(5) Digital Gentrification 101
What does it mean for the web to be gentrified? How does the term fit in a digital landscape?
Starting Schema Acquisition, I expected more leeway in my topics of choice, but I always found myself looping back to my current fascinations with the internet. This was a sign to actually write what I had been meaning to share: on digital gentrification. This is a piece I started many months ago, but struggled to finish out of fear and complexity. I still don’t know if this is the best way to introduce this topic. I figured that there is never a perfect place or time to start other than to just start. I made a new cover to delineate my line of work specific to digital gentrification and subversive practices. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
It’s year 2020 and I am back home in Orange County living, breathing, working, studying in my bedroom. I redownload depop after a three year hiatus to satiate my thrifting desire through “digital window shopping” or scrolling, that is. The interface is different, the sellers seem different. I am intrigued and alarmed by the round tags that read #y2k and #vintage, magic words that can turn any old high school gym shorts or children’s shirts into trendy prized possessions even when they upsell in the name of sustainability.
My memory of depop from its first launch was very different from what it had become. What used to be an opportunistic platform for people to sell and buy second-hand clothing (at actually decent prices) had become a classist price-gouging trend marker. I wondered, can the web be gentrified? Is gentrification even the right term to describe what I am seeing?
In 2021, I came across Jessa Lingel’s The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom. Lingel explains why “gentrification”, a term I had found to be spatial and site-specific, can be used to describe what is happening on the internet than simply “capitalism”.
Here are some of my main takeaways that informed my research on subversion and what we are trying to subvert; and how the digital and physical are connected to perpetuate gentrification in both spaces:
Like physical displacement, there is a digital displacement of users and old websites that happens through a monopoly of tech spaces and products.
Our current digital landscape is dominated by a select few key players. This not only creates a standard (Lingel shares as aesthetics and politics) on what the web should be, but also produces a chasm of inequality “within and between” platforms. From simple site builders to social media platforms, the barrier of craft has been lowered, but the individuality of craft has been lost. There is a demand for efficiency, fast-paced results to generate, produce, publish: everything is templatized, dragged and dropped. The plug for efficiency is a call for productivity, by capitalism, towards a homogenous, gentrified web.
In a homogenous landscape, it becomes easy for centralized powers to uphold a standard for commercial priorities more so than for community benefits. These policies and changes are gridlocked to incentivize certain groups, often those who are comfortable and privileged to meet these guidelines, while those who cannot are displaced. Lingel uses Tumblr as a notable example of this displacement. When Yahoo! acquired Tumblr in 2013, there was a sudden shift in policies to compete with other up and coming social platforms. Users felt there was an abandonment of community needs and core values, which led to a large exodus of its base users.
This is a phenomenon I found to be similar on twitter or X post elon musk’s acquisition. what used to be a community-serving, meme-sharing, culture-birthing platform was adopted to fit a single man’s vision — a terrible one — and his capital. Twitter was not perfect before musk. But previously, the platform was in demand by users, and this demand was key to twitter’s long-term sustainability. In 2023, I left twitter after musks’ rebrand. My brain had difficulty rewiring its new branding and chaotic content to the past joys of twitter.
Digital world perpetuates physical oppression, physical world perpetuates digital oppression.
Although our understanding of the web is often flattened as consumers, there are various physical infrastructures tied to race, class, and gender that make the web possible. Similarly, digital attributes and its contained discourse inform and escalate decisions that may affect our day to day lives.
What do you see when you think about your relationship with the web? I imagine my precious $2000 rectangular metal block and the screen as my portal. I dream of my web persona, profiles, avatars, and projects that live here, digitally. But what we dismiss are miles and miles of cables buried underground, camouflaged cellular towers, and invisible discrimination fed to us.
The algorithm is our desire whisperer, fortune teller, advisor, friend, and omniscient enemy, seemingly all-knowing but still truly not knowing. It shares what we’ve shared, it feeds what we choose to feed. My friends marvel at how accurate targeted ads can be. And if ad consumption is inevitable, they would rather see ads that captivate them than irrelevant feeds. But aside from the material pleasure of targeted ads, data mining is a discriminatory practice that turns the gears of systematic oppression. In 2019, facebook was sued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for discriminatory advertising. It was found that facebook relied on a discriminatory algorithm where homebuyers would be targeted according to their race and gender, violating the Fair Housing Act. Lingel finds this to be much like physical redlining, except digitally:
“Facebook’s advertising tools barred people from certain geographic areas from seeing certain ads. The tools actually created red lines on a map to target users, a direct parallel to “redlining” practices that created housing segregation in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.”
Digital issues are physical issues and digital gentrification perpetuates urban gentrification. Recently, I saw a video of a private meeting between Mayor Breed and the inner mission neighbors association, requesting Breed to reduce homeless services and increase AI incubators and tech start ups. It was mentioned that before the pandemic, 70% of the unhoused population were, in fact, SF residents who had occupied the city before gentrification.
It’s easy to treat the digital and the physical as separate entities as digital exposure and its contents feel real only when we choose to engage with our devices. However, inequities do not dissipate when crossing this divide. From big tech domination of urban spaces and the ever present fight for net neutrality to the growing concern of digital divide and material placement of tech components related to accessibility, oppression is ever present. As digital users, all these issues should come personal to us, no matter how indirectly linked they may be.
Platforms are designed to maintain centralized power to further labor and capital for profit.
Our understanding of “being online” is often tied to social platforms and the culture surrounding these platforms. In middle school, when I saw my classmates with iphones, I was compelled to get one less so for its “smart” functions, and more for its social components and apps. Simply put, I thought having a smartphone meant having instagram and facebook. Now, the online and social platforms have become interchangeable as one entity.
“When Facebook monopolizes someone’s entire experience of being online, their control isn’t just technological, it’s social, cultural, and political.”
— Jessa Lingel in Digital Gentrification
Current tech advancements and social platforms shed little liberty when it comes to user agency. There is so much effort to ease the users by mystifying the machine and the political workings that make up the machine. Big tech’s business design — through data extraction and exploiting basic facets of life as a capitalist marketplace — has changed society’s outlook on the labor market. In the podcast The Anti-Dystopians, episode Platform Socialism, James Muldoon shares insights on how platforms have changed and will continue to change capitalism. Earning capital through data extraction and advertisements flips profit on its head. In consumerism, there is usually a direct and voluntary exchange. A makes profit through B’s purchase and B has a new product, service, or whatever offered by A. What’s important is that there is a willingness and a direct trade for value — value that both parties found to be worthwhile.
Big tech works differently. For example, facebook makes profit through multiple streams of revenue, but its biggest stream is through selling our personal data to advertisers. This method of labor does not offer a voluntary exchange where users are given a seat at the table. The fine prints will argue otherwise, but the reality is, being a user on these platforms means abiding to the gridlocks that put our privacy and autonomy at risk while making tech moguls richer.
Similarly, when we consider ride services such as lyft or uber, their revenue stream is made through transaction fees that skim off the top of riders. Before tech, a direct exchange was made between taxi drivers and taxi callers. I have always found it interesting that lyft/uber are considered tech companies when their product branding, essentially a taxi, is an invention that has been around for centuries. This makes it evident that their service is not the ride itself, but rather the maintenance and organization of the app. This creates a divide between workers who provide the direct labor of driving versus tech workers who upkeep the maintenance of the app. This produces an inherent hierarchy and value naming on labor founded by tech. This should all come as ironic. There is an acidulous and almost a silly sentiment when seeing tech companies further inventing the invention just to make room for intervention — a middle-man that runs the show without being involved in the actual exchange to squeeze in profit. Tech commodification has now extended to make profit in every part of our lives. What’s frightening is how desensitized we have become by these small, and now large, infiltrations.
I started this research because I wanted to think about how the design of these platforms — tools that come very personal to me and my craft — carry wider consequences. I do not believe in techno-determinism and I don’t think we should surrender to such a notion. But users cannot surrender or fight without the context of what they are resisting in the first place. As a chronic facebook market browser, lyft rider, instagram user, and digital media lover, I am not asking users to completely eradicate the infrastructure of big tech or boycott platforms. However, I believe there is value in critically thinking about the platforms we use day to day to reclaim user control because currently there is a vastly unequal ownership structure. Resistance comes from first recognizing these big and small facets that touch our lives intersectionally.
Time after time, we see that change can happen if there is a wide demand for change. Unfortunately, equitable demands rooted in justice happen painfully slow and rely on community effort. This is evident with the digital and physical fight to Free Palestine and its targeted platform censorship. Fortunately, there are activists, researchers, creatives, and users like you and me here on these platforms asking for a liberatory web, a decentralized web, anti-discriminatory web. I don’t think resistance has to be groundbreaking. Even now, there is a digital movement to simply block (“chop”) celebrities and influencers who are building decadent empires but failing to speak up on issues that actually matter. There is activism in designing indie sites from scratch against the mainstream production of template web builders and resistance in simply not accepting site cookies. What’s more is that the digital is one facet of life, a tool and a portal, and community movements that truly matter happen offline.
There is still so much uncovered in this short guide. Now digital gentrification has become a more expansive topic that can also be read as enshittification or digital decay, among many. Moving forward, I want to dig a bit deeper into creative subversion — what I introduce as the counterforce of digital gentrification — and how artists, activists, and users online resist these platforms creatively.
As always, thanks for being here with me and reading, resisting, and activating!
— Eileen
Sources of boundless inspiration and knowledge:
🍉 The Digital French Revolution is the latest post on New Means, one of my favorite substacks, that provides critiques on politics
🦋 Syntax is an online magazine that writes about the internet and culture
🥑 avocado_ibuprofen shares mesmerizing art and writing on cultural criticism that often get very philosophical
🍄 Are.na’s featured channels and different creators’ magical thinking and collecting
🪲 Leon Eckert has mastered the art of noticing through beautiful, mundane photographs
🖇️ Ssense marketing posts and brutalist website
🪻 Syllabus features writing on discoveries and learning