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Useful as it is to recognize the lie in the myth, it is important to state at the outset that myths mean more than falsehoods or cons; indeed, they matter greatly. Myths are stories that animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence that lift people out of the banality of everyday life. They offer an entrance to another reality, a reality once characterized by the promise of the sublime.
[...] Critically examining myths of cyberspace may help us to loosen the powerful grip of myths of the future on the present. It may lead us to question the naturalized tendency to see the future as the pure extension of logic, technical rationality, and linear progress, and other bulwarks against the primitive forces of instinct and intellectual poverty that have historically weighed against human accomplishment. In this view, cyberspace is a mythic gloss on individual achievement and genuine community against the ostensibly backward Others who would undermine both.
[...] But myths are more than fabrications of the truth. [...] myths are stories that help people deal with contradictions in social life that ca never be fully resolved. They are one response to the inevitable failure of our minds to overcome their cognitive or categorical limits to understanding the world. [...]
citing Levi-Strauss
'Myth' is not merely an anthropological term that one might equate with human values. It is also a political term that inflects human values with ideology. By denying the fullness of the political, myth naturalizes its narrative and raises it to the level of a near impregnable fortress unassailable by ordinary mortals. Myths are what is and there is not much that can be done about them. [...]
i just like the way this is written
[...] Communication provides us with the very basis of politics. The public no longer exists as an entity inasmuch as it is a collection of discreet individuals who are serviced. Under the auspices of efficiency, individuals reign triumphant as a corporatist ethic provides the road map of social design. This vision of people and their interests is akin to a post-Fordist regime with customised interests, niche markets, and the narrowing and increasing specification of issues which speak to a narrowcast rather than broadcast mentality. The public becomems, then, a questionable claim, little more than a holdover annoyance of second wave politics, rather than a leading force in the new politics. In fact, the tone of the new private idealism obviates the need for the public altogether. we are left with a new sense of the political, an individualistic populism suffused with elite ideals. [...]
the post-Fordism analogy is intriguing and i should think about this more
[...] the dominant political tendency today is neo-liberalism, which was founded on the retreat of the state from vital areas of social life, including communication, where the state was once very significantly involved in building infrastructure, establishing technical standards, regulating market access, and providing services. According to neo-liberalism, such functions are best provided by the private sector with minimal state involvement. Specifically, neo-liberalism aims to customize state functions, tailor them to suit business needs, and thereby avoid what its supporters contend is the stalemate created by excessive public demands for state services.
decent description of neoliberalism from one angle. could be useful
[...] Almost a century and a half ago, at the birth of the electric sublime, competing telegraph interests established the International Telecommunication Union, a global body made up mainly of government organizations and managed on a one-nation, one-vote basis to set global standards for the new technology. [...]
However, as the number of nations grew, including former colonial societies eager to create standards that would help them expand widespread access to communication technology (and not just the profits of communication companies), conflict grew at the ITU. As a result, core industrial powers, led by the United States, began to consider alternatives. These included, first, political bodies, like Intelsat, a global communication satellite organization whose rules permitted Western control and more recently, private corporations, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which helps to establish technical standards for the web. [...]
[...] the number of global interests is expanding so that even something as seemingly innocuous as setting a country code for a web address becomes a political question when, to cite one particularly fractious case, it is Palestine petitioning for "p.s"(Clausing 19999). Should ".union" join ".com" on the list of acceptable suffixes, as one public-interest group proposed? Private businesses expect to depoliticize these issues by setting up Western controlled private or only quasi-public standards organizations. But they are actually only displacing tensions and contradictions.
In 2002 ICANN ultimately succeeded in eliminating democratically elected members of its board, but even this neo-liberal stroke does not guarantee smooth functioning (Jesdanum 2002). [...]
fascinating stuff. need to look into this more. i remember when i first thought about how US-dominated the internet is and wondered why
[...] It demonstrates how deeply entrenched the largest internet companies and their surveillance model is with the profit system. They’re just in the bone marrow of modern capitalism — of our modern political economy. To go after that is basically going after the whole system, in a way. It would require that sort of organizing campaign.
Or to put it in terms of media analysis: no significant economic interests wish to open up critical public examination of the surveillance model of capitalism, so that means none of our political establishment — Republicans or Democrats — has any incentive to go there. Those few journalists who remain have little to work with from the official sources they rely upon, so the matter dies. It is no longer “news.”
on the Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrating "the extremely close connection between commercial media, politics, and our everyday lives"
Most of the people who designed the internet didn’t want it to be a commercial medium, and that’s why they made it that way. The problem with that for capitalism was that it didn’t make for a very successful commercial model. In the 1990s, there was endless talk of locating the “killer app,” the digital goose that would lay the golden eggs. Capitalists knew the internet was changing everything, but it seemed resistant to commercial exploitation. By the middle of the 1990s, Madison Avenue and the corporate community realized that if they were going to really have the internet be the nervous system of modern society, they had to make it advertiser friendly, they had to make it profit friendly. They had to commercialize it, and the crucial thing to doing that was introducing the capacity and the protocols for surveillance, knowing who exactly is online, everything about them. That began in earnest in the late 1990s and changed the entire logic of the internet — turned it on its head in many respects.
in response to:
at the heart of it all is the commercial principle driving our media system. This is of course what’s left out of the mainstream accounts of it. Could you lay out where you think the connections are between the commercialization of media and the way in which Facebook has now been harnessed to these very
worrying political ends?
[...] here was a technology that conceivably could give corporations infinitely more power over consumers, not simply to advertise products, but to make sales. But that required wrestling away people’s ability to maintain their privacy, and doing so without their awareness of what was being done to them.
This movement was led, appropriately enough, by Procter & Gamble. The key was to find a way of tracking people’s internet activity so you could know who they were, where they were, and you could collect data on them. It didn’t begin all at once. It wasn’t an overnight 180-degree turn, but that process was underway by the mid-nineties, and then it was expanded to where we are today over the next decade.
Why, so early on, was it understood that the key to turning the internet into a commercial medium would be this tracking and surveillance capacity?
explaining that advertisers were ones driving it initially, recognising that no one would choose to view an ad