ACFM Trip 35: The Internet
Novara Media
Novara Media
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2023
⏱️ 114 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this bumper Trip, the gang survey the totalising modern phenomenon that is The Internet. Nadia, Keir and Jem dredge up their early interactions with a primitive web and explain how the dream of free and open communication was displaced by closed networks of e-commerce and data harvesting.
Following Keir’s recent Microdose episode with Malcolm Harris, they discuss the connections between self-optimising techies and the pseudo-science of eugenics.
They also talk about digital hygiene, the “Californian ideology”, why the Soviets didn’t invent the internet, and whether psychedelic drugs were the driver of Silicon Valley’s dominance.
Music comes from The Fall, Le Tigre and the very online Lil Pump and Macintosh Plus.
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Music: Knife Party – ‘Internet Friends’ / Le Tigre – ‘Get Off The Internet’ / The Fall – ‘Telephone Thing’ / The Penguin Cafe Orchestra – ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’ / Wiley – ‘Eskimo’ / Hannah Diamond – ‘Hi’ / Grimes – ‘Oblivion’ / Macintosh Plus – ‘リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー’ / Lil Pump – ‘Elementary’ / FKA twigs – ‘Ride The Dragon’
Books and articles: Daniel Levitin – The Organised Mind / Alison Winch & Ben Little – The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism / Benjamin Peters – How Not to Network a Nation / Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron – ‘The Californian Ideology’ / Malcolm Harris – Palo Alto / Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams – Hegemony Now / Nick Couldry & Ulises Ali Mejias – The Cost of Connection
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idle and I'm joined |
| 0:26.1 | as usual by my friend Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Kim Ilburn. Hello. And today we're talking |
| 0:32.9 | about the internet. So guys, why are we talking about the internet today? There's a couple |
| 0:40.7 | of reasons I think. Well, for me anyway, for me, my relationship with the internet is going |
| 0:45.9 | through a bit of a strange turn. A lot of the platforms that interact with have gone |
| 0:52.5 | shit as Cory Doctrine started talking about it recently. The most noticeably, Twitter |
| 0:58.7 | getting Elon Musk, etc. But like a lot of the other platforms as well, Facebook's unusable, |
| 1:03.9 | Amazon is increasingly a pain in the ass and like, you know, basically not doing the functions |
| 1:09.8 | that it originally attracted people to it. So it's almost as if a particular model of the internet |
| 1:15.4 | like platform capitalism has reached its shit stage. And so it could be, it could be in crisis |
| 1:21.8 | or no. Then the other reason I think it's interesting to talk about it is it's more foundational |
| 1:27.4 | to this podcast in that, you know, one of the way, one of the reasons we started talking about |
| 1:32.6 | this sort of stuff, acid communism and originally acid Corbinism was this idea that acid capitalism |
| 1:39.4 | is in some ways one of the sort of hegemonic ideologies of our time. And that comes out of this |
| 1:46.2 | whole idea of like that where the internet came from, a personal computing came from people |
| 1:50.5 | have talked about it as the California ideology, etc. This sort of melding of countercultural |
| 1:56.3 | ideas with like right-wing neoliberal economic ideas. And I think that story is coming to crisis |
| 2:02.8 | to some degree because some of the prominent figures around Silicon Valley are no longer the |
| 2:07.6 | socially liberal and economically conservative types. They're your Peter Teals and Elon Musk |
| 2:13.7 | who are much more associated with the far right in fact, white nationalism in fact in some cases. |
| 2:19.4 | What about you Jeremy? Yeah, all of the above and I think it's, I mean, it's always interesting |
| 2:24.4 | to try to think about the internet if only because it's so difficult to separate out discussion |
... |
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