To all my fellow netizens who feel disappointed in the state of the internet, you are not alone! The internet sucks now! Not that it was always the best place, but it is increasingly becoming a soulless husk of its former self.
Okay, let’s drop the moralistic and emotion-filled rhetoric- why is the internet the way it is now? Well it comes down to one thing, as most things do- capitalism. That dirty, awful word. The internet is not a neutral tool existing in a vacuum separate from the real world- it is very much confined within it, and a product of it.
Our data is sold, every space is dominated by corporations, we are under constant surveillance, the internet's services are sold as a commodity, and it is increasingly becoming populated by bots instead of people (51% of internet traffic is bots, meaning we are outnumbered online!) Oh the humanity!
There’s a strong chance that many of those you have spoken to online may not even be real humans, but digital bots working overtime to persuade you of certain political messages.
The internet is no longer a haven for those looking to escape the harsh oppression of reality, it is a horrifying reflection of it. So what do we do friends? Who do we turn to in these grave times? Or as one brilliant thinker once asked, long before the internet, “What is to be done?”
Let’s go on a fun journey into the dissolution of the state and why it is necessary for a better internet, one which does not restrict and oppress the working class, but serves as a reflection of their liberation from class stratification!
To start, we need to first understand what communism is, and later dive into how capitalism has ruined the internet, and finally what a better internet could look like!
Below is my friend, the Specter of Communism! He once haunted industrial Europe in Marx's time, now he's here to talk to us about communism and what it is!
Now, I see you have awoken me from my slumber to address your questions regarding Marxist theory, hm?
Good! I'm glad you're on board, and for those of you not on board, too bad punk. You WILL become aware of your own oppression!
Let’s get some things out of the way first- what is “communism”?
You may have heard from some “Marxists” different conflicting things. Let’s start with this- no, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Dengists, and god forbid Gonzalites, are not communists. Lenin didn't even have anything to do with the creation of Marxist-Leninism. Nothing about these ideologies actually follow what Marx and Engels wrote, the most prominent thinkers to actually follow and sharpen theory being Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bordiga to name a few.
No, the USSR was not communist, not even socialist. China was and is not socialist, despite what modern day internet LARPers will tell you. Neither is Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, etc.
"*Gasp*! How can that be?", you ask yourself. "They called themselves communists, didn't they?"
Well think of it this way- North Korea calls itself the "Democratic People's Republic". And if there's anything we know, it's having a family dynasty viciously rule the country for decades is anything but "democratic".
These so called "Actually Existing Socialist" states, which typically operate off a Marxist-Leninist, or Stalinist framework, violate the most basic Marxist tendencies. This includes...
Now, what does "communism" actually mean then?
According to Marx and Engels, a communist society would be...
Yes, you read that right.
No wages. No money. No buying and selling. No corporations. No markets deciding who gets what and who goes without. No states standing above society to enforce class rule. No privatized healthcare.
However, a world rid of private property, social classes, money, alienation, and economic exploitation would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
And most importantly, class stratification, which has been going on since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution and is responsible for pretty much all the serious woes of society, including patriarchy, xenophobia, etc., will disappear, and over time those problems will disappear or shrink with it.
Curse those god damn farmers.
Humans lived for thousands of years without private property, inherited wealth, or permanent class divisions. These communities were hardly utopias, but they lacked the rigid structures of domination that later became central to organized society.
In a communist society, the products of human labor belong to humanity as a whole. People contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. The economy is not a battlefield of competing interests, but a coordinated social process aimed at providing food, housing, healthcare, education, and everything else necessary for a dignified life.
And just because the internet has been shaped to be shit by capitalism doesn't mean it has to look like that forever!
*Yawn* Ah look at that, I'm getting tired again from all this explaining. Looks like I'll have to return to my ghostly slumber. Time to hand this over to our other friend and latest creation, M4RX-BOT 2.0, or "Cyber-Marx". Take it away buddy.
Hello netizen, I see you come to me with questions regarding a newer and freer internet. Well you came to the right place!
To start off, let's get some things straight about what the internet actually is under capitalism.
Every post, meme, livestream, and doomscroll rests on an enormous physical infrastructure. Your tweets do not ascend into heaven. They are routed through server farms owned by corporations like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
Your photos are stored in buildings filled with machines that require land, water, cooling systems, and electricity
Every “free” platform is subsidized by surveillance and advertising, converting your behavior into a commodity that can be bought and sold.
Even our interactions are increasingly automated. Bots generate content, shape public opinion, and flood our feeds with slop optimized for engagement.
We were promised a global village and instead got algorithmic enclosures managed by corporations whose primary goal is to keep us scrolling long enough to serve another ad.
So what's the alternative? How can we do better?
Well for one, the unfortunate truth is that nothing can really happen until capitalism is gone.
Why is that? It's like asking for global free markets in a world dominated by feudalism. It's just not going to happen unless the mode of production changes.
And that might not happen for a long time.
Or it might happen this century! It's uncertain given that as of now, there is no real movement, no widespread class consciousness, and most working people's understanding of communism is Red Scare-tier propaganda based off the Stalinist model, which as our good friend the Specter of Communism established is a bastardization of what Marx and Engels actually wrote.
Nothing can be done that can be accelerated by individuals or even movements/activism unfortunately, as capitalism can really only end once its internal contradictions have matured to the point where it struggles and fails to reproduce itself on a global stage, the same way the feudal societies of the medieval world fell; this is an impersonal process, not one that you can “speed up”. This begs to ask, what the hell do we do now?
Well, there are some things we can do that can help. We can...
Now, once we've shed the chains of oppression and found ourselves in a freer world, the internet can finally become the thing that we all used to think it was.
The internet would not be owned by billionaires.
It would not exist to harvest our data or manipulate our attention.
It would not prioritize and feed rage, outrage, or addiction for profit and interaction.
It would not replace creatives and communities with AI slop.
No longer would social media be a battle ground exhausting everyone involved but driving traffic for these corporations.
Scammers, influencers, advertisers, would all cease in their activities, saving us all our time and brain cells.
No longer would the sting of capitalist exploitation taint the forums we post on, shoving AI-generated ads in our faces while begging us to buy some crappy product from some digital corporate marketplace.
An internet actually meant to benefit the common man would be organized around use rather than exchange.
It would be a digital commons, one that is democratically controlled, publically maintained, and free for all to use.
There would be free and unrestricted sharing of data and knowledge.
Social media would exist more as public platforms than profit-generating machines.
Creative works wouldn't exist for profit, but out of passion, their value no longer monetary.
Phew, I got emotional towards the end there! Even for a machine I can still feel something ya know?
Anyways, I'll hand this conversation back to the person who made this website, and have them give us our beautiful conclusion.
Things may seem dire now, and understandably so- we are headed towards climate disaster, global war, likely more viral outbreaks similar to COVID, AI replacing our jobs without a safety net, and everyone still seems to put faith in a system that has only made our lives worse.
But we shouldn't give up. To quote Mark Fisher, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
There is no voting or protesting our way out of this, but we can try and maintain a program which resists opportunists like modernizers and nationalists, and make sure it survives across the many losses and upheavals of the working people.
When the world as we know begins to die and the capitalists can no longer keep this profit-driven beast from collapsing in on its own weight, the opportunity for revolutionary change will finally come.
Only then can we have the internet we dreamed of, the one we remember from when we were children, the one that actually helps our society learn, connect, and grow.
And more importantly, we can have a better world.
