The Internet as an Instrument of Class Struggle

Looking at the present state of the Internet (and primarily the World Wide Web as its popular façade, one cannot stop wondering why so powerful means of communication, that could accumulate knowledge for the benefit of the humanity as a whole, and of every individual, - why are they so wastefully used for annoying advertising, primitive chat, or silly entertainment? Why is it so difficult to find a free piece of information on a particular topic, so that one needs to sort out tons of junk to discover a couple of sites of interest?

The typical answer is that people are free to develop the Internet as they like, and if they want all that junk up there, they'll just put it there, and nobody should interfere with their freely expressing their free will. The demand determines the offer, and if something is well sold, it will be produced by somebody. Market economy, it's basic.

But are the people as free on the Web as they are pictured to be? And are the consumers as stupid as the apologists of capitalism present them?

If I want to live a world without too much noise, can I get it? If I want no advertising, no buy-and-sell, no lie, no gossip, no disclosure of one's private life, no perversions, no violence, no barriers, no visas, no politics... - can I get it? If I only want to never think about gaining my life, rather concentrating on unfolding my creativity and contributing to the development of the humanity - can I? If I want free access to all the achievements of culture, with no barriers of intellectual or other property rights - can I get it?

No, I cannot have what I want. The laws of capitalism won't allow me that. Instead, they'll make me consume what I don't need, and live in the ugly world built by those with money. They'll control my thoughts so that I'd think about survival here and now, and forget any dreams about the future. The capital needs slaves, and slaves are not allowed to think much. And the slaves must therefore be deprived of access to any important information, and ideally of the very ability to seek for it.

Luckily, the laws of the market are not the only economic laws, and there is a law of the development of productive forces, which demands that the workers' education should correspond to the technologies they use. People must know at least something to maintain the well-being of those at power.

While there is no way to forbid knowledge at all, capitalists do all they can to restrict access to knowledge, to tame it and present in sterilized forms. There are a few standard tricks used to divide knowledge in small isolated portions and thus prevent the chain reaction in mass education:

1. Confidentiality - just declare that some piece of information is classified and protect it with encoding on several levels; it does not matter, whether it comes under the guise of care for national security, or protecting private business secrets.

2. Properietary data - the author has the copyright, this is one of the biggest lies of bourgeois propaganda. Nobody can have any exclusive right for anything, since any product is a product of the society as a whole, rather than a single person or a narrow group. Making knowledge a property is absurd, and it is only needed to hide it from those who need it most of all.

3. Dilution in noise - if useful information occupies only a small portion of the Web (say, less than 0.01%), there is little chance that it will be found; it is sufficient to advertise the junk sites on the wide scale, to make any query return thousands of junk pages and bury useful content in that dirty flood.

4. Manipulating attention - the public can be manipulated to be interested in only what is of no importance, and forget about the fundamental problems of the present. Social pressure makes people go in for sports, all sorts of entertainment, mystical tales etc. Numerous sites devoted to such topics attract the visitors leaving them no time for discovering anything else.

5. Mass propaganda - online news, analytical articles, or moderated discussion clubs provide the examples of instruments used to plant the official view and suppress the opposition. There are also numerous "scientific" or "philosophical" sites that promote the ideology of the ruling classes, and many sites dealing with the arts are designed the way preventing any queer idea to break through.

6. Visibility restrictions - though many companies provide free hosting for personal sites, the usage of such sites is often very restrictive. Free sites do not offer much disk space, they may have restrictive procedures for updating content, traffic is usually limited to 3-10Gbytes per month, etc. Moreover, the providers gradually change the rules, leaving less options for the holders of free sites, and demanding payment for what was free before. Those who cannot pay are bound to move their files to another host, which makes them less accessible.

7. Mutability - the Internet is never stable in no its part. Everything changes, and no Web address can be safe enough to always lead to the same portion of information. This makes digging for knowledge extremely difficult, since one cannot construct an individualized environment and share it with other people, thus eliminating noise in this particular sub-Web. When a domains is sold to a different holder, all the former content is lost, and one has to seek for the mirror sites (which often do not exist). This helps the ruling classes to keep a high level of ignorance and destroy any Internet communities that might be dangerous.

The efficiency of these mechanisms is significantly enhanced by their ability to work in the unconscious background and support themselves in a kind of homeostasis. A person educated in the controlled environment will act according to the standards of that environment, without even noticing the social programming involved.

However, the objective laws of economic development demand more online collaboration and make computer companies produce the tools that could overcome the chaotic structure of the Internet and provide more data accessibility. Probably, under some different socioeconomic conditions, the Internet will be what it should really be - a mechanism of knowledge integration and propagation, with all the positive content preserved and the commercial noise driven out. The Web will accumulate ideas and give people convenient tools to manage them, producing more knowledge without deleting the past.