The Captured Commons

Morning Comrades.

I’ve used the internet since about 2008, as we understand it today, to, in addition to my real world work, build these little corners of being able to do what I want to, from online magazines going back as early as 2004, mostly music and art related but certainly with enough politics in there for them to be happy memories. The advent of social media brought with it exposure and access to corners of the internet that I normally only confronted in real life, fascists, racists, normies, call them what you want. However, of late there has been another ( the first round really happened around 2010-12 ) influx of hate mail, death threats, brain rotted “contrarians” trying to engage for their own purposes and it had me thinking on the parasocial reality that the internet creates, especially in the context of the online-organising bunch of “leftists” (derogatory) and its from this place the below exists.

The internet has undoubtedly created forms of connection that would have been difficult, sometimes impossible, to imagine within the geographical and institutional limitations of the pre-digital world. People separated by oceans can discover one another through a shared political commitment, workers can exchange experiences across national borders, marginalised communities can find others who recognise their conditions, and ideas that would once have remained confined to universities, publishing houses or small political organisations can circulate almost instantaneously between millions of people. It would and is therefore be both reactionary and intellectually lazy to dismiss online relationships as inherently false or politically meaningless. Digital communication can produce genuine affection, intellectual exchange and even forms of solidarity, and there are innumerable examples of online networks becoming important mechanisms through which people organise, educate one another and discover that the conditions they experience individually are in fact collective.

The problem is that the infrastructures through which that connection increasingly occurs are privately owned, commercially structured and intensely surveilled, meaning that what appears to us as a social commons is, materially speaking, somebody else’s property. We enter these spaces believing that we are participating in communities, but we do so as users of platforms whose owners determine the technical conditions under which communication is possible, whose algorithms determine what becomes visible, whose moderation systems determine what may remain visible, and whose commercial models transform our attention, behaviour, relationships and identities into economically valuable information. We are therefore never quite citizens of these spaces. We are guests in somebody else’s house, and guests whose movements through the house are recorded, classified and monetised.

Contemporary digital culture often confuses the existence of communication with the existence of solidarity and the two are not equivalent. A person may communicate with thousands of people every day and remain politically isolated, while another may know only twenty people but belong to a functioning collective capable of caring for its members, defending their interests and acting together in the material world.

Deleuze and Guattari provide an especially useful framework for understanding this contradiction because their analysis of capitalism begins from the recognition that capitalism does not simply suppress desire; it captures, organises and redirects it. Capitalism is remarkably capable of incorporating desires that initially appear antagonistic to it, converting the desire for community into markets for community, the desire for expression into content production, the desire for recognition into personal branding and the desire for political participation into engagement metrics. The digital platform is therefore not simply a machine that prevents people from connecting, it is a machine that allows them to connect in forms that can be rendered economically productive. The revolutionary potential of the network is not necessarily destroyed; it is continuously deterritorialised and then reterritorialised around the platform, the account, the follower, the subscriber and the individualised personality.

This is where the parasocial relationship becomes politically significant. The parasocial relationship is not merely the phenomenon of someone developing an excessive affection for a celebrity. In the contemporary platform economy it has become a general organisational principle of digital sociality. The user follows the writer, commentator, podcaster, academic, journalist, influencer or political personality; the personality speaks directly into the user’s private space; the user reads their thoughts, watches their face, learns their habits and gradually develops the psychological sensation of knowing them. The relationship can become emotionally reciprocal in appearance even when it is structurally one-directional. The writer may genuinely appreciate their audience, and the reader may genuinely feel that something meaningful has been exchanged, but the underlying relationship remains profoundly asymmetrical. One person produces a continuous stream of personally identifiable content while thousands or millions consume it, and the platform mediates the relationship while extracting value from both sides. What looks like community can consequently become an audience; what looks like solidarity can become subscription; what looks like political participation can become the repeated consumption of a personality.

Platforms such as Substack make this particularly visible because they combine intellectual production with the intimate architecture of social media. The writer does not simply publish an essay, they cultivate a relationship with readers. They announce what they are thinking, describe what happened to them during the day, reveal anxieties and frustrations, respond to comments, thank subscribers and gradually construct a recognisable persona around which readers organise their attention. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Human beings have always developed intellectual attachments to writers and political figures, and there is value in discovering a thinker whose work gives language to experiences that previously seemed incoherent. The problem emerges when this relationship becomes the dominant form through which political identification is experienced. The reader begins to identify less with a political project than with the person who describes that project; disagreement with the writer can begin to feel like personal betrayal; criticism of the personality becomes criticism of the community; and the political imagination becomes increasingly organised around the question of what this particular person thinks, what they have published today and whether they have noticed the latest event. The result is a peculiar political economy of attention in which the individual personality becomes the territory through which collective desire is captured.

Deleuze and Guattari’s language of territorialisation is useful here because the platform continually takes flows that might otherwise circulate unpredictably and gives them identifiable coordinates. The molecular movements of desire are repeatedly organised around molar identities: the writer, the follower, the expert, the audience, the influencer, the subscriber. The rhizomatic potential of digital communication therefore exists alongside an equally powerful process of capture. People can encounter one another horizontally, but the platform encourages them to organise those encounters vertically around accounts, brands and personalities. Instead of asking, “What can we build together?”, the user is subtly encouraged to ask, “Whose work should I follow?” Instead of joining an organisation, one subscribes to a newsletter. Instead of participating in a collective process of political education, one receives the weekly intellectual output of a trusted personality. Instead of building a political culture collectively, one consumes a political identity through a feed.

The distinction between these things is not semantic as the audience is not a collective simply because its members share an interest. A collection of people who independently read the same essay does not possess the organisational capacity of a group of people who meet, deliberate, make decisions, distribute responsibilities and act together. The former may produce an intense sense of belonging without possessing any corresponding material power. This is one of the central contradictions of digital political culture: people can feel extraordinarily connected while remaining structurally atomised. They can know intimate details about the lives of strangers while having no institutional mechanism through which to help a neighbour facing eviction, organise with a colleague facing exploitation or collectively determine what happens in their own community.

The platform’s commercial architecture deepens this contradiction because the apparent openness of the digital public sphere conceals its profound enclosure. We do not own Substack, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or YouTube. We do not determine their infrastructure, their terms of service, their moderation policies, their recommendation systems or their data practices. We do not determine what happens to the information generated by our activity, nor do we determine which commercial interests may gain access to the behavioural profiles produced through our participation. We are permitted to communicate because our communication is economically useful to the infrastructure through which it occurs. A commons is collectively governed by those who depend upon it, a platform is governed by its owners.

This means that even the apparently free spaces of digital political discussion remain enclosed within relations of property. The user may feel that they have established a little community, but the community exists upon rented technological territory. Its continued existence depends upon the permission of a corporation whose priorities are ultimately determined by ownership, revenue, growth and legal liability rather than by the political interests of the people using it. A platform can change its algorithm and destroy the visibility of a community overnight. It can suspend an account, alter its terms, remove content or simply cease to exist as a viable business. The community has no sovereign claim over the infrastructure upon which its relationships depend. What appears to be public space is therefore privately administered space.

Surveillance makes the contradiction even more severe. Every interaction that appears to us as social participation can simultaneously function as data production. The things we read, the people we follow, the subjects that make us angry, the advertisements we ignore, the posts we linger over, the links we click, the communities we join and the hours at which we become active contribute to increasingly sophisticated systems of behavioural classification. The digital subject is therefore both participant and object. We believe that we are using the platform, while the platform is continuously measuring us. The relationship is not simply between user and user; it is triangular, with the corporation occupying the position of an invisible third party that observes the interaction and attempts to extract economic value from it. If we are fortunate, the consequence is another advertisement carefully selected according to the behavioural profile assembled from our activity. If we are less fortunate, our political associations, communications and networks become available to state authorities, surveillance regimes or other forms of institutional access. The distinction between commercial surveillance and state surveillance should not be erased, but neither should we pretend that the digital architecture separating the two is necessarily impermeable.

This does not mean abandoning digital communication. On the contrary, doing so would misunderstand the problem. The internet remains extraordinarily valuable precisely because it can allow people to find one another. A person living in an isolated town can discover political ideas that are absent from their local institutions. A worker can discover that others experience the same exploitation. A person who feels politically alone can encounter thousands of people articulating the same frustration. An activist can distribute information rapidly. A campaign can coordinate across borders. A persecuted and / or disabled community can preserve connections when conventional institutions have excluded it. These capacities are real and should not be romanticised away. The mistake is to confuse the network’s capacity to initiate solidarity with its capacity to sustain solidarity by itself.

Online connection can be the beginning of solidarity, but it cannot substitute for the material relationships through which solidarity acquires durability. Solidarity means more than recognising that someone else suffers. It means accepting some degree of responsibility for what happens to them.

The danger of the parasocial platform is therefore not that every online relationship is fake. That is far too simplistic. The danger is that capitalism has become extraordinarily successful at producing forms of mediated intimacy that feel sufficiently meaningful to satisfy some of our desire for connection without necessarily generating the collective power required to transform the conditions producing our alienation. The platform does not have to prevent political consciousness; it merely has to make political consciousness compatible with continued passivity.

The task, therefore, is not to retreat from the internet but to refuse the idea that the internet itself constitutes the political community we need. Use it to find people, use it to circulate ideas, use it to discover that the person experiencing the same problem is not alone, hell, I do, but then leave the platform. Build relationships that do not depend upon an algorithm deciding that you are worth seeing and build forms of solidarity whose value cannot be measured in impressions, subscriptions or advertising revenue. The internet can help us discover one another, but it cannot absolve us from the harder task of becoming one another’s comrades.

The distinction ultimately returns us to a question that platform capitalism would prefer us not to ask: what does it mean to actually belong to something? Belonging cannot simply mean being recognised by an audience or feeling emotionally attached to a personality. It must mean possessing relationships of mutual obligation and collective capacity. It must mean that when one person is threatened, others respond; when one person is exhausted, others take responsibility; when a decision has to be made, people meet and decide it together; when the immediate excitement disappears, the organisation remains. The political future cannot be built from followers alone. It requires people who can become neighbours, comrades, colleagues, organisers and participants in institutions they collectively control. Digital networks can help those relationships begin, but they cannot be permitted to become their final form.

A great irony of the contemporary internet is therefore that a technology capable of connecting almost everyone can coexist with historically profound forms of social isolation. We have never possessed such extraordinary capacities for communication, yet the economic architecture through which that communication occurs continually transforms social connection into data, attention and individualised consumption. The answer is not nostalgia for a pre-digital world, nor the fantasy that everything online is artificial. The answer is to recognise the distinction between communication and organisation, between audience and collective, between parasocial intimacy and reciprocal solidarity, and between privately owned platforms and genuinely democratic social spaces. We should use digital networks as tools for finding one another, but we should resist allowing them to become substitutes for the material relationships through which collective power is created. The internet can tell us that we are not alone. Only organisation can make that fact politically consequential.

Yours, warmly,

Steven