Contemporary Virtual Class by disregarding bleak techno-dystopian views must have missed quite a big chunk of our written and cinematographic cultural background like growing in an atomic shelter for several decades and then suddenly discovering the Internet…

(Based on a forum argument against Internet panegyrics, December 2017 on The Conversation)

People with a background in information technology are well aware that politicians are in our time obsolete as far as democratic decision-making is concerned. We know that infrastructure exists now. Consensus is just as simple as the press of the button associated with a unique identifier (IP address). Online democracy can be implemented shortly by leaving only strictly limited executive power to politicians. On the other hand, we equally know that we are far from online democracy since there is no political will to implement it.

Virtual Class and knowledge power

Implementing Internet democracy would mean that political class would lose their power. All political donations would likely disappear overnight since there would be no reason for lobbying. Journalists would gain social status since the power of social interpretation would increase in significance. People might again be happy to pay for information if it would allow more informed decisions. This was promised by techno-utopian prophets of Silicon Walley; the argument was that the system based on the global network would enforce the will of the people and disempower oligopolies.

Now, this is where the problem is… We know that in our time and our democracies, it is not people who rule national states but corporations who control politicians. We just vote for politicians and give them the legitimacy to do what corporations expect them to do: to maintain the political status quo and the upward direction of the flow of capital. We can not imagine these corporations to be keen to implement something that might be against their interests, such as the will of the people. Now, we are also aware of the current global takeover of the Internet. The same corporations which habitually buy our politicians are gaining control of our Internet sources of information…

The idea that the public will be able to choose information from the common pool is also a concept promised to us by techno-utopian prophets. We can certainly agree that in human communication information becomes an information when it is understood… There is no information in the dead data… Dead data is not knowledge since only comprehension determines if something is information. It follows that one needs to know to be able to distinguish knowledge from dead data… It is clear that, subsequently, the burning question of our time is: who is controlling the access to knowledge in society and on the Internet?

The sea of dead data is not a sea of knowledge as some would want us to believe. Billions of Web pages without sense are nothing but dead parrots; they are clogging the space of representable. The search engines are supposed to be utopian algorithms promised by data class to provide permanent access to omnipresent knowledge. Yet this access has a gate keeper and a key holder who do not share our interests. It happens that the doors to the promised ultimate knowledge pool are controlled by the same big brother who pays our politicians and wants to keep the flow of capital in a particular direction far from national interests, far from people who enjoy the temporary illusions of Internet empowerment.

We can agree that, at this point, smart people are skipping the first pages of Google results for various reasons. How many pages will we have to skip soon? Who will have enough money to pay internet trolls to shape our truths if the current trend of capital flows continues? Who will feed bias and alternative truths with the argument that this is what you wanted, what you searched, what you asked for? Soon we won't be able to speak in terms of We, the public as it becomes clear that there are many different publics with different interests and different little alternative truths. Profit will determine the extent and forms of the truth commodity and ensure that it continues to flow in the same direction.

Sometime in the future, when we decide to write something important, a bitter truth, significant, something deep that we should all know about, there will be no coherent answers, but many voices in chorus: that's what you think, mate...

Whims of the Internet Gods and techno-optimism

According to a recent study of social mobility, the average optimist in the US estimates the earnings ratio of the average John to the average CEO as 30 to one. The reality is that the ratio is 354 to one. Also, the truth is that the Walton family owns more wealth than 42 per cent of Americans. Currently, 1 per cent of the world's population owns more than 50 per cent of the world's wealth.

You can always google future predictions. However, optimists rarely google such problems because they are usually unaware of the significance of such data. The results generally don't seem so clear if one can't underline the potential information between the dead data. The trend is that the search engine results will be less and less clear due to the lack of knowledge necessary to create the information.

The current ruling system, protected by global surveillance technology and draconian Patriot Acts, intends to disable any possibility of political change directed against the top few. We live in a world ruled by an oligarchy. It is not just some dark vision of a potential future. That is our present.

Regarding the Internet, hypertext and transparency, I have been following the issues for a long time. I read Vennevar Bush, Theodore Holm Nelson, and Phillip K. Dick, and I was one of the many young idealists who argued that information wanted to be free. That was before the people who desired to be wired hijacked the proverb. I witnessed an event when a reporter on Channel 9 News stated that NASA had launched the Hubble Space Telescope, a device with the main purpose of monitoring small aircraft above the Earth's surface. It was a significant moment in the history of fake news, foreshadowing the future lack of mainstream media credibility and its fading into social irrelevance.

I lived in a time when techno prophets promised a future resurrection, the ability to upload from the graveyard directly to computers and live forever. I remember someone seriously claiming that his thermometer was alive. To remind you, this was years before the Patriot Act and years before the calculated collateral damages exposed the cynical disregard for human life by our psychopathic institutions as revealed by WikiLeaks.

When Hillary claimed that The Satanic Verses was written by Julian Assange, our journalists were forced to back it up. Let's remember the three wise monkeys presented to us by a TV station, individuals who until recently were called TV personalities called themselves journalists and denied the same status to Julian Assange. Back then, many people in the Australian media openly appeared as wise monkeys instead of journalists. I guess out of love for work and status instead of love for common interest and truth. Many will not forget.

No, I'm not talking about some distant future. I'm talking about our time. Acting like a drone, if not a psychopath, is a welcome attitude in the corporate world. Dehumanized, redundant people are the reason for the disappearance of the middle class. Both are consequences of increasing profits. Pure pragmatism before humanity is a subsequent principle of politics, just like the collapse of the concept of knowledge into information. Or from art to entertainment. The algorithm is often interpreted as ideal communication - orders instead of negotiations. The middle class was pushed into insignificance before its disappearance. And the resulting confused precariat votes for Brexit and Trump.

After more than 20 years of witnessing the future, I can say that Virilio, Kroker/Weinstein, David Rokeby and Baudrillard were right when they pointed to Bentham's Panopticon, Orwell's Big Brother and Gibson's Neuromancer as possible futures. They were certainly more right than the panegyrics of the Internet virtual class gathered around the magazine Wired at the end of the last century.

The modern virtual class, ignoring the dreary techno-dystopian views, must have missed quite a large part of our written and cinematographic cultural background, lived in an atomic shelter for several decades and then suddenly discovered the Internet...

Guess what? I still consider myself to be an optimist. I believe in network subversion and new strategies of resistance. I am just not happy rereading panegyrics to technology. Today’s data analysts and Internet enthusiasts, just like porn fans stuck to their monitors, remind me of settings of Pavlov’s classical conditioning experiments (you can Google the image with a poor salivating dog ). Regarding the reading of technology, it is wise to recognise that the principle of change has precedence over the principle of advancement. Or, as Noam Chomsky has mentioned, Pentagon is not going to give people as a gift a technique for free communication which undermines the major media.