By Gordon Hull
Ajit Pai is the Marie Antoinette of the Trump Administration. How else can you explain his decision to do a little skit last week, in which he pretends that his chairmanship of the FCC is a part of a plot by his former employer, Verizon, to ensure full regulatory capture of the FCC? This of course while he was inside a cozy dinner, ignoring people outside protesting his impending vote to end Net Neutrality, and while he claims the support of millions of provably fake comments? If that moment put the sheer hubris of the Trump administration on display, then surely its naked appeals to the worst kind of partisanship was Pai’s attempt to deflect criticism of his decision by companies like Twitter. There, his argument was that Twitter, not he, is an enemy of the open internet because it’s (supposedly) too liberal. As for the millions of provably fake comments, Pai can’t be bothered to investigate, and won’t let anybody else do so either.
Let’s get back to that critique of Twitter, though, because it’s revealing. On the one hand, Twitter is not an ISP (he does know that, right?). They want net neutrality for the same reason other content providers do: they don’t want to have to pay extra to monopoly ISPs just to get those ISPs to carry their service. On the other hand, net neutrality says that ISPs can’t discriminate between different kinds of content – they have to carry both Twitter and Infowars, without speeding up or slowing down either of them, or charging extra rates to one of them, and so on. Removing net neutrality will allow ISPs to… handle content like Twitter does, favoring some, disfavoring others, at their corporate whim. Most of us are worried about the effects this will have on innovation online, by pricing out startups and those who would provide content that competes with what the ISPs want to provide. Those who offer no commercial product, well too bad: they don’t have money to pay for better access, and ISPs probably figure they don’t add that much value to their service. In other words, but Pai and his fanboys on the alt-right should probably worry that if net neutrality rules go, then so could a lot of the detritus floating out of the alt right. After all, the vast majority of people do not approve of it, and liberal ISPs could score big points with large segments of the population if they stopped traffic from the alt-right.
This possible outcome of the end of net neutrality is the only solace, though. By having enforced net neutrality, we’ve created the internet as a more-or-less public space. True, true – filter bubbles are a problem, and they present ugly problems for democratic polities like ours. But those problems are going to happen with or without net neutrality, since the companies that enable Filter Bubbles generally generate a lot of traffic and a lot of revenue, and will have no trouble getting their content carried. If anything, one should probably speculate that losing net neutrality will, over time, increase the problem of fake news and spam bots, since it will likely raise the entry barrier for startups even more, such that users are increasingly locked into the larger sites like Facebook, which are then easy targets for Russian trolls.
But what’s really going on in this effort to privatize the physical Internet? Ending net neutrality is an excellent example of what Italian autonomists call real subsumption – the extension of capitalist market relations into all aspects of life. As Foucault notes, this is a central feature of neoliberalism:
“American neo-liberalism … involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market. It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges. This, as it were, absolute generalization” (Birth of Biopolitics, 243)
This leads to a way to critique government actions: “the economic grid will or should make it possible to test governmental action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the grounds of their abuses, excesses, futility, and wasteful expenditure.” (246). This precisely the rhetoric of Pai’s FCC: in the name of “Restoring Internet Freedom,” we are falsely told that net neutrality decreases investment in Internet infrastructure, that we need to eliminate “heavy handed” regulation, that prior to the net neutrality rule, “there was bipartisan agreement that the Internet should be free of burdensome regulation so that it could continue to flourish,” and that net neutrality imposed “1930s-era utility-style regulation.” Quel horreur! The Internet must be a free market!
But of course that setup isn’t quite right, either. The idea that the Internet should be a commons where everyone has equal access depends on the infrastructure being privately owned, and is designed to create a free market. Don't take it from me; take it from Hayek: "there is, in particular, all the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are" (Road to Serfdom, 17). Neoliberalism is all about creating markets, in order to subject all of life to market logic. Removing Net Neutrality is a move toward passive acceptance of anti-competitive monopoly conditions for accessing the Internet, and will dispossess consumers of whatever surplus the created market generates, and transfer it to the ISPs. What seems to be the problem here is that the Pai ideology refuses to recognize that infrastructure and other public goods have any value, probably because he learned somewhere in his neoliberal economics class that only internalizing externalities is any good for anybody. Brett Frischmann showed a few years ago what was wrong with that argument; the gist of it is that it willfully blinds itself to the positive externalities that accrue to public investment, whether directly or through regulated private entities.
In this, Pai shows a deep kinship with his boss. Last week, our Tinpot Dictator himself (and somebody who knew how to write) took the stage to declare that Bears Ears National Monument should be a lot smaller. All those antiquities that were supposed to be there? Don’t need so much space to preserve them. Not efficient! What about the Native Americans? Another slap in the face.
What else? Well, scroll through the text full of complete sentences and archaeological details that Donald J. Trump definitely did not write (or probably understand) even a single word of, and we find this:
“At 9:00 a.m., eastern standard time, on the date that is 60 days after the date of this proclamation, subject to valid existing rights, the provisions of existing withdrawals, and the requirements of applicable law, the public and National Forest System lands excluded from the monument reservation shall be open to:
(1) entry, location, selection, sale, or other disposition under the public land laws and laws applicable to the U.S. Forest Service;
(2) disposition under all laws relating to mineral and geothermal leasing; and
(3) location, entry, and patent under the mining laws.”
It’s the mining interests of course, and Department of the Interior chair Ryan Zinke loves him some extractive industries. Like the uranium company that lobbied heavily to get Bears Ears reduced.
What I want to emphasize here is that the Net Neutrality declaration follows the same logic as the Bears Ears one: if it’s possible to extract value from some public space, then all regulation must be directed to facilitate that extraction, no matter what stands in the way, including overwhelming public opinion or highly competitive markets predicated on that space being public. In this, the Trump administration is reverting to seventeenth-century mode, aping the enclosure laws and trying to complete the apparently unfinished project of primitive accumulation. As Marx notes in Capital, primitive accumulation is the violent process whereby common access rights are privatized as preparatory for capitalist exploitation. As Marx details in his history of the process in England, primitive accumulation is deeply violent; the Native Americans at Bears Ears don’t need to read this passage: “in actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” ([Capital I, Penguin ed.] 874). And no, the current process isn’t the same exactly, but Marx’s comment here is at least indicative of the process:
“The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyliic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians” (895)
Here there is a twist, though: the demand for primitive accumulation is being waged on behalf of some members of the capitalist class against others. Companies like Google and Twitter want Net Neutrality; companies like Verizon do not. Companies involved in the travel and leisure industries want Bears Ears bigger, and uranium companies want it smaller. Perhaps the best indicator of how far we’ve gone into this rabbit hole is that one of the leaders in the legal fight to save Bears Ears is not the government, but outdoor recreation company Patagonia.
Marx said that the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth centuries weren’t truly revolutionary because the bourgeoisie presented itself as the universal class, when in fact it represented only its own interests. Here we see that dynamic still in play, as the government becomes openly capitalist at the direct expense of any pretext of promoting a public good. Rather, it’s selecting winners and losers in the market, with the winners being those that are closest to primitive accumulation, and which are farthest away from using any notion of the public as part of their business model.
In other words, for whatever reason, the winners have to be in the extractive industries. This is, after all, a President who won a lot of votes on the false and incredibly anti-worker narrative he spun on energy policy. The jobs are in clean energy, even if you don’t care about the environment or understand that coal is no longer competitive with natural gas. But nevermind: Make Coal Great Again. In the internal conflict between accumulation by dispossession and competitive markets. dispossession wins.
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