Anonymous, Online
In the thirty years since its inception as ARPANET, the internet has become a fundamental element of human social reality across the globe. According to Statista, 5.56 billion people have access to the internet, and 5.24 billion of those people use the internet to access and contribute to social media platforms. These social networks, enabled by the widespread adoption and use of the internet, have become increasingly important alongside other software and digital tools for facilitating international communication and coordination by communists, and will likely play a vital role in reconstituting a strong international communist movement.
Since the 1990s, the internet has been steadily commercialised; while browser services and the like are no longer paid software commodities like the browsers of the late 90s and early 2000s, the passive act of users engaging with network infrastructure, social platforms, and other digital utilities have been reoriented to serve the purpose of capital’s continued self valourisation.
This process—somewhat unlike (but not fundamentally different to) more direct ‘traditional’ productive social relations—is primarily empowered by a symbiotic relationship between the old but ever-evolving advertising industry, and a growing network of data and information brokerage firms. These firms purchase user information from digital service providers who collect this data directly from user interactions with their platforms, and sell that data to advertisers, online shopping services, and social media platforms to serve user-specific content, drive individual engagement, and capture human attention.
Efforts have been made to resist the collection and exchange of this data, which at scale can be potentially identifiable down to a persons identity. These efforts have been stochastically pioneered by a disparate ‘privacy culture’ milieu. Sections of this milieu are largely depoliticised or apolitical, while overt political agitation within the privacy milieu are generally skewed toward individualist libertarianism and personal souverainism.
Activists and individuals part of this internet privacy movement have recently found themselves facing down legislative measures to implement ID or minimum age checks to social media platforms in the UK, EU, and Australia, with the explicit aim of ‘protecting children’ who are consumed by antisocial online communities and, supposedly, suffer from decreased learning and social skills as a result of unhealthy internet use.
The length and breadth of political agitation within these circles generally begins and ends at claiming the efforts are a veiled attempt to expand the capabilities of state surveillance and repression; by tying biometric or ID information to a user’s social media account, repressive state apparatuses can more easily identify dissident users and respond to them legally or extra-judicially.
Very rarely does the privacy milieu question the underlying justifications of these measures on their face; are youth incapable of using the internet without being fundamentally ‘damaged?’ Is social interaction through the internet inherently anti-social and particularly detrimental to young people?
Communists would say no; the nature of the internet under capitalism drives technology and social networking firms to craft engagement schemes that are designed to exploit elements of human behaviour, up to and including intentionally serving intellectually detritic, anti-social, and emotionally negative content. This reality is tacitly acknowledged by elements of the privacy milieu, but generally default to increased state oversight of social media firms and GDPR-style data protection legislation within the current political framework. Very rarely does the privacy milieu look to the dialectical political-economic forces inherent to capitalism that mandate this state of affairs.
For example, the observation that crushing economic pressures forces parental figures to suzerain a significant portion of their own social-reproductive labour to the computer to stimulate their child is primarily culpable for anti-social behaviour in youth, not the fundamental nature of the internet itself, is rarely combined with an analysis of the commodification of data through the surrogate of engagement causing people of all ages to develop unhealthy relationships with technology. Nor is the previous analysis of youth anti-sociability deepened to address the fundamental contradictions inherent to the family itself.
Really we must ask, why wouldn’t those concerned with privacy draw narrow conclusions? Communists aren’t making an effort to agitate on the basis of our analyses or directly intervening in privacy culture to begin with; why would someone who became privacy conscious because they were the victim of a catastrophic data breach care about a Marxist analysis of digital social relations?
As mentioned earlier, the disparate elements of the international communist movement rely on a plethora of digital utilities for organising and conducting political work. Many communist organisations use secure messaging platforms like Signal to communicate; communists in Bangladesh have made use of privacy systems like TailsOSi during the protest movement that overthrew the Hasina government last August, and many communists in countries with bloated repressive governments utilise tools like Torii daily.
Despite the reliance on these technologies and tools, the communist movement has made little to no organised effort to intervene into the disconnected ecosystem of software developers, security researchers, privacy activists, and disparate users that ensure the tools communists use still operate for our benefit.
Organised political and material intervention into privacy culture should be a medium to long-term goal of communists internationally. We must not simply agitate and proselytize to the existing privacy milieu, but also directly contribute to the maintenance of its collective infrastructure and promote new avenues for securing not just a private internet, but a socially managed and democratic internet.
We must raise the consciousness of this milieu beyond the meek individual resignation of ‘leave me alone’ to the heights of communist politics. A totalising communist internet culture that sweeps away the sectionalisation of technical development, repudiates the notion that the current state of affairs is an aberration, that shatters the division between user and developer, and raises the entirety of humanity to the position where every corner of the human community is capable of contributing to the internet of a new world.
i TailsOS or simply ‘Tails’ is an ‘amnesic’ computer operating system that runs off of a USB, and routes all incoming and outgoing traffic through the Tor network. When the USB is removed from the device displaying the operating system, all data is wiped and is unrecoverable, even through meticulous digital forensics techniques that can read deleted files on traditional computers, hence the term ‘amnesic.’
ii The Onion Router (TOR), sometimes rendered as ‘Tor’ is a routing protocol best known for facilitating connections to the ‘dark web.’ Tor distributes user connections across a series of other computers or servers called ‘nodes,’ with connections between them being heavily encrypted. If a website owner or state agency attempts to find out who a user on a specific website is, they would only see the final ‘exit’ node. This, combined with Tor’s robust encryption at each stage of the routing process, obfuscates the user’s identity as at least two other connection hops have taken place; first between the user and the initial ‘entry’ node, the entry node and a ‘middle’ node, and finally the middle node and an exit node which connects to the website, user, or service on the other end.
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