Ben Tarnoff untangles the histories and complex architectures of the modern internet

Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians. He’s the co-founder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in a lot of different places, mostly left publications like The Guardian and Jacobin. His most recent piece of writing, and the focus of this conversation, is a book called Internet for the People. It’s an incredibly engaging study of how the modern internet came to be, why it's fundamentally broken, and what steps we can take to make it less broken. I asked Ben about the approach he took to writing Internet for the People because I was really impressed with how he was able to weave metaphors in with accessible language to give folks a much deeper understanding of “the stack,” as it’s called: or the massively complex architecture of the modern internet. One of my favourite lines from the book comes from his description of how the internet is “too sprawling to squeeze into a single frame,” and “too big to see without a metaphor.” That just makes intuitive sense, but it also becomes a sort of method for Tarnoff, as he works to explain the interlocking systems that create the conditions for living life today in a way that is increasingly saturated by internet technologies. His argument in the book is both easy to grasp and hard to pin down: when it comes to internet access, he makes it clear that increasing access by wresting the power away from large telecom companies that pioneered the privatization of the net isn’t just important in terms of protecting consumers from being gouged by ISPs, it is actually—in the era of more and more virtual activity—a basic condition of democratic decision-making and participation. One of the threats that your average internet user might be able to identify, when it comes to the links between online life and a healthy democracy, is the problem of “filter bubbles.” This is another area where Ben’s robust ability to synthesize a lot of research on the subject gets combined with his capacity to break things down: he says that this idea of “filter bubbles” basically brainwashing people is not just unfair, it’s inaccurate. We talk about some of the biggest companies in tech: touching on Zuckerberg’s empire, the power of Amazon and Uber, and how these companies are all sitting on a proprietary accumulation of data that makes them some of the most supremely valued corporations in history. What does it mean, Tarnoff asks, that data itself has become this valuable? The book answers that question in easy-to-parse ways, but the implications are still only now being worked through: I think it’s particularly important to think about his claim that, in fact, companies like Uber are allowed to lose money in part because of the aura around them as a “novel corporate form,” and because of the data they collect and control. At the end of the conversation Ben describes some of the places that he derives hope from, and you can read more about that by looking at his long piece at Logic magazine titled “The Making of a Tech Worker” movement (https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/). There is a redefinition of labour in tech coming—in an industry that doesn’t like to call what happens in it work, and which nonetheless relies on the skills and time and commitment of a vast cross-section of people from different classes and sectors. There is, he suggests, also a radical break on its way: a breaking away from the sort of bourgeois identification that might be a barrier to organizing across classes in the tech sector. And this is happening at the same time that a broader “techlash” is figuring the founders of these companies—long deified as genuines—as effectively the antagonists in a struggle for a more free, fair and democratized access to the power of technology in the present moment.