A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false…
The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!
It's really so much more than that, though. Besides, the person I'm responding to said that technology hadn't advanced since the 1980s, and that's just not true.
I mean, there's more to it in that - as u/GenXen quoted - the internet has primarily brought about new ways of exerting social control, surveillance, marketing, financialization, and admin.
We all spend increasing amounts of time punching passwords into our phones to manage bank and credit accounts and learning how to perform jobs once performed by travel agents, brokers, and accountants
Graeber isn't saying that the internet isn't a technology that's developed, he's saying that it's been developed in forms that work against revolutionary or poetic activity. That's, like, the whole thesis. Unless you're suggesting that social media is actually good.
It's really so much more than that, though. Besides, the person I'm responding to said that technology hadn't advanced since the 1980s, and that's just not true.
I mean, there's more to it in that - as u/GenXen quoted - the internet has primarily brought about new ways of exerting social control, surveillance, marketing, financialization, and admin.
Graeber isn't saying that the internet isn't a technology that's developed, he's saying that it's been developed in forms that work against revolutionary or poetic activity. That's, like, the whole thesis. Unless you're suggesting that social media is actually good.
I'm not arguing with Graeber, I'm arguing with OP.
This is a boomer-tier understanding of the internet and technology lol