#9 What Is The Internet

What Is The Internet?

On digital activism and the structure of the internet

Politics and the internet are no longer separable. In an era where the leader of one of the world's most powerful countries posts his opinions online daily, an analysis of how the digital age has transformed our social and political lives is necessary. Francis Fukuyama identifies the internet and social media as the cause of the enormous influence of populist politics in recent years, [1] and the European Union significantly tightened the rules for online advertising by political parties last year. [2] However, the political potential of the digital world does not only come from above: the internet can also be used by progressive and activist political groups, partly because “physical, emotional, and cognitive restrictions on participation in in-person activism” [3] can be circumvented online.

It is clear that the internet represents a radical revolution in the way we engage in politics. It remains to be seen whether our classical notions of how politics functions and how political goals can be achieved still apply to a digital age. Therefore, it is important to examine the nature of the digital or the internet, to understand its influence on our political possibilities, and to map the consequences of that nature on our politics. This essay argues that the internet can best be characterized as a new kind of connection between people that emerges as an autonomous space, through which traditional social relations are transformed, with potentially both extremist and emancipatory consequences within politics.

To explore the way the internet exists, we can ask ourselves to what extent it can be understood based on the two attributes that Spinoza describes in the Ethics: extension and thought. First, extension, or the possession of a physical form or the material existence of a phenomenon in the world. Does the internet have a place? If we delimit a location within our conception of extension, we seem to have to say no: beyond perhaps the device with which someone accesses the digital world, the internet takes up no space. The digital is precisely not physical, and cannot be directly bounded by physical objects; [4] the internet is not spatially bounded, because it does not have to be limited to physical networks, but can also move via, for example, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. After all, the primary function of the internet is to connect places.

Yet we do think of the internet in terms of space. From the beginning, people talked about chat rooms, and even today, the internet seems to be everywhere, which also implies a spatial dimension. [5] This language is primarily metaphorical, and the question of whether the internet is a location is primarily a matter of semantics, of vocabulary. The digital world is something different from extension and therefore, in a sense, not another place but rather a non-place; by leaving reality, you arrive "not somewhere but nowhere." [6]

So what is the internet? Because the answer to the question seems to be that it is both a territory and a fragmented collection of places. It is a network of places without extension, a seemingly endless connection of corridors and rooms and squares where information travels, like a decentralized nervous system. "What a shame to ever speak of the Id." [7] The fact that the internet is a network is its defining characteristic—just look at the etymology of the term. It is as if people almost only encounter each other on the road without actually visiting each other; the street is the meeting place instead of the town square.

The fact that the internet is a connection also answers the question of which of Spinoza's two attributes it falls under: it is neither, but rather a connection. The internet is a means of connecting thoughts, physical devices. The problem with the internet is not necessarily that it is not a place, but that it now serves as a place. A new, mediated relationship is established between thought and extension that creates problems. In his book on Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze characterizes Spinoza's conception of evil as follows: an action is evil if it causes "certain connections to be so much altered by external influence that the whole is destroyed." [8] This is the characteristic consequence of the internet: it is a new kind of connection between people, between ideas, causing old connections to disappear.

The breakdown of connection makes it possible to create new connections, but this can also have a dangerous downside. Precisely this new kind of networkedness is important because the high degree of connectivity that the internet exhibits can lead to a kind of cultural syncretism, a common tendency of fascist ideologies [9] — think, for example, of occult and pseudoscientific ideas within Nazism. [10] After all, it is much easier to encounter ideas that one would normally ignore, or to find people with similar ideological views and exchange ideas with them. The internet represents every belief, every ideology, as the art brut version of institutional parliamentarians, the fragmentation of a collective, social consciousness. The internet has caused a complete social upheaval: children, for example, play outside less, because they can simply meet each other online. [11] The way in which people traditionally connected with each other is changing again.

In itself, this is nothing new. The way in which social connection occurred has changed before, for example, due to the rise of nationalism, in which people began to explicitly identify with their country and thus re-examine their relationship to the social collective. However, the internet is changing the way we are connected much more radically: now that people no longer need to see each other physically to connect, traditional boundaries are being broken down: someone in the Netherlands can easily talk to someone on the other side of the world.

People who have difficulty connecting with others in their neighborhood can suddenly maintain online friendships, not to mention online dating, the pinnacle of the transformation of social connection in the digital age. The consequence of the rise of online friendships, however, is that technology is changing from a way to contact people and then see them in person—think of calling a family member to arrange a coffee date—to a place to be social in itself. The internet is no longer a means to an end, but a final destination. The fact that we now treat the internet as a destination in itself, rather than simply as a tool for connecting ourselves, also ensures that activism is specifically focused on the internet. Many people who are not very politically active find it easier to make small-scale digital contributions to political actions, for example, by changing a profile picture or donating money via a link on Instagram, allowing even those who are unlikely to attend a protest march to commit to a political cause. [12]

If activists want to engage effectively with the internet, they must also use it for their activism, instead of seeing it solely as the goal of activist action. For example, people have used the internet to organize themselves, like when the group VoterMarch organized protests in 2000 after the US Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore, or when social media was used during the Arab Spring to focus international attention on the large-scale violence happening there. [13]

The internet offers political activism the opportunity to create social connections in new ways, or to reach people in new ways. Technological innovations have always made criticism more accessible, and thus reach more people – think of Erasmus, who, thanks to the advent of printing, could suddenly distribute political works much more easily than before. The possibilities the internet offers to political organization stem primarily from its ontological structure: the high degree of connectivity it exhibits breaks through national borders and other physical barriers. Activism is evolving along with this technological development and can still gain much from it.

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