SchITTIFICATION

What’s this scrap of paper that’s found it’s way into your hand? A radical pamphlet? Have you stumbled into a cosplay of the ’avin it 90s? Actually, look around you, the answer’s yes.

To explain this apparent time-warp, let’s start by rewinding back just a decade ago to when we watched – to our chagrin – as the independent activist media which we’d squandered our youths building up (notably Indymedia, and others including ourselves) were deserted en-masse for corporate social media platforms (See the final SchNEWS article we published in 2014 for a flavour of this: https://schnews.org/stories/AND-FINALLY.htm).

The pioneering proto-social-media platform of Indymedia – specifically designed by and for hackers and activists to publish multimedia material instantly with anonymity – was gazumped by corporate behemoths such as Facebook, which always had surveillance, metadata analysis and control-by-algorithm baked into them.

Fast-forward to today and where are we now? Author Cory Doctorow calls it ‘shittification’. The ‘walled-gardens’ – which conspired to carve the internet up amongst a handful of tech giants – are now overgrown with weeds and parasites. New platforms will come and go, but this will keep happening. The monetisation always at the core of them will inevitably impose itself, and the hidden forces of algorithms, advertising money, and the agendas of plutocrats will increasingly distort and skewer search-results and feeds – and in turn people’s decision-making and even political beliefs. And the AI clusterf*ck has only just begun.

And then there’s the surveillance side of it: Protests can explode using social media, but afterwards, authorities can wreak retribution and round up dissidents by analysing their social media activity.

The corporate enclosures of the internet were never the place to network and disseminate oppositional politics.

So – this piece of paper – yep it’s wilfully old-school: it’s putting information in your hand in that time-honoured way, and there isn’t a corporate server somewhere logging which articles you clicked on, and profiling you accordingly.

And when you’re done you can make a hat out of it – try that with TwatterX.