Towards the Post-Naive Internet

let's. get. into it.

In the summer of 2022, I wrote:

If you and your community have not invested serious energy taking advantage of the internet revolution -- if you do not have a concrete set of norms, practices and institutions designed to allow you to use the internet without the internet using you -- you are destined to lose. In fact, you’re not even trying to win.

The consequences of this decision are becoming increasingly obvious. We’ve past peak social media; everything is becoming slop, gambling, addiction. The open web is increasingly a dead internet, inhabited by bots or — much worse — humans who have been conditioned into behaving like bots. And that’s just what we can see. The really degrading stuff is happening in the privacy of LLM-backed chat interfaces, where humans can spiral into insanity without even a minimal tether to social reality.

As Flusser anticipates, in Post-History: “what we dread is the inexorable progress of culture. Today, to engage oneself with freedom, and more radically, to engage oneself in the survival of the human species on the face of the Earth, implies strategieas in order to delay progress. This reaction is today the only dignified one.” We can now observe, in the brutal progress towards a meaningless internet, the necessity of Heidegger’s step-back, of the refusal to take things as they are.

The upside is that there have been some communities, of technologists and artists, thinking seriously about the problem of how to use the web for their own ends. The Mozilla Foundation recently published a visual essay by Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz about The Post-Naive Internet, where we’re finally moving past the failed idealism of John Perry Barlow and the associated California Ideology.

The tech companies that own the major platforms have become explicitly political actors, abandoning the liberatarian pretense of value neutrality and free speech; the US, China and other nation-states are engaging ever-more-explicitly in Cold War 2, where digital soveriegnty and a weaponized world economy are the battlefield. Power, predictably, is being brought to bear.

In contrast to the curdled ideals of universalism, The Post-Naive Internet is local, collective, community-owned: “Instead of fighting for grand alternatives like the free and open internet for everyone, the post-naive generation builds digital infrastructure primarily for their communities and their needs.” The universal, as Laclau says, has no content of its own, but can only emerge from the particular through a political process of contestation. This is the problem with abstract universalist dreams, and why I think the post-naive, prefigurative approach to building a new internet is the best way forward.

Here’s their map:

I’m encouraged personal because the map demonstrates a number of intersections with my own internet-intellectual trajectory in ways that go beyond mere coincidence; I’m hoping that the density of interconnections here is leading towards as a new canon, or at least a new intellectual movement, a new model. So let me explain how a few of these things work, and why you should be paying attention.

I started connecting with these online communities during the pandemic, largely because I was dissatisfied with the way in which the quantititative political science literature was approaching the study of social media and particulary emerging, video-based platforms. We were applying old models to new phenomena for the purpose of testing if the old models still held. For sociological reasons (the people who are experts in the old models are now senior academics), the answer tended to be yes. But regardless of the answer, this approach has things backwards: we should be trying to understand the new phenomena, which the online world produces at an amazing clip. In the deepening political-epistemic crisis of Trump’s re-election and the mask-off nature of big tech, the remaining mainstream media has finally started catching on.

A few weeks ago, for example, The New Yorker released an article about the podcaster, artist and internet research Joshua Citarella, arguing for the value of Citarella’s twin projects of investigating youth radicalization online and in building a broader coalition of left-leaning media figures in contrast to the purity politics of the past decade

I’ve been assigning Citarella’s book in my PhD seminar on media and politics since the spring of 2021.¹ It’s a fantastic example of the qualitative descriptive work being done by internet-native non-academics, observing important emerging phenomena which academia is too slow and still too internet-naive to grasp, the kind of thing that I argued in Deepfakes and Thirst Traps that we desperately need more of.

I came to Citarella’s work through Do Not Research, a platform for writing, visual art, internet culture research which he was instrumental in founding. Do Not Research started as a Discord server in 2020, which I joined later that year. They also publish amazing art/culture/theory pieces on their website, (the design of the original is incredible, but they’ve since mostly moved to Substack) including a recent profile of New Models.

New Models is the “post-naive” internet space I’ve spent the most time engaging with, and a crucial part of my intellectual development over the past five years. The Discord community is vibrant, serious, engaging — especially during the height of the pandemic, when Twitter was melting down, having access to an online community free of ads, engagement-bait and crazy people was invaluable.

The first article New Models posted on their feed was James Bridle’s self-published text from 2017, “Something is Wrong on the Internet.” This text also features prominently in my explanation of the feedback loops at the heart of the YouTube Apparatus, in my last book. This mechanism is elaborated in much more detail by Flusser in Communicology, as I attempt to explain in this beautiful, News Model-produced video lecture, which was co-funded by Citarella and Do Not Research:

The basic model of New Models and many other relevant post-naive internet institutions is that of the dark forest. The metaphor comes from Cixin Liu’s sci-fi trilogy, and is explicated in The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, published by Metalabel, another crucial node in this ecosystem. The key is to balance discoverability with the health of the internal community. Crypto enthusiasts did a lot of blue-sky thinking on this problem, but as is usually the case, there’s a simpler solution that doesn’t require the blockchain: have some light-leak signal in order to recruit new members (generally, a podcast), and then have a paywalled, moderated internal forum (generally, Discord) for discussion and community.

The original sin of the internet, as Ethan Zuckerman famously wrote in 2014, was having it funded by advertisements. This was downstream of the technical decision not to build micro-payments into the structure of the web — this allowed it grow, to progress much faster, but we now see what all that progress has gotten us. The current technical systems for payments and distribution are imperfect; here, crypto might one day prove genuinely useful. But at the end of the day, we have to pay something for the internet to work.

This, by the way, is the business model of Substack. An incredible analysis by Andrew Thompson in Components (itself a post-naive internet institution), suggests that Substack’s payment-based approach has managed to realize (at least for now) the long tail of paid internet content. In contrast to the winner-take-all nature of ad-driven platforms, we see a much more even distribution of platform revenue across producers of different levels of popularity.

I’m encouraged by this, and also to notice so many more of my colleagues joining Substack recently. It’s not the silver-bullet solution to the decaying web, but it fits into the post-naive internet ecosystem much more naturally than does, say, Elon Musk’s platform, or Sam Altman’s platform, or Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms.

But also — subscribe to New Models, subscribe to Do Not research, seek out or build your own post-naive internet spaces. This is the only way to even be trying to win.

To close, here’s a rare photo of Stafford Beer that the New Models crew found to accompany my most recent appearance on their podcast; here’s the teaser link, subscribe to hear the whole thing. It gets weird.

1. Also vindicated from this syllabus is Matt Hindman’s work on the centralizing tendencies of the internet. In Henry Farrell’s keynote speech in Naples, he mentioned the overwhelming importance of Ezra Klein in particular in setting the agenda for the center-left establishment when it comes to AI, tech regulation etc. Not “podcasts,” not the New York Times; just Ezra Klein. Nothing personal, but this is apocalyptically bad for the media ecosystem.