"}Everybody understands that the military, as well as economic pressure\n and covert operations, are central pillars of American hegemony. It\u2019s \nalso fairly well understood that Hollywood is an important vehicle for \nprojecting American \u201csoft power.\u201d But in the last ten to fifteen years, \nthe internet has done far more to make the world think like Americans \nthan Marvel movies.
At one level, this is because of the way the online experience is \nstructured: the built environment of the internet, if you will. It used \nto be there were millions of different internet pages. But the logic of \ncapital accumulation, within the U.S. regulatory and cultural contexts, \nhas whittled them down to two basic models. Type one relies on you to \nsupply content, then manipulates your subconscious desires, keeping you \nscrolling through other user-generated content, for as long as \npossible\u2014all in the service of selling your attention to advertisers. It\n is by now quite obvious how the monstrously wealthy companies behind \nthis trick have warped and reshaped how the world is represented, and \nthe way we see each other.
The other major type of website requires you pay a subscription to \nwatch some kind of television show. With a curated streaming service \nlike Netflix (responsible for over 10 percent of global internet traffic\n during the pandemic), subsidiaries in India or Nigeria have local teams\n in place. But they were still hired by an American company, to maximize\n its profit. In order for streaming services to be profoundly American, \nyou don\u2019t need Americans running day-to-day operations on the ground \nthroughout the world, just like the British Empire didn\u2019t rely on \npersons with white English identities to do the same. Dynamics of \ndominance and cultural diffusion also happened through the selection of \nlocal vassals.
Of course, there are also \u201conline marketplaces\u201d where you can \npurchase goods. But you don\u2019t spend any time there; you just lose money.\n And since I am a journalist, I should probably acknowledge that there \nare still media web pages, where you can read a newspaper or magazine. \nBut in truth, for a majority of people, those are just sites where you \nclick away four to five pop-ups before giving up and returning to \nscrolling through the news on social media. Mainstream media sites these\n days get all their money from guilty liberals.
Then there is the content. Both major types of websites started out \noverwhelmingly populated by American users, and this shaped their \ncultures. American voices remain primary on most social media platforms,\n speaking through the biggest YouTube and Instagram accounts. In \nIndonesia, social media influencers make sure to use English,\n even if their audience is entirely local. As importantly, whether in \nChile or the Philippines, conversations tend to be governed by American \nconcepts and discursive practices. Even if the conversation is about \nBrazilian politics, a huge amount of internet-cultural capital is \nassociated with fluency in American terminology and meme language. The \nSouth American far right has obviously been influenced by right-wing U.S. YouTube culture. There are \u00a0German Q Anon accounts.
People from countries without our history of overt racial hierarchy \nget into labyrinthine conversations based on U.S. designations. Are Palestinians white? Are Filipinos the \u201cMexicans of Asia\u201d?\n But the United States is not normal. We have a very particular \nhistory\u2014beginning with the genocide of Native Americans, followed by a \nreliance on slave labor for development, and then de facto apartheid at \nleast until the 1960s\u2014which shapes our concepts for things like race and\n politics. There are many reasons you would not want the whole planet to\n normalize our cultural superstructure.
This summer\u2019s worldwide Black Lives Matter protests illuminated the degree to which American culture is now universal. In an essay\n that I don\u2019t agree with in its entirety, Alex Hochuli pointed out \nsomething remarkable about BLM marches in places like Finland and \nSerbia. Some people, it seems, weren\u2019t marching in solidarity with the people of the richest nation on earth. They were marching as if they were themselves Americans. But\n this makes a lot of sense, because (with some major exceptions), when \nyou are on the internet, you are basically in the United States.