It will hardly be surprising to compare the internet to the market – after all, the internet is, at least in part, a market, and just as in traditional markets the space allocated to commercial activities was also a space dedicated to important cultural activities, the internet world presents the same dual function insofar as it is increasingly a nexus for both transactional and purely cultural practices. More important, however, is the fact that on the internet the public is also largely drawn by the prospect of satisfying its appetites, and it is this commercial aspect whereby one party seeks a service or product, while another offers it, that dominates social relations and the structural scope in both forms of collective life, which is to say that the internet is, to some extent, subject to the fluctuations and evolutional dynamics of the market in the way that they express movements of the deepest social reality. The mechanistic quality of the internet, which becomes apparent to the extent that it offers products, services and sensations, is equivalent, therefore, to the mechanistic quality of the market (being nothing more than an excrescence of it), and its alienation is directly proportional to how much everything that exists in it is subjected to the excruciating logic of the market.
The slow and gradual transformation of the old commercial fair, with its bargains and attractive entertainment, first into the sterile and disciplined supermarket, and, finally, reaching its maximum level of alienation, automation and mechanization, into the fast-food drive-through, was reproduced infinitely more rapidly on the internet since its beginnings as almost an intellectual curiosity until the online shopping of today. This process unfortunately signaled a certain qualitative decline of the internet just as it did for the market as a social space. The change is determined above all by the mechanisms of control of capital: the rationalization, mechanization and simplification of production and supply chains lead to the collapse of established customs and their replacement by the uprooted dominance of technology in the service of money and power. Man becomes a mere cog in the machine, his significance entirely dependent on his role in the production process.
The loss of the recreational character and disinterested elements of the market transforms it into a sterile and alienating space. Culture itself succumbs to the relentless rationalization taken to extremes by subsequent developments in the mode of production. In the traditional market, this operation occurs primarily through the progressive regulation (or even extinction) of the various autonomous intermediaries that stood before the consumer, separating them from direct negotiation with the establishment itself, the reduction or elimination of entertainment, once a natural and necessary attraction, now a superfluous and even detrimental addition, and, lastly, the structuring of a logistical system focused exclusively on satisfying a specific demand. On the internet, non-objectified entertainment and intermediaries still exist (it is practically impossible to eliminate them, and there is probably no advantage in doing so), but the development of extremely advanced logistical distribution and production capabilities determined in recent times the transmutation of the virtual space into a market in the fullest possible sense of the term. Today, almost everything on the internet is conceived in terms of demands that must be met, products, services and experiences that must be offered and results that must be achieved in an almost Pavlovian sort of way.
The consequence is an environment that is extremely alienating and depressing. The submission of everything and everyone to the appetitive impulses of the soul, the basis of the market and of transactional and financial activities, shapes our behavior online and prevents the full exploration of the achievable potential of this new invention. We are constantly conditioned to act impulsively and the cultural content we come into contact with has long been shaped and produced in a way that stirs the most fundamental instincts and desires of the species. On the internet, the music we can most easily find is dance music marked by a strong rhythm, melodic simplification and a low complexity as well as a decreased level of tonic-harmonic variability; the audiovisual element is mostly humoristic and distractive, long consolidated as shallow entertainment, sometimes offering some compendium of accessible and innocuous curiosities; video games, for their part, tend to awaken and stimulate an appreciation for risk, as exists in gambling, as well as the competitive passions that in sports assume a noble and beautiful expression, but devoid precisely of the aesthetic and life-affirming element that makes physical activity so valuable in its playful and contentious forms.
In this sense, the farce recently perpetrated in attempting to portray games as "electronic sports" reveals itself to be a complete parody: the entire liberating element of "action-in-the-world" in sports – its courageous engagement with the world, its proactive stance towards the world – is reduced to a grotesque mechanical catenation in which, mediated by an interface whose most notable quality is that of being the only object that materially exists in reality, the "sportsperson" must achieve a certain objective made manifest in the digital simulacrum. Their every pain and privation, all their dedication, their ambition, with their long and arduous preparations, their inspired and challenging routine, then appear as derisive when we consider that they are eminently at the disposal of the tendencies of alienation, control and brutalization of man, as they exist in capitalist society; when we consider that they serve solely and exclusively the symbolic – and perhaps even practical – enslavement of man. Nothing great is produced through "electronic sports", merely false consciousness, ideology and value in the purely financial (and therefore illusory) sense of the term.
It becomes clear, then, how culture is torn apart by the mechanisms of cultural capital. But we too are corrupted and our actions are no longer genuine actions, our desires no longer bear the marks of a disinterested exploration of the world, through which we are enabled to grow as individuals and which forms the ultimately inalienable and temporally transcendent foundation of all human condition; we are transformed into process-men instead of agent men in the sense that our agency is no longer truly ours, but rather becomes an action dominated by the conditioning of reward and punishment systems, as they exist throughout the network, a possibility of acting marked by the decline of culture and creator and maintainer of this very decline, for it is both cause and consequence of the dehumanization of man under the tyranny of technology, of the disintegration of his naive and youthful sensibility – fertile ground of all art and, by extension, of the highest culture (because the one who creates art is always the inner child). Indeed, it is no coincidence that children seem to be the ones who suffer the most from the unrestricted advance of digital technologies and, above all, from the control systems that exist in them: within us as well it is our inner child who is that part of our soul which suffers the most.
The market has always aspired to directly control the cultural, social and, above all, political life of humanity. Today more than ever before this absolute control emerges as perhaps a plausible prospect, and the door has been opened by the internet. The increasing transfer of social and political life to the realm of the net allows us to glimpse new instruments of political and social domination aided by the speed of instant communication and the potential omniscience conceivable through the interconnectivity and interdependence of devices. At the same time, it also facilitates resistance activities and promotes a true awareness of phenomena. The world finds itself at a crossroads.
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