I recall the 1990s when naive libertarian outfits like EFF were proclaiming the internet (or World Wide Web) was the realm of freedom. From a distance, one now sees how EFF and the like were unconsciously advancing a “neoliberal” economic project (with respect to the marketization of the internet) and were inexplicably unaware that surveillance has been the ruling governmental design since the nineteenth-century (perhaps they should have read more Foucault).

Suffice it to say that the internet was never democratic; there is no “internet democracy” to be saved. It is just like any other public space that has always already been invaded by money and power. Technology is not a prophylactic for these structural processes; it is an supplement to them.