Silicon Valley Ideology and Class Inequality A Virtual Poll Tax on Digital Politics (original) (raw)

A growing and widely held assumption is that digital communication technologies enable average citizens to participate in politics more easily, actively and directly than in traditional ways. The Internet in this framework, from blogs and video post to social media and mobile apps, breaks down barriers for political participation. The idea is that the Internet is a non-hierarchical democratic space where people can access, create and act on political information in a broader range of activities, whether as part of election campaigns, online petitions, digital activism or even revolutionary change. In this thinking, it is increasingly the individual who participates in digital politics without the involvement of a civic group or political party. Put together, this creates a more democratic scenario in which individuals exercise freedom of expression in a networked, horizontal and participatory digital network without bureaucratic, organizational or state intervention. I call this philosophy around the Internet ‘Silicon Valley Ideology’, which has proliferated along with the mass diffusion of social media technologies. The contradiction in this ideology, however, is that these institutionalized beliefs in egalitarian political participation mask the realities of structural inequalities. Silicon Valley Ideology builds on theories that challenge the folly of free markets, Internet utopianism, and egalitarian citizenship. The rise of the Internet has not only coincided with the rise of technological advancements, but it has also run parallel with the rise of neoliberal, market-based politics and economies in which individual rights are at the core of neoliberal ideology. However, class-based capitalist societies are not based on the individual but on hegemonic forces linking the market, the state and civil society. Yet part of the Silicon Valley Ideology is to keep the state’s hands off the Internet and not to intervene, censor or monitor personal Internet activities. Yet this philosophy is in conflict with any state support for full social citizenship, Internet or otherwise. Citizenship in a neoliberal age of digital politics often marginalizes the poor and working class, resulting in a digital politics gap.