Comrades,
A few thoughts on Amelia Davenport and Renato Flores’ The Platform is the Message.
I think the comrades are on the right track in their analysis of social media. They correctly steer between contemporary liberal hysteria about its malign effects, and the same liberals’ absurd over-enthusiasm for these platforms which obtained ten years ago. They are also right to analyse media in terms of their political economy.
There are a couple of striking omissions in their analysis, however. The first has to do with working class media. There is discussion of sea shanties, blues and political fiction, but oddly no discussion at all of the things we would more ‘obviously’ put under that heading: the newspapers, journals and (today) websites, podcasts and so on associated in one way or another with the socialist and labour movements. The history here is quite germane to some of their other concerns (for example, part of the democratic centralism discussion in the pre-war German socialist movement concerns how accountable papers must be to the party; whether, say, Vorwärts could call itself a party paper while simultaneously acting as a mouthpiece for the revisionist minority).
An important effect of social media platforms today is, if you will, the real subsumption of ‘legacy media’ to social media, by which I mean the form of the newspaper article, the film and so on gets shoved into the Procrustean bed of the social platforms. This phenomenon is now decades-old, starting with SEO, and going through clickbait stylistic forms, the use of short, context-free video clips and so on. Everyone from the New York Times to the average Trot paper gets sucked into this. Though the Times and other bourgeois ‘legacy’ outlets still largely drive the actual news agenda, they must increasingly do so on terms dictated by the platforms.
And the same is true of left media, or so it seems to me. In Britain, for example, the Corbyn movement threw up a number of prominent websites which aimed to counter the lies of the mainstream media – The Canary, Skwawkbox and so on – but they all exhibited the same defects, being entirely dependent on the patronage of the leaders’ office cliques and, by extension, the individual celebrity of their patrons. The result was (frequently dishonest) clickbait articles to boost their particular allies in the court of King Jeremy, and now impotent squabbles in the ruins. What we didn’t get was a party media in the true sense, something that could serve as a platform or set of platforms for true mass decision-making (the left-Labour project of striking grand bargains with the centre, of course, prevents any such platform emerging by definition). Our interactions with the extant social media platforms must, surely, point however weakly towards the social media platforms of our own we need.
Secondly: the authors bracket the question of a “communist programme for the social industry”, but perhaps shouldn’t. The question as to whether such a thing exists is a real one. I hope we would agree that there is no such thing as “a communist programme for the atomic weapons industry”, or at least only a purely negative programme (the industry should cease to exist and its products be safely destroyed as promptly as possible). It is clear that the internet represents great technological progress over previous information infrastructure, but it is not clear that – say – Facebook represents progress over the thousands of small forum communities that some of us remember from the early 2000s and before. One should not over-romanticise such things, of course, but I would argue that there is no economy of scale in actual social interaction, which is to say, our social lives are not improved by being able to insult complete strangers on Twitter, or happening to use the same Facebook as two billion others with whom we have effectively zero social intercourse. Having one giant social network with everyone on it is not an advance on having an ecosystem of more authentically social platforms (as even the old forum culture was), any more than it is progress to replace every pub in the world with one single Wetherspoons the size of the great Eurasian steppe (or, to return to our earlier analogy, a larger-yield thermonuclear device represents ‘progress’ over a smaller-yield one).
The economy of scale that benefits Facebook is in something else – advertising, perhaps the worst defect of capitalist culture; our immediate demands for ‘the social industry’ must surely include severing it entirely from advertising revenue, which will in fact destroy the industry as it exists at a stroke. The need for an escape from the behaviourist nightmare-world of ad-funded social platforms is one more reason why we need an alternative media ecosystem, with its own social media platforms, operated on co-operative socialist principles, ASAP.
Comradely,
Paul Demarty (CPGB)
