commons based peer production and so so free software wikipedia these sorts of things that this idea that it brings us back to this i've they sort of like gift economy idea like they think of a handy is the reproduction costs of digital property as opposed to like physical property the reproduction costs of it are so so low so near to zero that they're negligible which allows a sort of like a gift economy or even like you know various visions of what we might think of a cyber communism like basically the growth of commons the commenting all this sort of stuff you know that sort of model has sort of fallen away quite a lot now you know it did that's not whether way that they that most of the internet went of course wikipedia still exists etc but you could put that sort of idea of what a platform could be next to platform capitalism yeah i think that's right yeah i

mean i think the the history of free software and the history of social media platform i think it illustrates some interesting features of the relationship between capitalism and commons always and it's something i've said in stuff that i've written and it's it's derived from other people's thinking that i don't know anyone else who's formulated it in exactly those terms is that well capitalism always has to create these these contexts within which there can be a kind of maximization of collective capacities and you know it's sort of has to create commons sometimes i mean the most basic example is just creating factories which are never commons but they are sites of collective kind of massive intensification of people's collective productive capacities which then have to be disciplined into producing saleable commodities but i think under certain circumstances capitalism sort of has to enable commons or commons it has to allow commons to emerge so that it then has stuff it can commodify and can extract from and i mean open source software is an absolutely classic example of open software software becomes possible i mean you were saying this here when we were preparing the show it's not an accident that it comes out of scandinavia and california basically it comes out of context we're in which either because there's loads of venture capital money sloshing around or there's a social highly developed social democratic state there are some people you have the opportunity to just sit around and mess around with code and not even really worry whether they're going to get paid for that bit of code a lot the outcome of that is the Linux operating system which i don't know if it's true to say really it's kind of it hasn't retreated it's become so ubiquitous as an instance as the basis for institutional

computing but perhaps like the utopia thinking it went along with it as retreated put it that way because it's yeah it actually is what really widespread

well it's well i would also say that i mean a lot of software is free or it comes with hard i mean it's hardware that's not free it's hardware that's really expensive a lot of software is free compared to the prices people had to pay for it like in the 90s or it's incredibly cheap so i think it has had a really effect actually i mean the i mean really i mean the situation the situation we're in now today we're like if you want to use even a proprietary package like microsoft office not that many people have to pay for it and if you do have to pay for it it's not very much that situation i think was brought about because of the pressure from open source and free equivalents because the sort of a package like words cost the equivalent like in the late 90s it cost you the equivalent of the you know hundreds of quid today it cost lots of money that stuff if you if you weren't getting it correct so i think it has had a really big impact

richest omenos have this line that free software is free as in free speech rather than free as in free beer so it's like it's the free it's the ability to participate the ability to to use the software anyway any which way you want is the key thing rather than the the free as in you don't have to pay for it but the fact that like that that Linux is like free or incredibly cheap that will obviously have an effect you know they are the the free of a cheap

alternative loves you have an effect on the price of software as well but you're also it's also true but i was said this when we were planning the show from the point of view someone who's taken an interest in things like the free software movements is the 90s it's really disappointing and it is something i'm surprised by actually that there still isn't a really widespread widely used that domestic implementation of Linux if you're an enthusiast you can install an operating system when you're computer like Ubuntu which is the most widely used so graphical interface for Linux implementation but you still basically got an ocoding to be able to do anything with it and that's partly because it's just never had the level of institutional support development support that would have been necessary to make it really a proper marketplace rival for macos or windows and that and like i remember when you know call boom is leading with the party i was talking to people involved with policy for the party and that was something i suggested at once day it's like one of the policies should be the government will sponsor it's basically turning Ubuntu into a proper commercial proper rival for windows and macos because that could eat a quite easily happen like it wouldn't need that much investment it's never happened yeah can you

imagine that can you imagine the savings of like universities not using absolutely awful uh microsoft versions like teams

and all that stuff yeah absolutely yeah another scene that really emerged and became synonymous with the aesthetics of internet culture again around ten years ago really was vaporwave i don't even know the name of this track it's always written in japanese letters i don't know how you pronounce it but it's that it's the track that became very famous very famous on ut and it was partly because the graphics for it was so uh distinctive and it was uh the artist were calling themselves mac into octopus i think that's right i i've only ever known it as that mac in tosh plus track on ut so i don't even know what it's

proper name is

another really recent example of an internet an internet identified music scene with soundcloud rap uh most famous exponent of that would be the narrow departed xxx tantacion again as chow pointed out when we were discussing this uh quite a number of the most prominent soundcloud rappers have been accused of very serious forms of abuse we don't really want to be necessarily promoting them child suggested we play a little pump track uh we could play

his track elementary every seven brits and like the fur and gray i'll be counting bads balling like a d-way

music is really exactly it's really interesting that soundcloud rap it it's taking hip hop or rap in the direction in some ways it's been heading in ever since around 1994 and it's completely moves away from sort of the dance floor or can genuinely beat driven music towards something much more abstract something almost willing itself into a kind of internet disembodiment which is compelling if also quite depressing in many ways music

isn't part of the the vision for democratizing the space either that everybody knows

how to do coding like your torto like your torto maths right because

there's a massive you know

there's a there's a massive divide between people who can relate to the internet in that way and people

who can't relate to the internet in that way and of course the one thing that we haven't mentioned is like the reams of people that exist in britain today that actually don't have access to a smartphone and don't have access to the internet in the first place i mean i work in a local library often

and there's reams of people of all those sort of different ages who have

to come in and use a computer so that's the first thing is that

i think as a matter of in terms of policy like if we're going to say that we think some form of the internet is still going to exist in the future and there isn't going to be you know we're assuming there isn't going to be an apocalypse where there isn't an internet then

what are the policies that need to be in place for people to be able to access it whether it's kind of cheap broadband or but

then there's the problem of extractives and mobile phones right and the cost that that has like to to the planet etc so there's all sorts of like different considerations like do we want everyone to be able to code like is this a necessary skill is a language that people need to understand if we're going to democratize the space and what are kind of the goods and services because the

discussion that we've just had has been or that you guys mostly have have had has been

about like things around software that's like super interesting so for me there's going to two areas it's like what do we want in terms of software and what do we want in terms of training and what do we want in terms of like rights around that sort of stuff to have a democratized internet space

and then the second thing is what is the regulation if any if it is even possible or what is the legislation or regulation to be able to mitigate for the effects that are being instilled into the design of platforms in the first place that are creating an experience in terms of how we interface with the internet which is perpetuating addiction and you know dopamine responses and effectively are making us ill on a mass scale because it's those two things isn't it like you know

there are uses of the internet which are not about you know you want to go into the internet because you want to research something you want to go on the internet because we're recording a podcast like now you know you want to have a zoom meeting whatever

those are not the addictive spaces but the vast majority of the time that people are on the internet

it involves some kind of like you know school maybe not the vast majority but there's you know in turn there's that sphere of like addiction and illness as well i think it

probably is the vast majority actually i think yeah i think it interaction via social media platforms is probably the mass vast majority of interact i think

you're right and this is something that we didn't talk we haven't talked about which is probably for you know another episode now but

that whole the creation of like what information the understanding of what information is and the blurring of kind of like

fact and opinion and all of these things that have been perpetuated through these platforms trying to create you know spaces of you know angst and anger rather than discourse and understanding etc so there's all of those things to think about in terms of the future of the internet well i think you're completely right and i think this is one reason this is such an interesting subject is because it's one of the social phenomena or sets of social phenomena today about which you can most clearly say everything that's cool about this stuff doesn't originate with capitalism everything that's cool about this stuff originated with government sponsored blue sky research you know this is something that always shocks people when you make the point but the modern personal computer pretty much everything we recognize in it the screen the keyboard the mouse the internet connection was all developed by the late 60s and it was developed in government funded computer laboratories the good things about social interaction platforms things like forum models which i think are still really great as sort of like things you see today exemplified by discord servers for example i think it's a great way people communicating with each other lacks a lot of the drawbacks of social media with its compulsive permanent feeds that you have to keep up with or get lost in all that stuff doesn't come from capital doesn't come from institutions that were primarily oriented towards indefinite capital accumulation all the stuff we're complaining about all the stuff we don't like comes from institutions pursuing relentless endless unlimited capital accumulation and so it's quite clear that the answer to that question is you know how do we have the good stuff without the bad stuff is it has to be taken out of has to be extracted to be removed from capitalist social relations either through some program of general mutualization turning all these companies into giant co-ops or through governments constructing alternatives to them so i think there's no question you know the level of political demands and political policy we're never going to get the internet we want and the internet we deserve unless governments recognize that that should happen and that it won't happen without them acting without them intervening perhaps

i'll have a way to sort of reframe that and which brings us back to cori doctorals and certification i like to say that word one last time in stratification of the platforms argument is that what he's talking about is the thing that people actually want are things which are which are the sort of affects and the qualities of commons basically do you know i mean that's what they that's what's attractive and what's going on with the inshitification of the of the internet of the platform to get to say it one more time is basically that corruption of the commons by by capitalism and

also and also by a logic of colonialism it's something i've realized i should i should have mentioned earlier and it really lines up with the malcolm harris thesis you know one of the most interesting books on the politics of the internet and social media i've seen over the there's been published over the past few years is a book by nik caldry and uh ulysses alli mayas his co-author and it's called the cost of connection how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism and their argument is that the logic of enclosure the logic of privatization the logic of data harvesting which saturates the platform economy and the social media economy their argument is that is fundamentally a colonial logic it's a logic of appropriation and primitive accumulation and and enclosure and it's i haven't thought i hadn't thought about that properly before this moment but the malcolm harris argument that the logic of california capitalism was always a colonial logic it really syncs up with their argument in a very interesting way that

whole act like you know that the idea of a colonial logic that fits with the commons idea you know i mean that the idea of like the enclosure of the commons the idea of like terra newliss where there's nothing there so let's just go in and grab it sort of idea that basically what people are after is the commons or the things that come out of something which is which is a commons what what you need in order to have a commons that's sustained is you need people who will get to do the work of commoning and the work of commoning is like governing deciding on the rules by which that commons is maintained so that might be a way of like addressing this problem of of do we all need to become coders so well no but you know what we actually need is is uh mechanisms by which we can decide what we want from these platforms and

guide their development basically so that

will definitely involve coders but it doesn't necessarily have to involve coders uh sorry doesn't necessarily have to mean that we all are coders because we can we work in with coders who you know and have some sort of that democratic governance over these platforms you know which does lead us into things such as platform co-op alternatives to to the platform which do exist you know there are there are nascent versions of these so it's a really interesting experiment in in london called wings uh which is a food delivery co-op basically and it's those little alternative to delivery etc it can exist in in london because the margins are really high it would be quite hard to compete with delivery outside of those real core areas etc so it's got limitations on it because if this is something as self-generating sort of co-op although they are working uh with the local council on that so because the big problem of course is you know with platform co-ops is how do you get the kinds of capital the kinds of of of of money to compete with the big platforms who are prepared to operate at a loss

a lot of the internet music we've been playing to me is yeah it sounds like laptop music and it kind of lacks any quite consciously lacks any connection to an organic embodied community and this is something this isn't just an old person talking like a lot of my music students and they're really 20 to make the same comment about a lot of this kind of music but one artist who i think has managed to integrate some of the sonic distinct sonicly distinctive qualities of of a lot of internet era music with a more kind of organically embodied and effectively compelling sound is the british producer vocalist artist fk twigs although i think she's based in the states now you know i think is really one to me is really one of the artists who makes me feel some sense of hope for contemporary experimental pop music in various forms so that we can have a track like f from akie twigs most recent album this

track would be ride the drug really want to kiss me kiss me what do we

think are some positive developments in recent years if anything about because it seems to me that one of the things that's happened in the past couple of years with the relative decline of the social media platform the return to newsletter yeah for example the acfm email newsletter

that sounds interesting how do you subscribe to that again you

go on the website i think and i'm sure there'll be a link in the podcast but yes sub stack for example is an example of the email coming back as a technology and i mentioned discord already in passing the popularity of discord service i think is because they're the latest iteration of the forum as a social technology and forums have an honorable history game about decades and forums have real advantages over social media feeds because they because the whole point of them is they archive chat they archive threads so you don't have you can go look at it whenever you want you don't have to be constantly checking to see if you've missed something or to keep up with something so all forums i think are are fantastic technology for facilitating various kinds of long-term group discussions and you know discord servers which were initially just for people to play games together i think have become really popular because they are the latest implementation of that basic forum technology so i think we have been seeing a little bit of a retreat from the more toxic forms of platform in the form of things like twitter and you know facebook with their relentlessly addictive compulsive feeds back into forms of communication which let people decide when they want to engage how much they want to engage and i think that does indicate that you know there is still a degree progressive potential although like i would point out

that like what what's missing from that is like the public sphere element yeah some sort of replication of the public sphere element and if you were going to talk about about forums which were like in the public sphere you'd probably point to read it as like this absolute classic example you know which is in fact very very useful finding out how to do things and these sorts of things but that's itself has just gone through a process of minor gentrification and in fact it you know because they they changed the way in which the the forums operate and that provoked a moderator strike actually people were refusing people who moderated really good really really really popular reddit said that they would refuse to put up any new content until reddit changed its policy so i think that's the problem that's the thing that's missing whereas you know i do think it's really useful this idea like people are going back to newsletters etc and because you can have some sort of control you have direct control over who gets those who gets that information whereas you don't have that on face but you don't have that on twitter anymore

so that's really destroyed your nice ending you're positive what do you think in an idea well the things that that matter to me with the internet are probably about those there's two things the questions are for me what are the sorts of platforms and what are the sorts of spaces of interactions that would

a help humans create strong and sustain strong bonds in you

know whether mediated online or in real

life and what helps

humans see themselves as agents of change so that might sound a bit abstract but i think you know it's basically the opposite of scroll

mania and getting lost in indefinite

threads and feeling like you need to constantly be updating things and the kind of like cheap cheap performance interactions so i think you

know like email lists and newsletters and and and you know that that that way of like you mentioned Jeremy haven't been able to archive threads and go back and think about it but also to be able to like contact people individually and have some sort of forum for like having a discussion about it

is quite good so i think like you know the development and popularity of things like zoom during the pandemic were actually really important for people to be able to keep in touch i don't think i don't think i want to see a world where relationships are mediated entirely online i think human beings need uh iRL and they need touch and they need their other senses to be stimulated in terms of being healthy and i think that has ramifications for you know

like how we

we are able to develop and see ourselves as political actors so i don't have quite have a vision but i know something that's better than you know in shittified platforms when i see it and i think you know a newsletter is probably a good place to to start and forums some sort form of genuine space for discussion