It is a belief held by most people in society that the internet is a novel danger. That it is a threat to freedom and democracy unparalleled in the history of our species. It is often asked, “How do you stop the internet being used as a vector for radicalisation, hate-mongering, incitement to violence?” The corollary question follows: “How can we control it?” These questions are more elucidating than they first appear, not because they show the concern for democracy the average person holds instinctively, but because they display his sheer ignorance of the history of democracy and freedom. 

The internet as we find it today represents a logical ideal: a perfectly private state. The beginning of wisdom is to recognise this fact. Or to quote a study in the journal International Affairs, “Private US internet capital and digital platforms such as Alphabet (of which Google is a subsidiary), Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are acquiring forms of infrastructural power exercised traditionally by the US state.” Thus “a form of ‘virtual sovereignty’ is coming into existence in the United States,” which “at a minimum, disrupts the ability of the sovereign state to exercise its traditional powers.” And while the focus on the United States may seem parochial, the generalisation to “Western democracy”, an arbitrary but easily understandable term meaning roughly “neoliberal orthodoxy”, is justified when we recall that, though there has been some erosion of US hegemony, the “global internet’s root servers remain predominantly American.” 

The inhabitants of this new state are not citizens; not the demos of Aristotle, nor even the compromising savages of Hobbes, and certainly not the fallen angels of Rousseau, but the proud and noble commodities of Shoshanna Zuboff’s “Surveillance Capitalism”. In such a polis, the role of the individual, insofar as “man is a political animal”, is subsumed by his primary responsibility as a consumer; and as a consumer it is his duty to be bought and sold by those who use his data – his interests, hobbies, passions, prejudices, hatred, fears; that is, his entire personality – to condition and perfect his consumerist tendencies. That is, to create the ideal citizen, or commodity. The Fascist Youth is replaced by the YouTube Adverts; Goebbels’ radio by the TikTok algorithm. 

And if the citizen objects to his role as commodity, what can he do? Relocate to Iceland? Or else, to whom can he turn for support? The democratically elected officials of his real-world democracy? Those who see the acquisition of the internet by private capital as necessary for sustained economic growth (synonymous with “progress” in the language of propaganda; or in the words of the President Trump’s “science” advisor, Michael Kratsios, the “best way forward

for America was for Silicon Valley to chart its own course independently without government intervention”) or else are resigned to the inevitability of this new “virtual sovereignty”. 

Let’s sketch this new world: an unelected sovereignty – a “virtual state” – almost completely independent of, though supported where possible by, the state; the assumed benevolence of this unelected sovereignty; the subsuming of the individual into the greater community of consumers; the acceptance of the individual as material (a commodity) to be moulded by this state in the name of safety and “progress”. To anyone acquainted with the history of democracy this is not a new situation. Rather there is a common name for it: totalitarianism. 

The fact is that the internet merely represents an ancient problem in modern dress. The problem of illegitimate authority; the difference today is simply one of nomenclature. The argument, however, is exactly the same. 

Eve knew that there was no authority great enough to deny her the right to knowledge. And yet, the concerned commodity of today might wonder: Had God warned her about the threat such knowledge might pose to democracy, or Eden? Did He mention the potential of incitement to violence, or that she might be offended by what she will see and hear? Did He, benevolent and loving as He is, not tell her about the harm such unrestricted and unfiltered knowledge might do to the poor children? And finally, suppressing his anxiety and regathering his shaken nerves, the commodity might ask, his pathetic lip trembling, “What about the luckless minorities?” 

There has never been a more totalitarian system than monotheism. This is true of its metaphysical form – a supervising dictator arbitrating between right and wrong, instructing His citizens to do exactly as He says or else face everlasting torture, demanding in return only unconditional love – as well as its physical form, in which an unelected priesthood (or, say, a necessary intellectual class) at every opportunity seeks absolute control over the mind and body of the individual. 

How is the control of the individual achieved in every case? By the accumulation of knowledge in return for safety. This is the essential (to use a modern term) selling-point of all religion: surrender your critical faculties in return for eternal bliss. Safety is the primary concern of Man and it is found in ignorance. It is also, by extension, the basis of all other totalitarian systems. Recall: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength. Such systems can only survive

on a well-watered and nutrient-rich bed of ignorance and superstition; can only fall under the grinding boot of our divine reason. 

The synthesis, or symbiosis, of the metaphysical (or “virtual”) and physical forms of religious control into a theocratic state is the most perfect form of totalitarianism. Only with the Enlightenment and the emancipation from our primitive ignorance, the casting off of our “mind-forged manacles”, does it become clear that human progress is found not in the words of schizophrenic rabbis or illiterate businessmen but in those of Socrates and Galileo, who taught that wisdom is only defined by ignorance, and that to doubt is the surest route to anything like true knowledge. 

The most radical event in Western history is the translation of the Bible. Why? Because it represents the ultimate challenge to authority. For one thing, it says there is no knowledge or idea which is not open to the critical mind of every man and woman by dint of their shared human nature. For another, once the authority of the divine has been questioned, there is no mammal, however solipsistic and deluded, whose authority is not open to criticism; no institution whose legitimacy cannot be debated. Hence Luther’s call to “smite, slay and stab” the rebel peasants, because “it may be that one who is killed fighting on the ruler’s side may be a true martyr in the eyes of God.” 

Upon this challenge to divine authority is built every revolution since the Levellers. (Or it might even be said that the translation of the Bible led to hatred, incitement to violence, riots, the persecution of minorities, etc.) This humanistic idealism finds its highest expression in Paine’s Rights of Man, which argues that freedom and democracy are innate human rights, and Jefferson’s promise in his letter to the persecuted Baptists of Danbury (persecuted, recall, by the Congregationalists of Danbury) that there will always be “a wall of separation between Church and State.” Well, let there be a “wall of separation” between the new Church and State. That is, between Private Tyranny and State. Only when this is achieved can there be true emancipation from the preachers of salvation; only then can the “virtual state” of the internet be exposed to criticism. 

The internet is not more radical than the printing press. Rather it is another expression of the principle it represents: freedom. And just as the Bible embodies at once repression and freedom, so the internet offers a choice between liberty and chains; ignorance and knowledge. The

freedom to think – and, crucially, the freedom to think differently – is at the core of any truly free society. The question is simply this: Who decides? On whose authority do we accept the right to determine what knowledge is and is not acceptable? 

The problem is that power is never surrendered easily. The banning and burning of books is the national sport of every totalitarian system. Control is maintained not only through the promise of safety but by the threat of punishment. Yet in modern democratic society, the citizen-commodity is not threatened with punishment, not to any real degree, rather he is conditioned to believe that ignorance is indeed strength. Before Orwell, this was recognised by David Hume, who wrote that, “force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion.” That is, in the absence of authoritarian systems of control it is necessary to control opinion. Thus the new totalitarianism must find a way to exercise its natural impulse. 

One way is through misdirection. Orwell put it like this in his essay The Freedom of the Press (the introduction, incidentally, to his allegory on totalitarianism Animal Farm), “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban” because “at any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it.”. Why is this the case? Because, “the British press is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.” 

Well, extrapolating to the modern age, it is clear that the propaganda – “the body of ideas it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question” – of private enterprise, which includes of course the mass media, has merely been transposed on to the “virtual state”. And with the enormous accumulation of personal data which is the basis of the surveillance capitalist 

economy, the “manufacture of consent” (as the progressive liberal journalist Walter Lippmann put it) and the conditioning of the commodity into the ideal citizen, is achieved much more effectively and efficiently than in Orwell’s day. 

Another way is through the support of a sufficiently devout state dedicated to the religious education of its commodity-citizens. Legislation such as the Online Safety Act in the UK is merely the same impulse to control inherent in all forms of authority. It is the collusion of state and religion manifested in the age of online pornography and pop-up adverts. Whether the intentions are benevolent or malicious is irrelevant. Either way it assumes the justification for the

ownership of the internet – or the printing press – by an unelected class, a priesthood, who claim without justification to represent “progress” and serve the interests of society. 

But once this is accepted, there becomes no justification for claiming that the internet should be free and open. Because if the internet really is a “virtual state” composed entirely of private companies, then surely they have every right to censor whatever they do not wish to see or hear. Just as I cannot go to, say, Iran (or Heaven) and shout whatever I want, by the same principle nor am I necessarily free to go to the “virtual state” and say whatever I please. The right to do this is entirely dependent on the benevolence of the unelected authority. Or, perhaps, the confidence this unelected authority has in its own power to manufacture consent. Something to remember in the age of Google. 

The average citizen-commodity has been so conditioned to believe that democracy and freedom are not innate principles but merely concepts to be passed vicariously up to some governing class, there to be defined and controlled on their behalf. (After all there were no affordable tickets for the Council of Nicaea.) And this fact is infinitely more dangerous than any “offensive content” or “incitement to violence” will ever be.

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