Sandvig vs. the Radical Internet Fringe

Before I get started, I just want to make it perfectly clear that I really liked Christian Sandvig’s “The Internet as Anti-Television”; it lays bare an aspect of the internet as content curator, and in turn content prioritizer, that I think doesn’t really get discussed much. I had little idea of the processes inherent in bringing video to your fingertips (the VAGUEST POSSIBLE idea), and this piece will probably affect the way that I think about YouTube for a long while.

However, I think that Sandvig’s argument isn’t as cut-and-dried as he would have us believe. It is pretty powerfully undermined by the vaguely recent resurgence of the Internet as not only a facilitator of P2P file sharing, but as a honus for modern illegal activity, particularly in the realm of video.

To put a finer point on it, the revenue stream of the internet is undermined by torrenting and other file-sharing services. Let me be honest here - a MASSIVE majority of the content that I’ve elected to watch after getting rid of cable (excluding the legal video services I use - Sling TV, Netflix, YouTube - and these I totally get Sandvig’s point with) has been acquired via file-sharing sites over the internet, or hosted on some weird Russian website. In these subcutaneous content streams, priority of information becomes basically nonexistent; video becomes more like Lick’s dream, content for the masses, non-dictated and wholly elective. This priority, furthermore, is even more compromised with the advent and popularization of various in-browser ad-blocking services, which fully remove money from the occasion. Joe talks about a capacity for intervention, and while I don’t think that torrenting all of the media you consume is necessarily a good ethical choice - or, for that matter, a decision necessarily motivated by more than ambivalence or laziness - I think that it may be at the very least a potential form of resistance to the cultural modes foisted upon us by the distribution infrastructure.