The mirror colonization of the internet
As someone who grew up in internet spaces, who first got onto the internet as a child during the Myspace era, I’ve watched the slow transition of the internet from an open wilderness, full of small communities with their own rules, to an enclosed space with virtual walls and fences, where the rules are made, not by the community, but by the website (or app) owners, by internet barons if you will.
When I was eleven I remember having a class discussion about the internet and how the (then growing) Facebook was changing the landscape of it. “It won’t always be the wild west online”, was what our teacher said, at the time I didn’t believe him. It was inconceivable to me that the internet could be boxed in, I was a nerdy kid who spent a lot of time online, and it seemed boundless back then. Of course things have changed now, now only have internet spaces been enclosed, there is an active attempt to push out human voices on the internet via AI slop.
Today I want to explore the evolution of the internet as a cultural space through the lens of colonization, because frankly, I don’t think it’s an inaccurate framing. This is in no way intended to lessen the impact of real-world Colonialism, and of course, unlike in real-world Colonization, no one has died in the process of internet colonization. But subcultures have died, communities have died, and spaces that were once communal have been privatized, controlled and exploited, and in that sense the changes that have happened to the internet can be said to be a mirror of real-world Colonization. So to distinguish this phenomena from real-world capital-C Colonization, which has had an almost incomprehensible impact on history and still affects people deeply today, I’m going to refer to this phenomena as mirror-colonization, because it reflects capital-C Colonization, and I believe, is a derived from a similar mindset of resource extraction, and devaluing humans, that drove real-world Colonization.
Mirror-colonization, as I see it, pertains to ephemeral, non-physical communities rather than communities that inhabit or have inhabited, real-world places, it involves the commodification, privatization and exploitation of that non-physical community for profit, often at the expense of the community that built or supports it. The internet is not a place physically, but is still a place we go to, with different regions, such as different websites, apps, forums etc. And each of these online places have their own community and own culture, or multiple communities and cultures.
On the internet, mirror-colonization started with the privatization of the internet, which to an extent, began even before I was born, but which really ramped up in the early 2010s. After moving away from more open forms of internet space curation, such as webrings, internet spaces became curated via search engines SEO (search engine optimization), which ultimately lead to paid SEO, allowing companies who had the most money to push their websites to the front page of search engines like Google. This led only to the prioritization of websites owned by for profit companies, but led to advertisements becoming some of the first results you would see in a Google search. But that point, the internet had already begun to silo and congeal into large corporate owned websites that required creating user accounts to view information, Facebook and Twitter were two major
But internet places are not the only ephemeral communities where mirror-colonization can happen. A similar type of mirror-colonization can be said to have taken place in the punk community in the 80s. What started as an organic subculture, intended to rebel against corporate greed, commercialization, and capitalism (among other things) eventually became co-opted by those very same forces. Corporate companies now sell the idea of punk (along every other subculture under the sun), offering your strategically pre-ripped jeans for only $9.99, made by an impoverished woman in Bangladesh, so that you can look punk, while completely disregarding the ethos and ideas of punk. This mirror-colonization is a process which has happened to countless subcultures, punk, hippie, emo, reggae, hip-hop, and countless more. Mirror-colonization is probably happening to some subculture I’m unaware of right now. I want to explore the topic of subcultures, mirror-colonization and commercialization more thoroughly in a future post, but for now, let’s just acknowledge that this problem is widespread and pervasive in 2026..
I bring up punk in the context of mirror-colonization, because I think it’s important to acknowledge that this phenomena did not begin with the internet, nor will it end if we all stopped using the internet tomorrow, the sense of soullessness you may feel when perusing the internet these days is not rooted in the internet itself but is a systemic problem. This is a pervasive problem that’s rooted in the way modern society has built up capitalism, to be a system that extracts resources, for profit, as efficiently as possible, and then disregards the source (place, community etc.), those resources were extracted from.
Extraction of resources at all costs, is where colonization, both capital C-Colonization and mirror colonization ultimately lead. And this brings us to generative AI, specifically generative AI in the context of creative work and community made work. At this point you’ve probably heard about how generative AI pulls from large databases of unlicensed works, and how the creators of those works have no way to opt out, or even know that their work is being stolen. I am by no means wholly anti gen AI, being an HCI researcher myself, I of course understand that it has its positive use cases, even including use cases for consumer-facing interactive systems. And perhaps in a future post, to counter the negativity of this one, I will go over what I feel are some examples of positive use cases of gen AI. But in the context of cultural artifacts such as visual art, creative writing, and music, and the communal online spaces that support these endeavors, gen AI is almost wholly consumptive without contributing anything of substance.
Therefore, in the context of communal creative spaces, which make up much of the internet, gen AI is akin to a strip mining company or logging company tearing down a forest. A force that comes into a thriving space, takes all the resources that space has, and leaves nothing but trash and pollution in return, leaving the space lifeless and empty. Just look at Deviantart for an example of a place where this has happened, what was once a thriving community of artists and art fans, actively creating, interacting and engaging with each other, is now a wasteland of gen AI art, with a dying user base and little engagement. Now you could say that Deviantart has been on the decline for awhile now, and you’d be right, but the nail in the coffin was when Deviantart stole it’s user’s artwork to train its own gen AI model, and much like loggers destroying a forest, killed the very thing that gave it value.
Gen AI, as it stands currently, is largely used for the extraction and exploitation of resources, in this case personal data. Personal being the operative word there, the resources being extracted are personal, from photos of a child’s birthday party, to a poem written for a dead loved one, to a self-published book painstakingly written with blood sweat and tears. These are the artifacts that are taken without consent, processed as raw material, and then sold back to us, not unlike a mining company taking up land that does not legally belong to them and then selling what was extracted from that land back to its former inhabitants. This is, I believe, why gen AI, and especially gen AI in art and other cultural settings upsets people, it’s certainly why gen AI upsets me at times. On the one hand, as an HCI researcher I am excited to see how we can use LLMs and other gen AI systems in interesting ways, but as an artist I see the damage that gen AI cultural artifacts cause to online creative communities. And while I make no claims of being a historian, I can see the historical parallels between what’s happening with gen AI and what happened with other major technological revolutions, such as the industrial revolution which was supported by the transatlantic slave trade. Which is to say, in its current form, it’s a technology that is built off exploitation of labor, as has so often been the case.
If gen AI is to be a net positive for society as its major proponents claim it will inevitably be this is something that must be reckoned with.
Note: What I post on this blog is opinion, not scientific research, though I will sometimes link to relevant open-access scientific publications in my further reading section. If you are interested in my research, please visit my website’s about page.
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Further Reading:
Post-Colonial Punk
Why DeviantArt Will Soon Be Dead And How The Platform Is Killing Itself
Andrejevic, Mark. (2009). Privacy, Exploitation and the Digital Enclosure. Amsterdam Law Forum. 1. 10.37974/ALF.86.
Oksanen, Atte & Celuch, Magdalena & Oksa, Reetta & Savolainen, Iina. (2024). Online communities come with real-world consequences for individuals and societies. Communications Psychology. 2. 10.1038/s44271-024-00112-6.
