Whilst the internet’s development can be traced back to the 1940s (Turner, 2006; Flichy 2015), the rhetoric of a digital revolution primarily emerged during the early 1990s and mid-00s and was often produced by the US-based academic community which has been intrinsically involved with the advancement of the internet. The dominant conceptualizations put forward in their popular, scholarly writings about the technology’s past and future, became authoritative in our academic understanding of the internet’s social impact and significance. Subsequently, notions like ‘the electronic highway’ were adopted in legislative and popular discourse which, in turn, influenced how the internet was understood, designed, and used on a broader, societal level.

Notable authors of these influential texts - Howard Rheingold, Nicholas Negroponte, Sherry Turkle, and Geert Lovink - wrote their findings based on their own experiences with internet initiatives and from their particular theoretical backgrounds and positionality. Most importantly, these texts present valuable information as if coming from a time capsule; often framed with a rhetoric of transformation, the writers themselves contribute to the idea of a revolutionary internet following optimistic notions of digital utopianism and technological solutionism, situated in a particular Zeitgeist. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how these revolutionary notions developed over time and what their grander impact was on our contemporary conceptions, in and outside the influential American context. This is achieved by conducting a critical, historiographical analysis of canonical, intellectual literature about the early internet and thus re-contextualizes it as historical traces itself.

Digital labor has become an umbrella term for describing a range of digitally mediated practices from paid work in the gig economy (Srnicek 2017) to cultivating a personal brand online (Scolere, Pruchniewska, and Duffy 2018). This wellspring of activities now referred to as labor has muddied the waters, making digital labor an ambiguous concept at best (Gandini 2021; Goodwin 2022). This framing of user activity as labor also has limitations, as it necessarily produces reformist, rather than revolutionary, political ends.

Following Sadowski (2020), this paper challenges the conceptual framework of digital labor by re-theorizing the user/platform relation as rentier capitalism. Engels (1970) explained how tenants confront landlords not as sellers of labor-power but buyers of a commodity, and we argue that typical social media users confront platforms in an analogous way. Platforms thus only circulate existing value rather than create it, and this distinction matters in understanding their role in economic crises.

Because the digital labor concept misidentifies the user/platform relationship and concedes the commoditization of communication, reformist demands emerge from this discourse, like “Wages for Facebook” (Ptak 2014 as cited in Jung 2014) or data ownership as compensation (Chakravorti 2020). Capitalist data relations (Couldry and Mejias 2020) and the profit motive of corporate platforms cannot be addressed by renumerating users. As platforms attain infrastructural status (Plantin et al. 2018), our politics must reflect the need for their transformation into public utilities with democratic accountability, a revolutionary demand that has been displaced in the turn towards digital labor.

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this paper investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, privacy, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify Meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its social power. While certain artifacts attempt to confront the prevailing narrative related to privacy, such discourse is often ineffectively rooted in cyber-libertarian ideology. In order to more effectively challenge Meta’s social power, future critical discourse should be 1) more holistically deployed and 2) cognizant of the logics of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. Ultimately, this paper considers the rhetorical strategies and functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse, while also acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries.