How Much Worse Could the Internet Get?

Doctorow is a leftist writer and thinker who has expressed deep skepticism about whether “capitalism has a future,” but both his diagnoses and his recommended treatments tend to circle around a rather nostalgic notion of a unionized, highly regulated, almost midcentury American capitalism, or perhaps just a pre-AfD, pre–National Rally, common market European social democracy, neither of which seems especially adequate to the present moment. He can also be frustratingly sloppy with his terms. He writes about monopoly and monopsony, words with quite specific meanings, in a breezily vernacular way (explaining in a jokey footnote that he is doing so because the alternative, more accurate terms are hard to pronounce). He refers to “efficient market hypothesis” in an otherwise quite interesting treatment of abuses of copyright and intellectual property law, but efficient-market hypothesis is not about consumer or business-to-business markets; it is, rather, a hypothesis about the nature and accuracy of securities prices in capital markets. He uses “orders of magnitude” to mean “a whole lot,” rather than a ratio scale based on multiples of 10, which is a venial sin, but a frustrating one from a usually technically fluent author.

While Doctorow’s diagnoses are damning and infuriating, his prescription is tinged with a sentimental vision of what he calls, without apparent irony, “the old, good internet.” I am a decade younger than Doctorow, but was myself a fairly early adopter, and I understand this wistfulness. I, too, made friends in early chat rooms, explored my sexuality, engaged in debate, and adopted and discarded all sorts of strange politics and intellectual currents that I never would have otherwise encountered. I miss that internet, but would I go back? Could I?

“Lowering the barriers to entry for participation in digital life is an unalloyed good,” Doctorow writes. Simply: no. If anything, the opposite. License it like a car. Or a firearm. If there is anything that the past several decades have shown us, it is that “digital life”—access to tools of information and communication more powerful and universal than any heretofore invented or available—is something that most individuals, and perhaps even the most responsible among us, simply should not possess. Its capacity to enable demagoguery, to dissolve ideology, to promote conspiracy, and to encourage violence and antisocial behavior is wild and dangerous. Are corporate algorithms alone to blame? Perhaps, for your racist uncle, for your perpetually enraged hashtag-resistance aunt, for your Fox News dad, for your MSNBC mom. But for the disaffected young man, angry and future-deprived, lurking in some strange bespoke Discord channel or creating untranslatable racial slurs with which to bait his fellow gamers? Long before Elon Musk bought Twitter, before YouTube made celebrities out of “manosphere” pickup artists, before a Facebook group convinced your neighbor that vaccines cause autism, the internet proved a fertile ground for fervid weirdos to find each other and psych up strange beliefs.