How we lost control of the internet—and how to win it back.
The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people—not businesses—online.
Jessa Lingel is Associate Professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, she works with the Creative Resilience Collective and the Workers Solidarity Network.
"This is a powerful model of engaged, twenty-first century social criticism. Writing in the tradition of Jane Jacobs, Margaret Mead, and Rebecca Solnit, Jessa Lingel is a formidable new critical voice in America."—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media and The Googlization of Everything
"The Gentrification of the Internet deftly dismantles romanticized notions of Big Tech, helping readers understand the internet as a site of increasing isolation, commodification, surveillance, and displacement. This readable and accessible book will definitely be required reading for all my courses." ––Clemencia Rodríguez, Professor of Media Studies, Temple University
"Jessa Lingel’s book persuasively demonstrates that gentrification and its consequences in terms of displacement, isolation and commercialization has migrated from the realm of the urban economy to the internet. A revealing account of the way the digital world has transitioned from a space for DIY countercultures to a playground for the corporate oligarchy."––Paolo Gerbaudo, Director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London
168 pp.5.5 x 8.25
9780520395565$16.95|£14.99Paper
Feb 2023