A Humane Digital Future

The digital realm, once heralded as a boundless frontier for connection and knowledge, has increasingly become a landscape of alienation and discord.

Where many once envisioned a global village fostering understanding and cooperation, the reality of the modern internet often feels like a cacophony of outrage, cyberbullying, and profound disconnection.

This pervasive sense of digital malaise prompts a critical question: Is the internet’s legacy irrevocably tied to despair, or can it still be a crucible for collective flourishing?

Two decades ago, as the dot-com bubble burst and the internet’s future seemed uncertain, social theorist bell hooks presciently warned of a “loveless zeitgeist.”

Her lament for a public discourse devoid of love’s practice now echoes with an eerie resonance in our hyper-connected world.

Far from fading, the internet has become inextricably woven into the fabric of our lives, an extension of our very selves through the smartphones we carry and the algorithms that parse our personalities with alarming intimacy.

Yet, this deep integration has not ushered in an era of digital empathy.

Instead, studies consistently paint a picture of social media platforms as engines of alienation, largely because their underlying algorithms are designed to reward the very behaviors that tear us apart: trolling, outrage, and cyberbullying.

This cycle of negativity is not an accidental byproduct; it is, in many ways, the intended outcome of a profit-driven model.

As sociologist Aarushi Bhandari explores in her new book, “Attention and Alienation,” the immense profits of social media giants are directly proportional to the time, creativity, and emotional labor users invest.

Whether it’s meticulously crafting a TikTok video or composing a thoughtful Reddit comment, participation is work – often exhausting work.

Even passive engagement, the endless scroll through feeds, consumes precious hours, deceptively appearing as free entertainment until users grasp the uncomfortable truth: they are not the consumers, but the product, their data harvested and emotions subtly manipulated.

This systemic degradation of online experience has been succinctly termed “enshittification” by blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow.

He describes how platforms, in their relentless pursuit of profit, gradually deteriorate, exploiting user data and tweaking algorithms to maximize engagement, often at the expense of user well-being.

The result is a digital environment where toxic interactions and mindless doomscrolling, fueled by dopamine-driven feedback loops, become the norm.

It’s a stark reality where hate and mental illness seem to thrive because, fundamentally, love and healing appear to be incompatible with the prevailing profit motive.

Yet, amidst this digital gloom, glimmers of a different kind of internet persist, often hiding in plain sight.

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright, in his 2009 work “Envisioning Real Utopias,” highlighted offline systems that prioritized cooperation and egalitarianism, but notably included one digital example: Wikipedia.

This online encyclopedia, a non-profit, volunteer-run bureaucracy, embodies the utopian ideal “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Unlike the self-aggrandizing metrics of social media, Wikipedia offers no visible likes, comments, or rage emojis for individual hoarding.

Its rewards are purely collective, a testament to the power of shared knowledge and democratic curation.

Everyone wins, even the vast majority who consume its vast repository of information without contributing work or money.

Wikipedia is not an isolated anomaly.

Recent years have seen a burgeoning movement towards creating nonprofit apps and websites committed to user data protection, such as the secure messaging service Signal and the encrypted email provider Proton Mail.

These initiatives represent a laudable step towards a more ethical internet, but the question remains: how can the internet actively promote collective flourishing?

Sociologist Ruha Benjamin offers a compelling path forward in “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want,” recounting the impactful Black TikTok cultural labor strike of 2021.

Black creators, whose viral dances were often co-opted or suppressed by biased algorithms, organized under the #BlackTikTokStrike movement, forcing TikTok to issue an apology and commit to better representation and compensation.

This landmark action underscored that social media engagement is indeed labor, and workers, even digital ones, possess the power to demand equitable conditions.

It demonstrated that users of platforms like TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit can, and should, organize.

Beyond activism, foundational shifts are occurring.

Firuzeh Shokooh Valle’s 2023 book, “In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics in the Global South,” highlights worker-owned technology cooperatives like Costa Rica’s Sulá Batsú.

This co-op actively promotes policies designed to dismantle the stranglehold of negativity and exploitation, striving for an online world where “women and people of diverse sexualities and genders are able to access and enjoy a free and open internet to exercise agency and autonomy, build collective power, strengthen movements, and transform power relations.”

In Los Angeles, Chani, Inc., a technology company unburdened by venture capitalist funding, offers an app blending mindfulness and astrology, designed not for compulsive engagement or data harvesting, but simply to help people.

Notably, it has no comments sections, a radical departure from the norm.

The absence of comments sections, as seen in Chani, speaks to a core problem: the obscuring of human identity.

In the vast, text-based public forums that dominate much of the internet, words are often detached from the speaker’s identity, allowing individuals to hide behind anonymity and disengage from genuine human interaction.

Bhandari argues that the ability to meet and interact online as “fully realized, three-dimensional human beings” would be transformative.

She shares a poignant childhood memory of wishing to “see” her parents through the phone, a longing for a more complete connection that resonates deeply in our digital age.

During the 2020 pandemic, Bhandari’s online classes, conducted via videoconferencing, offered a glimpse of this potential.

Despite imperfections, they fostered a space where one person spoke, and others listened, promoting a form of discussion that transcended mere text.

While ventures like Clubhouse tapped into the vision of voice-based forums, they faltered due to predatory data privacy policies.

The challenge, then, is to build upon these insights: to create public social media platforms that bring people together, showcasing not just voices but live video feeds of faces – the raised eyebrows, the grins, the frowns – without harvesting data or promoting conflict.

These nuanced, non-verbal cues are what distinguish humans from increasingly sophisticated large language models and AI chatbots.

They are the essence of our humanity.

Ultimately, the question of the internet’s hope boils down to a fundamental query: Is anything you can’t say while looking another human being in the eye truly worth saying in the first place?

The answer may lie in our collective willingness to demand and build a digital future where genuine human connection, empathy, and cooperation are not just possible, but foundational.