Freedom and power. When I say these words I imagine a stable grasp on their standalone meanings, perhaps even their mutual implications when examined together. In fact, their dialectic reverb seems cranked more loudly than ever of late.

The is the theme of Yochai Benkler in his essay published earlier this year in Daedalus. With a soberly balanced control I envy, he makes his case early for an Internet under threat:

“If we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points as they emerge and devise mechanisms of recreating diversity of constraint and degrees of freedom in the network to work around these forms of reconcentrated power.”

An intriguing read and worth the $15.

One of the points of control Benkler warns us about losing it seems has already been ceded to the corporatists by a mix of players including the ever helpful US congress, the W3C and the Mozilla Foundation. It concerned Netflix’s eventually successful attempt to have DRM controls baked-in to the browsers we all use, slipped cleverly into the recent HTML5 standards.

Benkler has christened the loss and the trend it leads the “The Netflix effect” and traces its success to an “increased identification of content as culture”. Let that roll around inside your dozing alarmist brain for a few moments. Explore the implications. Repeat…

I enjoy an unlikely vantage point across the battle grounds of the interwebs. My professional career spans thirty years in the dark arts of marketing and advertising, all of it in the data and then digital age of brand marketing. I teach its secret serums and persuasive sauce making at the graduate level. Yet, by avocation I spend almost as much time analyzing, critiquing and harassing the ever-encroaching neoliberal machine. Berardi calls this new dominatrix of all things public, private and in-between, semocapital. That has an accurate, suitably dystopian, ring to me.

The next few years will be telling in this accelerating while compressing world where content – especially in its commercial form – become both culture for “us”, and bank for the businesses and states owning these points of control where content must squeeze through. A world where power keeps gathering in the board- and cloak-rooms of fewer and less benign actors with every passing quarter. Spend the fifteen bucks on Benkler’s calm but startling list of warnings. Then do something about it.