235. EVERYTHING GOOD COULD STILL EXIST - On The Internet Without Capitalism

The most powerful idea we can ever hear is this: if we took away money right now, everything that exists would still exist.

Those natural resources from which things are made would not disappear, and those artificial creations of human ingenuity which combine existing resources into brand new things not available by nature alone could still be produced if the motivation was there.

Money is an imposed fiction designed to organise and control the use and exchange of those pre-existing resources, and to motivate people into using them to achieve certain ends. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. And imposed economic scarcity and the created need to “earn” a living has led to a cavalcade of necessities which have spawned all sorts of products and ideas. But other motivations are possible. And much of what we humans produce serves only the purpose of profiting someone rather than providing anything of any real value into the world. If we got rid of money we would lose those unnecessary and useless things perhaps. Meanwhile, those wonderful things which do have value and serve a purpose other than paying the bills for someone else, could still be created. Not for pay and profit, but for their use and enjoyment.

It was with this thought in mind I asked my junior Philosophy Club this week to imagine a world where the internet was invented without any profit motive. A world without money that was still motivated to invent computer technology because of its many useful applications. If the internet were invented in such a world, how might it differ from today?

I asked it because it occurred to me that most of the negativity around the internet boils down to the economic model of capitalism which infects it. Spurious influencers begging us to “like and subscribe” so that they can earn an income from their vacuous content. AI slop creeping into feeds so that tech companies can learn what we like and sell it back to us. Social media which mines our personal data and sells it to advertisers. Advertising in general, which generates the revenue most “content creators” get paid by and incentivises quantity over quality. Even competing companies offering variations on the same theme and vying desperately in the attention market for their piece of the pie.

Why are tech companies hesitant or immobile when it comes to stopping hate-speech, violent pornography, or online bullying and misinformation? Because they fear losing customers. Because controversy and scandal creates views and generates cash. The most outrageous, the most awful, the most viral thing gets the most clicks, so what incentive is there to take it down, even if it ruins someone’s life? Two days after starting up the new Philosophy Unleashed Substack, for example, The Guardian revealed how Substack profit from Nazi and other far-right newsletters being sent out on their platform. Which, under capitalism, of course they do!

Even the simple phishing email or online scam that one is vulnerable to when online stems from a profit motive in a world where we need money to live and money is in short supply. Such scammers use the internet to target their victims, but would have no need for their scams if all things they needed were available without a fee. In a world without money, where everything is available for free, what need would there be to scam people out of their already happily empty bank accounts?

Together my students and I imagined an internet used only to connect people. To play games together designed for excellent gameplay and stories, not merely as a means to get you to buy more and more upgrades and updates. To share information which no-one had a financial incentive any more to distort or dispute. To share art and funny things without the intent to get anything out of it. Not clogging up the feed with a billion similar nothings all seeking to get your click, but things that are genuinely funny or interesting. A place to keep in touch with those we love and like, and, yes, maybe even to connect with new people out there with similar interests. But not a minefield of bots trying to trick you into connection to serve some other financial purpose for the bot-masters.

There would still, of course, be some dangers. Just as there remain dangers in real life. The existence of the internet in such a world reminds us that money is not the only motivation, and crimes motivated by things other than money could still be carried out online, just as they currently are. But it remained the case that in today’s real world those sorts of crimes are made worse by the possibilities for financial gain some perpetrators find in them. For instance, someone seeking to trick someone online into meeting them in real life for some terrible act of abuse might still occur (just as such abuse happens offline too), but there at least would not be the sorts of professionalised human traffickers and organised gangs seeking to turn such abuse into a profitable business that we currently have with the internet as it was made under capitalism. Likewise, I am sure that awful far-right hate would continue to spew in an internet made in a world without money. At least to some extent. Such is the cost of free speech. But at least we would lose the hate-speech financially incentivised by social media demagogues or well-funded think-tanks who build empires of bile not because of ideological commitment to a terrible cause but because it lines their pockets every time their hate-speech is shared.

Gone too would be the economic circumstances in which such rhetoric and hatred rise. It becomes hard to falsely blame economic inequality on immigrants, asylum seekers and any other “other” the far-right likes to target when there is no longer an economy! No longer anything people don’t have. No longer anything “they” can be accused of “taking” from you. One suspects, in an internet made in a world without money, any far-right chatter which might still live on to infect online spaces will be confined to easily ignorable faraway corners, along with other cranks and crazies the majority of the world are happy to ignore.

We imagined the phone in our hands as a powerful tool for communication, sharing and hope, rather than a demanding lump of temptations we were all addicted to to serve the financial needs of other people. Something we could use to create and collaborate with instead of passively scroll on for someone else’s profits.

When you think about the fact that, in 2026, most of us keep in touch with friends and family using some sort of platform that accompanies our connection to loved ones with advertising, it is quite a chilling thought. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, as I did, I couldn’t imagine having phone-calls to the same people repeatedly interrupted by commercial messages, or letters we wrote to each other bundled with ads we had to trawl through before we got to the next paragraph. Yet today, this daily financially-motivated commercial violation into such private spheres of life is the norm.

If we took away money right now, everything that exists would still exist. Those natural resources from which things are made would not disappear, and those artificial creations of human ingenuity which combine existing resources into brand new things not available by nature alone could still be produced if the motivation was there. Imagine how much better the internet would be in such a world. Imagine, then, how much better many other things might be which are currently corrupted by that same insidious profit-motive lurking beneath the surface of so many norms and decisions, distorting our everyday life just so that someone else can pay their bills. Bills that we have collectively invented, with the shared fiction of “money”. A fiction it is entirely within our power to end right now with the simple act of disbelief and rejection of this imposed fantasy. A disbelief in money, fuelled by a far stronger belief that a much better world is possible without it.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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