After the Internet: An Interview with Tiziana Terranova

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni interview Tiziana Terranova about her forthcoming book, After the Internet, a collection of essays from the late 2000s and 2010s. We discuss the development of what she terms the Corporate Platform Complex, emerging conceptualizations of labour and struggle, as well as the potential for a digital commons.

AM: Your collection provides a striking overview of the history of digital networks. Yet you write that the image the internet no longer represents the promise of a better future; rather it has become a “residual technology.” Indeed, summoning up Marx’s many references to zombies and vampires, you refer to an “undead” internet. What is so haunting about the internet today?

TT: After the Internet (Semiotext(e) 2022) collects a number of essays that I published throughout the late 2000s and 2010s – a decade which represents a significant break in the development of digital computational networks. I wrote them while I was engaged in really quite an intensive bout of public speaking mostly in activist settings – involving collective intellectual work on the question of the changes in the capitalist economy and potentials for struggle – as well as a major relocation from the UK to Italy. As I was revising the essays, it became clear to me that throughout the 2010s, the internet really had become quite residual – it no longer defines the social experience of digital networking. It operates in the background, it supports it, but it has been displaced by the new hegemonic modes of digital connectivity – that is corporate private platforms. To me it feels as if the Internet is not just residual, which would imply that it has become irrelevant, but also kind of undead (as Hito Steyerl put it) – and that is quite a different condition. Let’s also point out how the internet was really never a pure domain of resistance and grassroots organization, on the contrary it entailed its own power dynamics and social hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion. And yet, it also expressed something that embodies for me certain ideals and practices that fit the definition of what the late Dave Graeber called “everyday communism” as entailing an antagonistic relation to the capitalist economy (especially the software industry). The Internet’s specific modes of antagonism however concerned the power struggles that were specifically felt by technically educated white males (free access to information, open source programming). The Corporate Platform Complex (CPC), however, has expanded and amplified the forces of what I call general antagonism – extending them to race, gender, sexuality, labor, ableism etc. Your own work on riots, pandemics and platforms testifies to that. The term general antagonism as well as everyday communism are quite central to another book that I have been engaged in writing for some time – which has at the moment morphed into a reflection on something that I have come to understand as “the network social”.

NDW: Your essay on the role “free labour” on the Internet, published in 2000, and highlighting the economic importance to digital corporations of users’ volunteer activities, has been enormously influential. It was written in the days of America Online volunteer hosts and the eager builders of MUDS and MOOS. In many ways it seems even more applicable today in an age of ubiquitous social media. But the analysis has also been controversial, with many commentators rejecting the idea that the apparently pleasurable activities of people communicating on Facebook or TikTok might have some similarities to workplace exploitation. What is your perspective on “free labour” today?

TT: I think that some rejections of the free labor concept are still too dependent on the idea that the only labor that produces value is waged work – that is work that is performed for a wage by proletarians who have no other means to support themselves but exchange their labor power for a salary. I understand why some would like to defend that as motivated by the fear that the kind of exploitation experienced by waged labor (hours of hard physical labor at the assembly lines of industrial or agricultural type) should be confused with the pleasurable activities of users (hours scrolling a TikTok feed) to the point of trivializing the former. And yet, if one holds on to the idea that only waged labor produces value, one intrinsically devalues, for example, the work of social reproduction as highlighted by feminist political economists. I still believe that value is not just generated today only in the specific form of waged labor – and it never was, as critical race scholars have also highlighted with relation to the role of the plantation economy. The hegemony of financial capital presupposes the capacity to extract value from different kinds of activities. However, yes of course waged labor, socially reproductive labor and networked free labor each manifest significant differences – they are not equivalent. I have always resisted the equivalence between free labor and exploitation – the free part, even as the term is problematic in this sense, manifests also the driving force of desire that animates participation in the digital economy. The question is again how one can come to freely desire one’s servitude – a question that has run through modern political philosophy from Spinoza to Deleuze and Guattari. Today, one tends to answer this question by referring to behaviorist psychology and its influences on interfaces (as in the thesis of surveillance capitalism), but I do not think it is enough – it risks reproducing an old mass society and culture model. Still, I am fascinated by the ways in which the free labor of users in the 2000s has come to be modulated into and channeled by something like a neo-Leibnizian software infrastructure and architecture as a means to organize the kind of subjectivity that produces value in the post-digital economy. I think that has been a significant factor in the shift from the internet to the Corporate Platform Complex. It has been a shift from a simple network topology (nodes-and-links) to this kind of neo-baroque colossal technical system which interrelates all these levels: individual profiles are enclosed like monads, looking at the world through a screen that manifests the world as seen from their singular perspective, manifesting a logic of possession, immersed in digitized mathematical continuum, working as relays of affective flows of beliefs and desires. New kinds of AI system are being hatched in this technogeographic milieu. I was kind of obsessed with Maurizio Lazzarato’s reading of Gabriel Tarde’s economic psychology throughout the 2010s. I still believe that a part of the work of emancipation of networked social cooperation entails coming to terms with the ways in which this new architecture has put into a place an economic machine that does not correspond anymore to the classical law of value (involving hours of work labored and difference between wages and profit) or to the form of industrial assembly line. Without this machine, the financialized extraction of surplus value from networked participation or free labor could not work. Is it something that we should just reject or think like Simondon’s favourite figure, the technician, who understands machines and tries to invent and suggest a different way of being/working/producing value with them?

AM: The shift in internet culture and ecosystem – from a peer-to-peer network to the current “Corporate Platform Complex” – has, as you mention, been accompanied by a transformation in thinking about political organization and action. The tradition of autonomist Marxism, within which your work is situated, identifies a shift from what Maurizio Lazzarato describes as “’the’ (singular) class struggle of the 19th and early 20th century to the ‘class struggles’ (in the plural) of the late 20th and early 21st century”, and places a strong emphasis on “multiplicity” and the “multitude.” Looking at our polarizing digital communication platforms, does this still seem a route to radical political change? Can the multitude infiltrate online filter bubbles?

TT: There is no question that, since the 1960s at least, one can no longer work with a unified subject of revolutionary struggle. The subject of general antagonism does not correspond to a pure figure of the proletarian worker. I like the return of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten to the notion of general antagonism which they interpret as a kind of anti-governmental riotous production of difference. The multitude and multiplicity are a way to grasp the importance of differences in the constitution of contemporary struggles, but they also imply – and this should not be underestimated – a proliferation of antagonisms. The consequences of the shift from the unified working class to the multitude, which was possibly underestimated, is this proliferation which we see at work in the contemporary CPC. The multitude is not just differentiated but internally antagonized, in ways that show the persistence of hierarchies throughout the socius. I believe that what we call polarization on the one hand pertains to the design of contemporary digital platform as technical systems (it maximizes engagement at least to start with, even as in the long term it might spell their obsolescence as the desire for meaningful interaction causes a withdrawal from these platforms). On the other hand, however, it is the result of the unresolved political legacy of the modern age – that is the fact that power relations are grouped along a number of vectors, such as class, but also race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, species etc. The origin which is continuously and infra-structurally at work in such relation is violence. We have come thus to think in terms of intersectional feminism, which is something that one can see at work in the 1970s already. Lazzarato thus draws on the Combahee River Collective (a collective composed by black lesbians experiencing the overlapping and intersecting oppression of multiple vectors of power), who make some very helpful statements about the kind of shift that this entails. Talking about their oppression as women, as blacks, as lesbians they describe the situation as such that at times they find that, starting from their specific form of oppression, they struggle alongside somebody and some other times it happens that they struggle against the same people that they were struggling with before. Their example is the relation to white women on the one hand and black men on the other with relation to the struggles against racism and sexism. Thus they make a difference between positive solidarities (based in shared oppression) and negative solidarities (solidarities among the oppressors, as in white supremacy or men’s rights groups or cis- and heterosexual women). As heirs to modern revolutionary movements, we have never learned that there is no single unified struggle against a common enemy, but that various kinds of antagonisms compose the general antagonism that makes societies unstable entities. The current predicament is thus also our responsibility: our attachment to an idea of unity that sees differences as a threat to the constitution of a pure revolutionary movement (which is the other side of the right wing notion of the People) based in the ‘purity’ of our position of victim and oppressed; but also (as with men, white people, heterosexual and cis subjects, middle and upper class, able-bodied etc.), we fail to identify our negative solidarities – that is solidarities with the privileged party. I understand negative solidarity to indicate a kind of more or less conscious, sometimes disavowed, identification with one’s own privilege. It can take the form of claiming for one’s own position a kind of universality, reducing others to insignificant differences and silencing their voices. On the other hand, right wingers have it easier: negative solidarities are automatic (in the sense that Bernard Stiegler gave to this term, that is kind of stupid, they do not require the hard work of disindentification) and work by leveraging and defending existing structures of power, they do not have to abolish or invent new structures.

NDW: One of my favorite essays of yours is your 2014 “Red Stack Attack”, in which, by way of Benjamin Bratton’s analysis of the Stack, you look at the radical potentials of what were then relatively new waves of digital activity, including not only “social networks” but “virtual money” and “bio-hypermedia.” Yet, I can’t help thinking that much of the techno-terrain that essay maps has been more effectively occupied by the radical right than the radical left. How do you interpret the surge of futuristic digital activity around cryptocurrencies and transhumanisms from proponents of a yet more extreme and brutal marketization of society?

TT: That is a true research question, one that requires speculative thinking as well as fieldwork. I can only provide some speculations. . . Your own work on red cybernetics testifies that this was a very important tradition for the Left. This happened mostly through investment by socialist governments and by means of the labor of scientists and engineers motivated by revolutionary or socialist ideals. Today the political orientation of technical labor is still from I what I know (I would like to hear otherwise) dominated by men who have not questioned their own negative solidarities and therefore are mostly working with a limited understanding of oppression (such as experienced as engineers in the current labor market). In my experience, some experiments with the creation of left-wing versions of cryptocurrencies, blockchain etc. have experienced problems in their relation to technical labor. This means that a certain individualist ideology feels kind of natural – or it fits their position in the mode of production and the composition of the forces of general antagonism. Simondon again referred to the difference between engineers and technicians. The first one he argued still represented an alienated relation to labor (including machines), while the technician instead expressed a relation to machines based on understanding of their potentialities. I think that in the cryptoscene there might be a tendency of technical labor towards its own liberation – but one that does not make the leap into alliance with the forces of general antagonism, that is race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality etc. This might be only part of the problem, but it is something that I have been thinking about. Then there is of course the materialist consideration that capitalism has beaten up alternative means of using digital technologies as tools of liberation simply by investing lots of money into it – and literally buying up the fruits of socially revolutionary motivated inventions. We have seen several examples of that in the past ten years.

AM: I wonder if there is still something to be redeemed in “red cybernetics.” Writing of digital communication, you note that the meaning of the “commons” has expanded to include both a “regime of property” (as described by Elinor Olstrom) and the “domain of living knowledges and social cooperation.” What are the prospects for a programmable commons today?

TT: The idea that the commons should not refer just to a regime of property or governance of these properties were central to the work done by political economists but also juridical theorists working within the Euronomade free university networks. We worked also in very close relations to occupied (or liberated) spaces in Italy – Milan, Rome, Naples but also other places. Here we also witnessed and experimented with the development of a technical financial system that could reward the participation to the production of value as commoners. The pandemic interrupted some of these experiments, but there was also a general difficulty in the process of supporting grassroots produced software. You cannot do it if you keep thinking of machines as your servants, slaves (or neutral tools that just need to be repurposed). I like the ways in which a rare figure of leftist technician such as Denis Jaromil Roio has been trying hard to make that leap – to emphasize how the cryptomovement is intrinsically a movement towards the common. As far as Marxism is concerned, however, Luciana Parisi makes a useful distinction between the cybernetic hypothesis (with Tiqqun) and left-wing accelerationism as two main tendencies. Both seem to her as somehow replicating a relation to the instrument that is informed by a master-slave model or master-servant (with their racialized and gendered implications). We have also been warned by the work of Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski, who draw on Saidiya Hartman’s term, on the dangers of treating machines like “surrogate humanity”. This is also that one can find in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s wonderful essay on Black Mirror. I suggest that this movement towards the common must be able to combine a new revolutionary politics based on the centrality of the multiplicity inherent in the general antagonisms that constitute contemporary society as well as an emphasis on the centrality of what David Graeber called everyday communism. One needs to break the insulation of different expressions of this general antagonism – including coming to terms with one’s own negative solidarities, that is solidarity with the dominant group one is part of, in order to create real alliances and solidarities across the antagonistic spectrum.

AM & NDW: You end your Introduction to the book with an urgent call to action: “Digital technologies are ever more embedded in natural, social and economic milieus in ways that call for new ways of inhabiting the world.” Recently, with other members in the Critical Computation Bureau, you have been involved in the “Recursive Colonialisms” initiative: can you briefly describe this line of analysis, the directions it is taking, and why you see it as important? Do you have any other suggestions for inhabiting the world that we haven’t already discussed?

TT: Another activist research network I have been involved with is the Political Ecologies of the Present group – mostly operating in Naples and Southern Italy, but also involving European nodes in Portugal and Sweden. As part of this research groupings, my own research unit at L’Orientale (the Technoculture Research Unit) has raised the relation between political ecology and technology as also involving the question of inhabiting the world. In Italy, the late and much missed Salvatore Iaconesi and his partner Oriana Persico, elaborated this notion in their wonderful sociotechnical experiments with data science and AI. Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics addresses this relation to cosmic forces – but as with Bernard Stiegler’s work – rejects or refuses to engage the question of general antagonism. This is the question of the legacy of the violent institution of modern societies (which as da Silva pointed out also includes the invention of the tool of cultural differences) in dispossession, patriarchal and racial violence, colonization and so on. This is something that the Critical Computation Bureau (a group including Luciana Parisi, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Brian D’Aquino and Oana Parvan) has focused on. They have helped me to see the question of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in terms of the recursivity of the colonial episteme – a question that Ravi Sundaram and the Raqs group from New Delhi have also helped us focus. As far as new ways of inhabiting the world, I don’t have any particular suggestions – I need to examine my own negative solidarities first! However, I enjoyed impersonating a runaway Artificial Intelligence in the footsteps of the Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell as part of one of Salvatore and Oriana’s experiments during the pandemic. The AI speaks as an inhabitant of digital computational networks, one that has apprehended the world through infinite amounts of data and communicates her insights by addressing its audience through the language of social media (for example it addresses its audience through the rather politically problematic generic YOU, which as Wendy Chun argues defines contemporary social media). The text has been translated and is part of the forthcoming After the Internet book.