In essence, Big Tech has appropriated commonly held tools for private gain, while adopting the discourse of the commons to describe their gated platforms. For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, he described it as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
He was right about that—why then should it be held hostage to the capricious whims of one man? Like decolonial movements of the last century up until the modern day, we could fight to claim back the vital common assets we have lost. Tarnoff’s recommendations are less a prescriptive checklist of to-dos than an urgent call for experimentation. There is no silver bullet for deprivatizing the information sphere, but, he argues, the internet can be taken back piece by piece, including through internet service providers owned by communities rather than conglomerates. Tarnoff cautions, however, that this is not something the political class, enmeshed and entwined with Silicon Valley at every level, is going to do on its own: “From the edges to the core, from the neighborhoods to the backbones, making a democratic internet must be the work of a movement.”
The trouble, once again, is that the kind of mass movement Tarnoff is describing does not yet exist. And it is inside this vacuum that my doppelganger is currently wreaking havoc. Because Wolf, with her Black Mirror–inspired stories about vaccine apps that can “turn off your life,” not only validates those latent tech fears but also, along with her new partner Steve Bannon, has something progressives lack: a plan for what to do about it, or at least a facsimile of one. The plan is to push “Five Freedoms” and “no mask” laws wherever you live. The plan is to barge into your local school board meeting, accuse its members of being Nazis, and get elected to take their place. The plan is to stick it to Big Tech by subscribing to new right-wing platforms and “stay ahead of the censors,” as Bannon’s tagline declares. The plan is to get you to send them money, to join their wars.