Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

Description

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

Ben Tarnoff is a tech worker, writer, and co-founder of Logic Magazine. He writes for the Guardian, Jacobin and New Republic. He is the author of The Bohemians and A Counterfeiter's Paradise.

Ben Tarnoff is the best kind of visionary: deeply knowledgeable, intensely practical, and utterly committed to the transformation of an abusive and corrupt status quo. We are profoundly fortunate to have his fine mind focussed on reimagining the tools that have remade our lives. An extraordinary and urgent book. -- Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough The privacy-invading, throttled, and ad-filled Internet we have is not the Internet we deserve. But as Ben Tarnoff lucidly lays out, if we want to manifest the latent democratic potential of our communications infrastructure, we will have to wrest control from the privatizers and profiteers and transform the underlying political economy. Internet for the People provides an engaging and enraging account of how the online world was hijacked by corporate interests, excavating the past so we can envision and organize for a better future. Ben Tarnoff has done a public service writing this book. Now we need to get busy building the movements and popular power that can fight for an Internet in the public interest. -- Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss it When It's Gone and The People's Platform Tarnoff offers not only an eloquent and essential guide to the history of our capitalist internet, he also charts the myriad ways in which alternatives are emerging. A key book for imagining a better digital future. -- Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism Voices from the Valley is in the fine tradition of Stud Terkel's Working. People working in technology, from a founder to a cook, speak directly to us. Ever more urgent in this digital age. -- Ellen Ullman, author of Close to the Machine (praise for Voices from the Valley For decades, Silicon Valley has told its own stories on its own terms. Voices From the Valley quietly subverts these self-made mythologies, by giving tech workers--from a cafeteria contractor to a founder who failed up--a new platform to speak for themselves. Through seven straightforward, honest, insightful, anonymous accounts, readers are offered a glimpse of the business values, politics, motivations and mundanities animating one of the twenty-first century's most opaque and influential power centers. Timely and important, and an exciting new genre of tech narrative; hopefully the first of many such chronicles to come. -- Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley (praise for Voices from the Valley) Tarnoff's book sings with the humor and expansiveness of his subjects' prose, capturing the intoxicating atmosphere of possibility that defined, for a time, America's frontier. * New Yorker (praise for The Bohemians) *