But finally, we're there. And if you talk with someone using FaceTime audio on an iPhone, yes, those are digital packets, but it's like, I wonder, is that better? Is that more personal? Is that more soulful, pranic than twisted pair?

40:35It's got the kind of wire that used to be used for telephones, that twisted pair analog connection. Have we gotten there or is it just a better simulation? And does that simulation leave out some, and again, I'm asking, I'm not saying it does, I'm not new aging here. Does it leave out some essential analog physical connection or was that just a fantasy to begin with?

41:04Demetri Kofinas:It may be just a fragment of my imagination. it's hard to know because there are no opportunities to have analog phone calls anymore. I know. So I can't actually compare. I mean, how many people realize that the reason we had rotary phones to begin with is because when you put your finger into one of the numbered holes and rotated the dial, you were effectively winding a spring. And when you released it and let it spin back, it opened and closed an electrical circuit corresponding to a certain number of electrical pulses that the telephone company switches could then read and route you to the person you were trying to reach.

41:38Right. It would go, like if you dialed a five on the way back, it would give five clicks to the phone, which is why what you could do until they figured it out on a payphone was you could click, click, click, click the, if you did it fast enough, the, like the hang up thing, whatever that's called. You could click that fast enough and in the right sequence to dial a phone number.

42:04Demetri Kofinas:Yeah. I mean, there was a more, and not to sit here and sort of go down memory lane and nostalgize, add in fun item on this stuff. But I think that what we can agree on at the very least, whether it's good or not, is just that it was a more tactile way of being in the world. It was embodied. It was more embodied. It was a more embodied way of being in the world. Exactly. Which is why you see people trying to get embodied again. I mean, I'm going to ecstatic dance nights and things like that and cuddle puddles. And in the East Village here in New York, it's just jammed with kids all weekend, kids, 20-somethings going out.

42:40I do think that we are getting back. Kids now, they're buying LPs, meaning the vinyl, even if they don't have turntables, they're buying it to have their record. That's interesting.

42:53Demetri Kofinas:Well, so I should just mention this before I quote a passage from one of your sub stacks. I think there is something to be said about the rising incidence of depression and anxiety and people's sense of disembodiment. Because I do think that people, I mean, I've even found this to be true for myself before I began to put limits on technology. For example, I years ago stopped allowing Twitter to send me notifications. there's something... I think a lot of people feel increasingly like floating heads because so much of our lives are lived out in our minds and also we're projecting and essentially running simulations of what other people are thinking all the time as opposed to being more physically present.

43:31Demetri Kofinas:And I think that probably explains some of what we're seeing in terms of people's psychology. I'd like to quote a passage, Douglas, from a post you wrote on Substack a few months ago titled The Fascist Atmosphere as a jumping off point for a discussion about what you were trying to get out with this piece. I thought it was really interesting. And you wrote, quote, I know many people right now are very concerned with what feels like the encroachment of fascism or authoritarianism on our government. And that fear, that reality is definitely something to reckon with. I'm not suggesting it's not real or that it's not urgent, but I do think it's part of something greater, something that might require even more of our collective attention at this moment.

44:11Demetri Kofinas:I'm less concerned right now with fascism as a philosophy or a form of government than I am fascism or authoritarianism as an environment in which human beings are attempting to operate. The easiest way for me to express it is as a digital or quantized environment where everything is one or zero, yes or no, right or wrong, us or them. That's what I'm looking to address here, this pervasive atmospheric quality that is biased towards these distinct boundaries between people and their feelings and their ideas and their origins. These are boundaries that are not real. They are artifacts of our thought systems made all the more distinct by the digital.

44:52Demetri Kofinas:When we were talking about the difference between analog and digital, this came up for me, which is why I wanted to quote this to you now. Can you elaborate more on what you've been seeing that inspired you to write this piece and how it fits into the discussion that we were having? I mean, it's interesting. This is why the media theorists, the media ecologists saw sort of resonance in my work. And what I'm trying to do is describe the digital media environment as kind of conducive to this fascism, authoritarianism. And you think about the television media environment, and that means like the world on television.

45:33Think about like each medium like a drug. So the world's on TV now, or it was. What did that look like? It was global. That world was very global. We had globalism and global markets. We had a president like Ronald Reagan. We experienced things simultaneously together watching TV, like the moon landing or the Olympics. Those were sort of these global real-time events. We had monoculture. We did. I mean, on the downside, yeah. We had monoculture, we had global markets, we had scale.

46:08Demetri Kofinas:But would you say though that the media that we had at that time was more aligned with and conducive to the systems of political and social organization that we lived under? That in other words, they were conducive, they fit with each other. We had large scale systems of organization and large scale media. Well, it did, but it changed things though. Like politically, the peak of the radio media environment was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his style of politics and community, you know, pulling us out of the depression. And the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. It was something hot, what McClellan would call hot media and passion media.

46:53The stars of radio politics were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Chairman Mao, and Adolf Hitler. So it was political, but it was very particular politic. The television media environment brought us cooler stars of politics. Both Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were really good TV performers in a different way, but they were kind of cool. like that, think more Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood. Cool. These are cool guys, Dean Martin kind of politicians. But at the peak of television and television being globalist and connecting, you end up with Ronald Reagan saying, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

47:39That was sort of the peak of the television political era is Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall saying, we are in one world. This is artificial. Tear it down. When we get into the digital media environment. It's about yes, no, off, on. Everything is discrete because we know everything is sampled. It's packets. It's separate. It's that feeling. You're auto-tuned onto a quantized bit and everything else is sort of cold blank space. So in the digital world, which is interesting, which is built on memory because everything digital is memory, RAM and ROM is memory, We have the one bias toward memory, which is make America great again, Brexit, things were better before, nationalism.

48:22And the other bias is this discrete binary thing. So instead of Reagan tearing down a wall, you get Trump literally building a wall between us and them and tariffs and separation. So it's as if the air we breathe is based in memory, false memory for that point. and separation and division and binary and yes, no, off, on, one, zero. And so that does tend toward which side am I on? What nation am I in? And everybody is all on or all off. There's no in between. There's no volume knob.

49:02Demetri Kofinas:So I asked you before we started, if you were familiar with the work of Ian McGilchrist, I think you said you may not have been. He's of course the author of The Master and His Emissary and also The Matter with Things, very well-known philosopher. And the dichotomy that he draws between the left and right brain is that the left brain is the part of our brain that's concerned with apprehending, whereas the right brain is the part concerned with comprehending. And the left brain is the part of the brain that schematizes the world, that creates models in order to compress reality into a manageable map that it can use to navigate it.

49:34Demetri Kofinas:And one of the other consequences, I mean, he would say this, he would agree with you on this point. He would also say, for example, that the cornucopia of new gender identities that are in the hundreds now, I think, is an example of this. Because we used to have a very fluid concept of gender and sexuality. So people were more or less masculine, more or less feminine. But now it's like, and this is just one example, but I think it's such an interesting one. It's like people need you to be in a box. They need you to fit in a tight little box. And if you don't fit in that box, it's a problem. And I'm curious, is this a good direction in which I'm going, this idea that it's got to fit?

50:07Demetri Kofinas:It's almost kind of like, we're all kind of, I don't know if neurotic's the term, but it's like everything needs to have a clear definition. If it doesn't, it doesn't work because we're struggling to deal with the fluidity and the continuity of the world. Well, we don't have the fluidity. There's no in-between. It's like we're living in a world where there are only the ticks of the clock, and digital technology doesn't recognize the duration between the ticks when life actually happens. So on which tick do you fall? And those ticks, importantly to point out, those ticks are 100 % artificial. They don't actually exist in the world.

50:44These are boundaries that we're creating. Right. It's a symbol system, which is the same as money. Sorry, again, it sounds like I'm being radical. Money's not real. Money's an invention. We print this stuff on paper. I mean, it's not even just not real because it's not based on gold. Gold wasn't real as money. It was just, it's a scarce thing that we decided to make - Right.

51:05Demetri Kofinas:Gold as the physical thing is real, but the value we ascribe to it is artificial. It's also artificial. It's also a social construction. So even those, like you're saying, all those little lines, all those little division points are fake, but the problem is we desperately want to be machine readable in this world. And the way to be machine readable is not to be in that liminal, in-between space? Where do you fall? Twitter, as I know it's not the entire digital media environment, but as a good case study in the digital landscape, especially a digital landscape owned by a single person, you can't be in-between.

51:48You can't be subtle. You can't be neither Democrat nor Republican. You've got to do one. You are either a Zionist colonizer or a terrorist. You know, that's the problem with basing our society on binary systems and now running our social, cultural, and in some ways, biological systems on these. So when I say living in a fascist or authoritarian environment, I mean, it's the texture of everything. And it's partly because we're new in it also. Even the switch from analog television to digital television, it's everything's standardization also, right?

52:38Demetri Kofinas:I mean, it's interesting because this totally resonates with me. I mean, I would say again, this is, I don't know if this is a good way to go about this, but I think that more standardized systems are more fascistic. Less standardized or more artisanal systems are less fascistic, kind of like a really smooth set of staircases or cracked, broken, brick-laden staircases with roots coming out of them are less fascistic, so to speak. Right. And you could look at the same way, having screens in front of your face at one distance and flat is more fascistic. Having a long view with multiple depths of field is less fascistic.

53:13That complexity and circularity is the kind of thing that we're calling fascism or authoritarianism can't tolerate. That capitalism run at this level is a straight line towards a goal. We keep on going and you never allow the kind of cycles of karma or anything to come back.

53:35Demetri Kofinas:Yeah. I mean, there's so much here to explore, Douglas. I think also capitalism is an important part of it, but capitalism is such an insufficient definition because capitalism, at least the way I think of it, is essentially the private ownership of the means of production, but the distribution of that private ownership can vary dramatically. You can have wide scale distribution of ownership, which means that the majority of people actually have a stake in that economy or in that business. And then you can have a very narrow distribution, which is no different than totalitarianism or authoritarian rule in a political sense, in a political model.

54:06Demetri Kofinas:I'm going to move us to the second hour, Douglas, where I want to continue this conversation. I also want to discuss techno-feudalism because that's something that you've either written explicitly about or I've inferred it from some of your writings. I do think that there's a sense in which we're moving towards this type of a society. And I think it's the type of a society that many of the people who have captured these new mediums want. These These mediums that we talked about that in the 90s felt very sort of libertarian and anarchic and laden with human feeling and human interaction that have since become more fascistic are led by people that seem to want this type of a world.

54:40Demetri Kofinas:And we'll sort of explore what that is in my mind. And then one of the things I want to talk to you about before we end today's conversation is solutions. What is the solution here? Because this is something that I've really tried to explore. Because I think that I don't take a fatalist view of this. In fact, I've been frustrated by the constant sense of inevitability that people want to put on this. And I think people that talk about inevitability of this kind of dystopia are either depressed and that's why they feel it's inevitable or they want to make it seem inevitable, which is why they keep talking about it in those terms.

55:12Demetri Kofinas:But a good example that I have brought up on the show is social media and how this is a choice, the way social media works. It's a choice that we have the outcomes that we have. We don't have to have them. And I feel like we have lost a sense of the public purpose of public policy. Public policy for the common good, or is it public policy for private corporations and the powerful? And it seems that we have tended consistently towards the latter. And I want to explore solutions in that context as well when we head into the second hour, Douglas. For anyone who is good to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supportive.

55:43Demetri Kofinas:We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Douglas, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Douglas, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed.

56:15Demetri Kofinas:If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.