It was not unusual in 2016 to hear a politician or reporter declare Detroit a “failed city.” And from the outside looking in, it seemed that everyone had emigrated long ago. But that wasn’t the case; many stayed, including the “digital stewards” of the Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP).
In a world, where a “good internet connection is a necessity,” 38% of homes in Detroit have none. But since 2016, the DCTP has provided hundreds of Detroit residents with a fast, reliable, and secure internet connection.
“Detroiters who would otherwise be too poor to afford internet service can look up bus schedules and video-chat with their grandchildren. They have access to a resource they need in order to exercise meaningful control of their lives,” Ben Tarnoff, the co-founder of Logic Magazine, writes in his important new book Internet For The People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, which comes on June 14th. The example of Detroit lives well beyond its city limits. It provides a clear and well-imagined possibility of an “internet for the people.”
Tarnoff draws on a bounty of contemporary left-wing thinking — particularly around labor organizing, police and prison abolition, and municipal socialism. He engages with friends and colleagues, like Astra Taylor (The People's Platform), Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism), Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression), and Richard Seymour (The Twittering Machine).
Internet For The People is a succinct introduction to the brokenness of the internet and the plethora of creative solutions aimed at fixing (or better, reimagining) it. Tarnoff’s contribution lies in bringing these vast and diverse materials together — while elucidating the early history of the internet.
He takes readers to the very bottom of the ocean, where fiber optic cables hang out with eels and other life forms to “carry beams of light…the bits of data [which] are Facebook friends requests and financial trades. Twitch streams and supply chain analytics.” These cables were once in the public domain, albeit for “the U.S. military to help its assets adhere into a more effective war-making machine.”
“In the 1970s, the government invented the universal language of the internet…Thanks to this avalanche of public cash, the internet became widely available to American researchers by the end of the 1980s,” he writes. Privatization wasn’t an inevitable fact of online life — but in the 90s, through a series of “bipartisan” policies, it happened.
The internet was now in the parasitic hands of companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. They would shape how we access, engage, and encounter other human beings. “As privatization ascended from the basement of the internet into its upper floors, from the pipes to the so-called platforms, it programmed the profit motive into the network,” Tarnoff notes.
The issues identified by Tarnoff, because of privatization, are not far and few: “oppression became algorithmic,” privacy became next to none, and connection speeds weakened.
A public and democratic internet is still on the table. “Up the stack,” Tarnoff advocates for de-privatization and “new architectures.” Because “to remake the internet, we will have to remake everything else.” Undoubtedly, a reorganization of the internet would better our social relations. “A network that brings people into new relationships of trust and support and mutual concern, forged in the course of caring for collective infrastructure and caring for one another,” he writes.