“The early internet was a capitalism-free zone… a network without hierarchy, it relied on horizontal decision-making and mutual gift exchange, not market exchanges.”

As someone who grew up in the 00’s I have truly been feeling so nostalgic for the early internet lately 😭 like, it used to just be a fun place full of wacky stuff that people posted for no other purpose than connecting with other people. And now it is a fully monetized hellscape with like three websites on it 😭

I think this is the first nonfiction work of this variety that I've read that actually makes an effort to put forth a new framework in some significant amount of detail (to be fair, I haven't read that many works). Even if it isn't a perfect system that he's describing, I really appreciate that it exists at all, showing that thinking outside of capitalist realism can be done.

The ideas he's proposing sound a bit simplistic and I do have some more questions about the tax system, but it's interesting to consider.

Technofeudalism has made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that used to provide the liberal individual with a refuge from the market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprised of choices as expressed by clicks which its algorithms are able to manipulate. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of being self-possessed. It has diminished our capacity to focus by co-opting our attention. We have not become weak willed. No, our focus has been stolen.

It hurts my heart to see this spelled out so plainly. I hate watching what social media conglomerates have done to people. The part about "be yourself and be good at it" was really jarring. As a specific example, it makes me think of when I see people asking "what's my aesthetic?" As if every piece of yourself needs to be able to be accompanied by a hashtag for branding purposes. You need to be identifiable, both to find an audience and to manufacture your online identity, and for the algorithm to sell you whatever it is you need to meet your aesthetic goals. It's like we always have to be on, always have to be performing for an audience that could be watching.

This also calls to mind a thread I saw in the PB club forum about struggling to focus. I saw a few others who described or empathized with the same experience I've had - that scrolling not only seems to diminish our attention spans, but when we do try to focus on something, our brains feel like mush after the fact. Even after physically leaving the technological "fiefdoms", I struggle to engage with other media or activities in a substantive and satisfactory way.