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