Anger in front of the screen

Anger in front of the screen
Capitalism has ruined the internet
Capitalism has succeeded in turning even something as ingenious as the internet into a wasteland that drives users crazy.
By Jan Tölva
[This article posted on 12/4/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://jungle.world/artikel/2025/49/kapitalismus-internet-die-wut-vor-dem-bildschirm.]

Ubiquitous nightmare. It says something about users that social media algorithms particularly often present them with content that makes them angry.

Right-wing populism, conspiracy theories, concentration difficulties, and even global warming—the internet is blamed for many of today's problems. In any case, not much seems to remain of the utopian expectations that were once attached to it. Was the internet a mistake? Should it be shut down? Or can it still be reformed? Markus Liske believes that mass internet consumption is harmful, but that the internet has unfortunately become indispensable (“Jungle World” 48/2025).
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The problem is not the internet. The problem is people. The basic idea of the internet as a rhizomatic network of networks without a center or hierarchies was and is utopian in the best sense of the word. What people are making of it, however, is increasingly resembling a dystopia.

In the early 1990s, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee described the internet as “a dream of a shared information world in which we communicate with each other by sharing information.” Without his dream, the internet in its current form would not exist. He invented or was instrumental in the invention of the first web browser, World Wide Web, the programming language HTML, the HTTP protocol, and URL as the format for internet addresses.

Today, little of this optimism remains. As early as 2018, Berners-Lee saw the internet reaching a tipping point. Lack of data protection, hate speech, fake news, and, last but not least, the concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations—the list of problems he saw was long and still seems relevant today. At an event in October at Harvard University to mark the publication of his autobiography, he went even further. He said that the internet had been taken over by an “attention economy” and was turning its users into “consumable products.”

Users are shown what is most likely to keep them captivated by the app and make them continue scrolling.

This criticism is not new. In relation to other media, it is even older than the internet. As early as 1973, artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman stated in their video “Television Delivers People”: “The product of commercial television is the audience. Television delivers people to advertising companies.” According to Serra and Schoolman, mass media are so called because they deliver people en masse.

Looking back half a century later at the digital media that have emerged since then, especially social media, it is difficult not to see the same mechanisms at work. The economic value of digital and social media platforms is measured not by the quality of their content, but by the number of users, views, and interactions.

The whole mess really started on October 27, 1994. That was the day banner advertising appeared on a website for the first time. “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will!” (Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will!) was written on the banner that the US telecommunications company AT&T had displayed on Hotwired, the online magazine belonging to the trade magazine Wired. What seemed innovative, even clever at the time, quickly turned into an omnipresent nightmare.

Pop-up banners, invented around the same time by Ethan Zuckerman, quickly proliferated everywhere. And when the advertising service Google Adwords went online in October 2000, it was all over anyway. The internet had finally degenerated into a digital advertising pillar. However, it was one that conspicuously often advertised penis pumps and pornography.

An arms race that continues to this day
Around the same time, Google itself became the most widely used search engine on the internet thanks to the then revolutionary idea of ranking websites based on the number of backlinks, i.e., links from other sites. Website operators quickly figured out the system, of course, and from then on did everything they could to get linked as often as possible, no matter how. So Google refined its search algorithms. But the market adapted to that as well, and an arms race began that continues to this day.

Today, Google's market share for search queries is over 80 percent. In more than half of all cases, users click on one of the first three hits in the search engine – unless they click on the paid advertising above it first. Those who do not advertise and are not among the top hits are virtually invisible. It is therefore not surprising that websites are no longer designed for people, but for Google. In practice, this increasingly means that an AI program writes texts for AI programs. This is called search engine optimization; optimization for readers would be something else.

But social media also limits horizons. Search engines play only a minor role, especially for younger people. They search for and find most of their information via social media – sometimes in the form of links from the platform to conventional websites, but increasingly in the form of content on the respective platform itself.

Each of these platforms has its own algorithms, which decide in their own unique way who sees what content and how often. However, what almost all of them have in common is that they are not guided by what might be relevant to users, but rather by what is most likely to keep them captivated by the app and make them continue scrolling.

The algorithm knows neither ethics nor morals
What that is can vary greatly. Some are shown hours of cat videos, while others are given tips for the perfect suicide. Some are shown images of dying children in Gaza, while others are inundated with animations of AI-generated women with giant breasts. The algorithm is completely value-free. It knows neither ethics nor morals. Perhaps this is the last true form of equality in our world: everyone gets what makes them dependent, not what they need.

It says something about users—and nothing flattering—that social media algorithms particularly often present them with content that makes them angry. The algorithms wouldn't do that if it didn't work. But it does. Even better than cat videos and AI-generated soft porn.

Actually, we could care less what b1gd0ng69 thinks about rainbow flags in front of the Reichstag. But there is obviously something in many of us that makes it incredibly difficult not to tell him what we think. The bad thing is that this something is the same thing that prompted b1gd0ng69 to post his comment. Even if we don't want to admit it, in the world of social media, we are much more similar to b1gd0ng69 than we would like to be.

The problem is not the internet. The problem is capitalism, which, like a reverse King Midas, turns everything it touches into shit. In a liberated society, the internet would be a place of knowledge and learning, of equal communication and fearless exchange. But we do not live in a liberated society. And that is why the internet is nothing more than the digitization of everything that is already wrong in the analog world.

Even in the countryside, organized crime is just a mouse click away
Child pornography, crystal meth, and handguns—thanks to the darknet and cryptocurrencies, even in the countryside, organized crime is just a mouse click away. And while the older generation radicalizes itself and each other into fascism on Facebook and WhatsApp, the younger generation learns from Andrew Tate and Hannah Neeleman how best to make women submissive or how to be submissive to men.

It is obvious that not only right-wing and religious authoritarianism is currently on the rise, but also left-wing authoritarianism. In times when many people's attention span is barely enough to read a single page of a book, it is easy to forget that Mao, Stalin, and Hoxha did not establish dictatorships of the proletariat, but dictatorships over it, and quite bloody ones at that.

The right dominates the discourse, the left is tearing itself apart, and the center has always been nothing more than ideology. Everyone is becoming increasingly isolated and alienated from one another at such a pace that Robert Putnam's “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on the social consequences of isolation in the US, sounds almost idyllic from today's perspective. The digital lynch mob seems to be one of the last forms of community building.

Twitter was once inspired by TXTMob, a software for decentralized coordination of protests. Today, Twitter is called X and belongs to the richest fascist in the world. In the end, the shameless always win.