I read Lisa Nakamura’s Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet when I was an undergrad studying digital culture, almost an entire decade after the book was published. I took away two ideas that I still grapple with today to explain in my own words:
- Being online is not only gendered and racialized but an embodied experience, where identification on the screen as not a white man is a choice made visually and verbally that affects how we understand ourselves in real life.
- Two, neoliberalism in the 1990s referred not only to economics but the internet–and the fantasies around the access to that resource. The universality of the internet and the universal experience with internet are myths.
The result in my life was an addendum to my patchwork political philosophy. The internet is personal and political (feminism). There are classes of people on the internet being exploited for their invisible and surplus labor as well as their offline counterparts for being seen as cast from society (Marxism). Virtual representations of racial and gendered difference are part of the larger project to force cohesive and mainstream-coherent narratives of identities that are used for visible political stability, the optics of “diversity initiatives” and “cultural competence” as well as the maintenance of stereotypes and archetypes (queer anarchism). The culture of the internet, I realized during that month of reading, is coded with the same hegemony I challenged in my understanding of and actions in the world. My interest in the internet has been molded from what I reflected on with Digitizing Race.
Now, years later, back to studying digital culture in a college setting (at least, mentally), a new concept to refine my internet politics: “american techno-utopianism.” This term comes directly from the Wikipedia page of Nicholas Carr, one of the names we’re reading this semester, a business-literate pessimist about the internet. In a different work of his than we are reading, he condemns the general optimism particularly in Silicon Valley that continual refinement and release of new technologies will make the nation and maybe even the world a better place. This myth is so pervasive about new tech that it carries into our visions of the future–and the past. Overenthusiastic developers of driverless cars like Elon Musk do so knowing that public transit isn’t reliable right now. The Industrial Revolution and “increased” “productivity” were due in part to adapting labor technology to have interchangeable parts, allowing for mass-production, first debuted by Eli Whitney, the notorious inventor of the cotton gin. Utopia comes at a cost, making invisible systemic problems in our collective conscious by affirming that all advancement inherently maximizes liberty. America continues to use technology as a placeholder for solving its social problems.
Some of the most effective changes in our society have leaned on new tech and new media to enact social change. BLM is a great example, starting out as #BlackLivesMatter less than a decade ago if we remember. But the difference is in the political philosophy and praxis–making visible issues in the system and resistance to that way of living and dying.
Treat with trepidation any approach to the internet that meets it with mass enthusiasm–or a critique that doesn’t keep in mind the structure of the internet and how it has come to amplify social issues offline. New tech, like older tech, is more than a tool. A tool doesn’t exist as a tool without a wielder and a context, and in the case of the internet, the context is systemic in design. It looks like the master’s house has been outfitted with in-home internet access.