Nature
Some believe naturalness means purity and goodness. But in nature, there exists various kinds of parasites. Their meagre existence is optimized for the production of their useless species. They are at best, completely pointless, and an ecological danger at worst. But their way of life succeeds in ensuring the survival of the species as a whole. Parasites will almost always emerge in nature, but we don’t believe they should be a part of it, as natural as they are.
The Internet
There is an essential fact about computers and networks, in which everything about the power of the Internet lies. I’ll call it the Information Principle, or just the Principle in this piece. It is such:
An infrastructure of fully connected computers permits a system where — beyond the initial expenditure — the cost of distributing information is, in all kinds, very close to zero.
This is interesting because this has never been true in the past. No matter how civilizations advanced, the distribution of information was always difficult and costly. This is important because distribution of information can include the preservation of information, i.e copying, creating redundancy. Part of the decline of Rome, besides many other factors, was a failure to preserve the working knowledge of their technology.
The past five decades saw the creation of a global inter-network (or Internet) of computers. With almost everyone connected, anyone can distribute information to anyone else. Even if you don’t have home Internet, which is a vanishing occurrence, you can probably access facilities to get online, such as public libraries. The Internet itself is likened to the Library of Alexandria, but I think that is inaccurate. Unlike the Alexandria, it has unlimited copies of any work, exists in a world of astonishingly high literacy and mass production of connecting devices, and is not geographically constrained; it is in many ways, highly accessible. All entrants to the library can be participants; they can be the reader, the scholar, the librarian, the archivist, all at once with ease. Nothing remotely similar has ever existed in human history.
In early times, the Internet was the domain of academia and rare enthusiasts. Everyone interested in Internet history knows the month of September 1994 when the Internet experienced a flood of new users, which never stopped nor slowed. It swelled to Biblical proportions; like Genesis, it brought the world underneath with it. Many say that this is when the Internet was doomed; we have lived in the Eternal September, where the Internet could never as it once was.
Media Companies
In the past, media publishers served a legitimate function as the manufacturers and distributors of physical media. At a time, they positively contributed to information distribution by developing mass production that made media cheaper and more accessible.
The nature of media changed when the Principle became effective; media is just information, a set of semantic signals. New methods of distributing information were devised with the concept that individuals can be distributors as well, such as peer-to-peer networks and torrenting. Though they have a reputation for piracy, it’s not necessary that what is shared this way is illegal, but it so happens their architecture is so resilient that it works well for unauthorized copying and sharing. There was a great opportunity here for artists to sidestep the distributors and become the distributors themselves. No need to bulk-order compact discs or talk to record pressing facilities; the old companies were now unnecessary, though they persevere they no longer have any legitimate function, and so they invented function by orienting themselves as arbiters.
When people begun sharing copies of music with one another, the old companies took action by ruining the lives of random individuals for their quite harmless actions, an injustice serving to frighten the others. No matter where you stand on copyright, anyone can tell this punishment is not proportional to the crime. They were so threatened, they felt they could only retain relevance through a corporate equivalent of martial law. Consider that when you listen to a song on YouTube uploaded by a random person, you are doing effectively the same thing — downloading data to reconstruct a song — but it is for some reason, not considered the same thing, though streaming is a synonym of downloading.
In time, new companies came into existence, espousing new ideas for distribution that ostensibly embraced independence. Amazon’s bookstore, Substack, Wattpad, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, and so on. The problem is that they create systems that artificially restrict the flow of information to ensure space for their market. For instance, Amazon uses DRM with their books to restrict how these files can be used, and Spotify obfuscates the data they send.
The astounding truth is that you don’t need these companies to publish anything. There is nothing they do that you can’t do yourself with a web server that you rent or host at home. You still depend on the Internet infrastructure companies (as you always must), but unlike the aforementioned companies, they have little motivation by themselves to subvert the Principle. Where they do, it’s usually by decree of those irrelevant arbiters called media corporations.
I want to emphasize the point I’m making. Media distribution companies have an interest in destroying information freedom, because it’s the only way they can remain relevant. They make money from scarcity of information, just as any other company makes money on the scarcity of their product. But there does not have to be such a thing as scarcity on the Internet. Digital information is free by nature; all digital restrictions are an illusion created for a selfish benefit of something else. These companies are innately hostile to the Principle; let me repeat, these companies have a vested interest in subverting the most important technological achievement of human history.
You may notice I haven’t discussed author compensation up until now. I did not want to distract from the point to which I was leading, and so as to not lead this to a diversion, I withold any discussion about this particular point, and suppose that we may find a solution for this anyway. At any rate, the subversion of the Principle is such a step backwards for humanity, that this comes above the earnings of artists, but I may note that art patronage has never been so popular as it is today. For those who truly appreciate art, they see it as a moral imperative to support the work of artists even when it is not demanded of them, even if they are regular people with a small amount of expendable income. Compare this to the past, where art patronage was for the aristocrats.
Advertising Companies
When enough people were online, advertising companies recognized the Information Principle and it’s implications for them. They can distribute their information at extraordinarily low cost to almost anyone they want to. This is the Nature of the system, and while it is essential to everything good about it, nothing prevents this type of exploitation.
I am not sure if advertising has ever been an honest field, but it can be said with certainty it is not today. It could be well defined as the methods and techniques by which markets are artificially created or stimulated, by encouraging demand where it is lower than wanted or even nonexistent. As the field has become large, successful strategies have been determined by plain Darwinism, and which include: be invading, dishonest, psychologically manipulative, and overtly sexual, so to intrude into our minds. Advertisement has an interest in misrepresenting reality for the sake of promotion or attention, thus advertising companies have a vested interest in polluting the information that exists on the Internet, which reduces the utility of the network.
Advertisement itself is a form of media, which is just information. When enough people were online, the advertising industry could take advantage of the Principle to distribute their information (ads) cheaply to anyone. It was discovered that information about users could create more effective advertising techniques, thus user data gained value. These are irreversible as these pillars have seemingly propped up the entire technology industry of the United States.
Fighting the Digital Parasites
Both media and advertising companies are effectively parasites of the Internet. Between desperation to survive and optimizing behavior, they pollute the Internet by force of their nature. Their behaviors are natural consequences of the Principle, but the naturalness of this doesn’t mean it is healthy for the net.
Fighting the advertising companies may be unnecessary. I believe that data is not what people think it is, and the utility of it is vastly overestimated, and could even be depreciating in value. One can guess this by how companies have become desperate to take not only more data from more people, but more invasive, new kinds of data. Until when? But to fight the advertisement companies, it may be so simple as this: use AdBlockers, avoid social media. We only need enough people to take on this cynical and active attitude against advertisers to starve them out.
To fight the media companies is a more difficult task. One good way would be to adopt the model of the online visual art communities, who have done well in not being shoved into a central company as music artists have with Spotify, but are spread out across DeviantArt, social media, and various booru websites. Though it is not self-hosted, it is at least not central. Other media forms would do well to mimic this.