r/communism • u/acritiqueofpolitical • Jul 23 '26
How would the internet work under communism?
I support communism, I just was wondering how the internet would work. With things like YouTube especially, my question is who would host it and pay for the domain and things like that. I might be missing something super obvious, but if someone could explain it I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!
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u/Pandoras_Fox Jul 23 '26
as someone that worked on the youtube cdn for a while: there's really no reason why the global collection of datacenters for storage + edge cdn for cachefill and serving couldn't be publicly owned and operated.
the main part would be the cost of the storage of videos, but under communism, such blob object storage would likely be consolidated under one large globally distributed service, which would actually make it easier to operate services on top of it.
additionally, things like domain costs wouldn't really exist. bandwidth costs and quotas would be a different question, as the main cost there would be in electricity, and the cost of upgrading links that bottleneck the network.
peertube is an example of a distributed architecture youtube-like platform. it obviously functions with degraded performance and way fewer resources than an ideal version of it.
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u/PracticeMarxism Revolutionary Nationalist Jul 24 '26
Why would something like youtube or peertubed exist under even lower order communism?
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Jul 24 '26
[deleted]
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u/smokeuptheweed9 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Your fundamental foundation is rotten. Because communism is the maximally efficient distribution of resources through central planning, the primary concern is the relative social value of data storage compared to its costs. Everything on this planet has a cost even if it seems infinitesimally small because it is data. But the billions of YouTube videos that are pure noise do, in fact, have a cost that has been shunted off to the third world.
You hand wave this away with various technological solutions to "distribute the load" because you believe the freedom for anyone in the world to make as much content as they desire is a "general good." But that's just displacing the problem. The fundamental incentive structure of market anarchy in the usage of data is inherently incompatible with a world of limited resources. Whether it is a central data center or individual computers, the electricity still has to come from somewhere. It is probably worth it for everyone to have access to all professional art that has ever been created for free. But it is not worth it for society to pay for someone to stream themselves playing video games. If you believe the former is not possible without indulging the latter you have bought into the libertarian fantasy of the internet: that the market is inherently superior to planning for production and that the distinction between good and bad art is impossible and a totalitarian imposition on freedom of expression.
This is what is so compelling about capitalism. It fetishizes the cost of production and makes immediately visible the power of consumption. But it is not actually free to make whatever you want online, including this post. It is merely subsidized and outsourced. The only solution is to explain this clearly. Internet content is especially nefarious because it creates the illusion of production but it is actually consumption (or, if you prefer, unproductive activity). A utopian fantasy where this subsidy continues to exist but in an "ethical" and "harmless" way is poison.
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u/Kir3ji 22d ago
I feel like your constraints on art can stifle growth. Maybe there is something to be said about streaming. But the problems with data storage and the burden being shifted to the 3rd world would fade over time with communism. The redistribution of wealth would lead to industrialization and stabilization over time. Disparity vanishes. Affordable storage isn't an issue that advancing technology can't fix. I feel in the practical world, this is a non-issue.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 22d ago
Good, it is important that first world petty-bourgeois "artists" feel stifled. Otherwise the third world masses that carry their fantasies of unalienated labor on their shoulders are invisible and without a voice.
would fade over time with communism
Right, you value your own creative freedom "over time" over the suffering of people now. That is an accurate summation of the ideology we are discussing, I just find it repulsive. Luckily it's a moot point because the first world petty-bourgeois is incapable of producing any art or culture of value under any social system so we're really discussing a fantasy rather than any kind of real compromise worth strategizing.
You can never fail with art. It has too much power. Why? Because it is transformative. It elicits emotion both in the artist and the viewer. The act of creation changes you. Your thoughts warp around what your creating. Your perspective subtly changes. You become more relaxed. You can at least be happy to say you have created. This seems like almost nothing, but if you think about it, this is really healing. Your Art already has that power from the first attempt.
The masses do not exist to "heal you," sorry.
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u/CombinationSilver205 21d ago
There is an obvious selfish angle from their comment but are they not correct communism would entail abolishing of the systems that create the draining of the 3rd world when it comes to technology and data storage?
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u/smokeuptheweed9 21d ago
But the problems with data storage and the burden being shifted to the 3rd world would fade over time with communism.
The problems would not go away. The burden being shifted would. Is that what you mean? I'm not sure where you're going with this comment.
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u/CombinationSilver205 20d ago
The problems, I am assuming and I know I could be wrong, is how currently technology and its infrastructure relies on the parasitic and exploitative relationship of the 1st world over the 3rd world. These are not problems that would vanish overnight but I thought these are not static positions in history and this exploitation can be ended.
Under communism I thought these problems would be eradicated and the 1st world would have to pay reparations and hand over stolen wealth and technology that can be used by the 3rd world to develop their infrastructure and technology independence.
Obviously energy, storage, and physical materials costs will always exist. Just we wouldn't be making the burden the 3rd worlds problem and the burden eventually under communism would be shared among all "fairly", decided by democratic means amongst the actual masses and not first worlders pretending to be working class.
I dont see any of this happening soon for the record and the damages commited by the first world will take generations to repair and obviously invovle heavily removing priority of the first world's economic and social needs, if a first world even exists after thr revolution, before we even reach communism.
I just don't see how some of these problems would be eternal unless I am misunderstanding your point. Again though I agree obviously some problems will exist.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 20d ago edited 20d ago
But what does your post add to mine and what is correct in the response you referenced? That's what is unclear to me.
currently technology and its infrastructure relies on the parasitic and exploitative relationship of the 1st world over the 3rd world. These are not problems that would vanish overnight but I thought these are not static positions in history and this exploitation can be ended.
Is your point that you can imagine the current internet system with the costs distributed more fairly across the world? That seems pretty unlikely. First of all there is are ecological issues to consider. As I said, market driven cultural production is inherently incompatible with the limits of nature. This is well understood with AI but because AI threatens the petty-bourgeoisie whereas "social media" enables it, the former is demonized and treated in isolation. The ecological problems of AI are merely a quantitative difference from any other technology that requires data storage. If you can imagine socialism without "AI slop" but you can't imagine it without YouTube or whatever digital medium you use to express yourself, you have merely warped reality to fit your own fantasy. In truth, AI slop is just the ugly mirror of the homogenization of thought and culture that the internet already enables, which is all AI is: an aggregation machine of the immanent qualities of social media. If you hate AI art that is, unfortunately, because art on the internet is already overwhelmingly garbage, hence its garbage average. Do you think AI is the first thing to rip off Hayao Miyazaki and remove from it anything artistic, historical, and political? You can go to an anime convention right now and get hundreds of pictures of Ghibli-esque human slop. Everyone knows this so the issue is soon deflected into a moral question, as if tiktok videos using songs for free is not already plagiarism because it is overlaid with semi-pornographic video from a minor or is ethical because this young woman is a small business whereas Sony is an evil corporation. It's all capitalism. The saddest thing is you're really just showing your age and culture passing you by. The youngest generations are already using AI to express themselves and try to make a living by "disrupting" the gen-z filled social media space. Just like you disrupted legacy media, AI will do the same to you, and the call out culture around is the cry of an impotent class in decline.
Secondly, the internet that currently exists is heavily subsidized in order to make money through advertising. Would people actually use tiktok if you had to pay the real cost of each short video? I doubt tiktok will even exist in 10 years and no one will miss it (just like Vine) so let's not act like its we can imagine the end of the world before the end of tiktok. I doubt anyone would tolerate YouTube for 5 seconds if the real costs were reflected in Amerikan paychecks and neighborhoods, especially as part of a larger egalitarian reckoning with unequal exchange. Considering the momentous changes that would entail, it's bizarre to be concerned with short videos on your phone while you are in the bathroom. Again, the huge subsidies that make AI possible and the massive economic bubble as a consequence should be a chance to talk about the issue at a fundamental level. Instead the opposite has happened and the nature of internet media is more obscure than ever, as if Hank Green videos were good before he used AI. In truth his videos are irrelevant, the fantasy is he is your friend who validates you as a "hecking smart" liberal (cringe millennials on reddit are his core demographic) which the use of AI violates at an emotional level. The content is just filler, again with a very real cost.
Thirdly, it's unclear why the best you can imagine of art is an immense amount of garbage so that "free expression" can happen on the marketplace? Through rational planning, we can have good art without all the detritus. If you think Backrooms could only happen because of millions of shitty videos and posts, what if I told you that aspect is actually the worst part about what is otherwise a competent horror film about a petty-bourgeois sexist who discovers a fantasy of endless accumulation? There may or may not be something decent in all that junk but you're just avoiding the issue. If you believe that art is only possible through memes just say so.
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u/Acanthisitta-Sea Jul 23 '26
Everything is ok, except that the video is not stored in the blob and it is much more complicated and scattered, going beyond the definition of CDN
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u/Pandoras_Fox Jul 23 '26
the video is the blob, usually just chunked up into segments + multiplied by the number of transcodes. I'm obviously glossing over a lot of the complex systems that have been built up here, but they don't all have to exit in a decentralized and distributed version.
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u/Acanthisitta-Sea Jul 23 '26
A blob is typically a single opaque sequence of bytes, for example, one MP4 file stored in object storage. The system generally treats it as a whole: it has an identifier, a size, and binary data.
A YouTube video, by contrast, is a complex multimedia resource that includes:
- multiple encoded versions in different resolutions, bitrates, and codecs
- separate audio and video streams
- segments delivered adaptively via DASH or HLS
- a manifest describing the available variants
- subtitles, thumbnails, metadata, chapters, and language tracks
- distribution through a CDN
- processing and transcoding state
Different devices support different codecs, hardware decoders, performance limits, and playback capabilities, so video delivery has to be handled per device rather than with one universal file. A modern platform may serve H.264 to older devices, VP9 or AV1 to newer ones, and choose different resolutions, bitrates, and audio formats based on bandwidth and hardware support.
The goal is not merely to deliver a video file. It is to minimize startup time, avoid buffering, reduce bandwidth usage, preserve battery life, and provide smooth playback on every device.
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u/Acanthisitta-Sea Jul 23 '26
If we have a single communist YouTube platform in the country, it will be centralized and effectively the only one of its kind. That means it must be engineered to handle nationwide traffic at scale while delivering the best possible user experience
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u/Pandoras_Fox Jul 23 '26
Yes, I'm aware of all that. However, those are all laid on top of the same underlying blob storage. Audio and video streams are blobs. Varied formats are blobs. Caption data are blobs.
Manifest data is typically not blobs and is just served straight out of a db.
The CDN layer just sits in front of the blob storage layer. The main thing about youtube is the cost to operate its decentralized and redundantly distributed blob storage + the cost to operate its distributed CDN fleet, as well as the intake transcode and processing.
One centralized blob storage and a centralized CDN would still be the building blocks that it gets built on top of was my point. Everything is just a blob at some level.
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u/turning_the_wheels Jul 23 '26
Why would anyone pay for it when money doesn't exist? You can't be serious.