empire online
The doctor is in…the machine! Over the last century and a half, computation has slowly converged with psychology, enabling corporations to measure, predict, and exploit human behavior on an unprecedented scale.
In the mid-19th century, while American interests built wealth through chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, and other atrocities of settler-colonialism, European powers were growing restless for the dawn of New Imperialism.
As Western science sought to classify and flatten the natural world, one British mathematician named George Boole turned his attention to the realm of logical reasoning. In 1854, Boole published a formal algebraic treatment of logic inspired by Aristotle’s syllogisms. Like many intellectuals of his time — steeped in a culture that sought to categorize and control — Boole devised “laws” to show how reasoning should proceed, rather than describing how people actually think. Curiously though, he titled this writing An Investigation Into The Laws of Thought, suggesting that he may have seen a greater theory in the text, to explain the mind itself-a type of protopsychology. Although his work did not capture the complexities of human cognition, it did reveal how binary values (0 and 1) could encode logical operations. This insight laid the groundwork for what we now call Boolean algebra and "the rule of 1’s and 0’s".
One hundred years later, in the wake of World War II, as public opinion swelled against the physical and spiritual toll of imperialist ambitions, a group of American scientists stood at the edge of another frontier: electronic computing. In November 1945, just five months after detonating the first atomic bomb, the US Army Ordnance Corps completed work on ENIAC, the first programmable electronic computer. Scientists utilized thousands of vacuum tubes to create a vast matrix of logic gates. Each gate would receive an input, then conditionally output either a “1” or a “0.” When tasked with creating the first programming languages, early computer scientists would honor George Boole by naming this foundational binary data type a “Boolean.”
This connection, across time and oceans, formed the first link in a long chain marrying computation with psychology.
In the late 20th century, advancements in computing gave rise to the field of “Business Intelligence,” which popularized large-scale, data-driven customer surveillance programs. By 1996, this demand had driven digital storage to become more cost-effective than paper alternatives. Around this time, the capitalists who had now spent decades learning to seduce and influence customers, began to set their sights on the world wide web.
One of these capitalists was Jeff Bezos, who left a Senior position at a New York hedge fund to create Amazon.com, with a vision of using big data to “know our customers better than they do.”
By 2006, when data scientist Clive Humby asserted that “data is the new oil,” over a trillion dollars had already been gambled on colonizing the Internet, and commodifying the lives of the one billion people it connected. That same year, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. acquired the surging social network MySpace, hoping to cash in on this promised gold rush. 2007 saw executives at the company roll out some of the earliest large-scale advertising algorithms on a social platform, which used computational psychology to tailor ads based on the personal information of users and their relationships to each other.
For the first time, capitalists could use data to unfold our brains, memorize every crease, and poke around to test their control. Data became a scalpel, used to perform vivisections en masse. Stealing from Bezos' and Murdoch’s examples, a young Mark Zuckerberg committed himself to refining this kind of cyber-frontier psychiatry, taking full advantage of the Internet’s unique relational terrain. Since 2010, Facebook has maintained an internal department devoted to “social engineering” projects. In 2014, Facebook revealed its ability to experimentally produce "massive-scale emotional contagion" by tweaking what users saw in their feeds — a finding published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014). Where Amazon had sought to know customers, Facebook shareholders wanted to control users.
For Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and countless other destinations on the for-profit social internet, these practices have become tricks of the trade. Reputations are staked on a firm’s ability to grow, retain, and control massive user bases. In the current paradigm, one metric that has become core to a social network’s valuation is the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), in effect how much a user might earn the company in a given period. Within the traditional attention-based model, this figure is a factor of a user’s retention (hours of engagement), and the user’s clickthrough rate (how frequently the user does what advertisers want). ARPU is a fiscal indication of a for-profit social network’s ability to commodify not only individuals, but their relationships to each other. Within this context, a user’s attention is the product, and their engagement is labor for the corporation.
You can only reconcile the astronomical valuation of social networks by understanding that engagement is unpaid labor. In April 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, the startup had only 13 employees on its payroll. However, it also had a workforce of 30 million users, logging on around the clock to create content and tune advertising algorithms with their likes and comments. Despite these substantial contributions, no Instagram user will ever see a dime from the acquisition.
To classify online engagement as labor means acknowledging that users expend cognitive, emotional, and creative effort to produce content and train algorithms, all of which directly generate profit for the platform. This is uncompensated work — yet it forms the bedrock of social media’s business model. The platform could not exist without the user, and its power is derived entirely from the exploitation of the user’s engagement. Markets have seized on this dynamic, incentivizing for-profit social networks to ceaselessly develop new ways of monetizing attention on their platforms. Every form of engagement must be co opted into profit generation.
Here, Zuckerberg and the growth hackers succeeded in realizing a neoliberal pipe dream. The “attention economy” introduced a mode of production which reflected the extreme mind-body dualism which neoliberalism assumes. A person’s emotions and thoughts were now as valuable as a physical good. Where Amazon profited from emotional shopping and impulse buys, Facebook profits by molding those very emotions — and selling that power.
In this way, neoliberal influence over the social Internet has given new life to the project of imperialism. Today, every relationship, social movement, crisis, conflict, or connection serves as an opportunity for profit, control, or surveillance by the state and its corporate allies. Yet in the last decade, the very neoliberal frameworks that shaped these platforms have begun to falter, as evidenced by Facebook’s ongoing struggle to moderate billions of users—particularly since COVID emerged. While the surface aesthetic remains molded by market logic, the underlying infrastructure is still wedded to imperial interests. As neoliberal institutions buckle under mounting pressures, we are witnessing the first true politicization of the Internet, as corporate hegemonies yield greater power to states and their more traditional mechanisms of control.
Through e-commerce and the for-profit social internet the same forces of empire that hunted geographic power in the 20th century have cemented it online in the 21st. As the political implications of this new feudal landscape continue coming into focus, we are already experiencing the tremendous toll of this system on the physical and mental wellbeing of Internet users, as well as on the health of the real-world communities they live in.
Yet this empire of data is not unassailable. As users, activists, and even disgruntled tech workers push back against total corporate control, we stand at a crossroads where the Internet could evolve into a more humane, community-centered space — or harden further into a tool of mass exploitation. Recognizing the historical roots of this digital feudalism is the first step toward forging an Internet that benefits all.