Smell the rose, the sweet sweet rose that grows

on castle walls in heaven.

Kula Shaker,  Hey Dude

Coinciding with the ambiguity, with the unique threshold from which the pleasant and the terrible emerge (0.27)—pleasant for the self and sovereignty and terrible for the prey—in the eyes of their creators the virtual paradeisos appear in their soft facet, as walled gardens. Indeed, this is the name given to social networks and platforms when referring to them as opposed to the open web, that is, the original configuration of the Internet. The confluence between the two terminologies would seem surprising were it not for the fact that the new walled gardens are actually heirs to the commodification of the paradeisos that took shape in the modern era as the amusement park and the shopping mall (6.14, 6.15, 6.16) which, in turn, correspond to a “pleasant” evolution of the topography of the royal gardens and menageries (6.7, 6.8, 6.11, 6.12).

The emergence of these virtual walled gardens is inseparable from the economic dynamics of Silicon Valley and is intimately related to the rise and expansion of Google and Facebook’s virtual paradeisos. It is in the pattern of conquest and colonization (10.5, 10.6) that has led these coporations to acquire and absorb hundreds of companies and startups since the first decade of this century where we find the origin of the new virtual gardens. The procedure is straightforward: a corporation adds a variety of small companies or startups to its paradeisos that allow it to offer a greater number of online services to its users, so that they don’t feel the need to leave their ecosystem to lead their virtual lives. This move is essential for the survival of any virtual paradeisos as new services can enable better and more efficient data capture from different sources, thus diversifying the company’s “behavioral portfolio.” (10.7, 10.8)

Exclusivity is essential to properly wall off each garden, so inter-platform wars are not unusual. “After Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012, Twitter stopped letting Instagram users import their Twitter followers. Instagram retaliated by cutting off users’ ability to share photos on Twitter. More recently, Facebook has blocked users of Twitter-owned Vine from accessing their Facebook friends list on the app.”¹ According to Marco Arment, former chief technology officer at Tumblr, this situation affects cross-platform interoperability as they “lock you in, shut out competitors and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out it would be useless.”²

This situation is creating true virtual burghs (boroughs)—originally castles surrounded by a village and a wall (0.28, 0.29)—which, like Facebook, now want to issue their own cryptocurrencies to guarantee an almost complete supply chain for their users. In all likelihood these virtual burghs will eventually configure themselves as the new fiefdoms of the digital middle ages, the dark ages we are fast approaching. This combination of circumstances is what Yanis Varoufakis has aptly called technofeudalism.

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1. Ryan Holmes, “From Inside Walled Gardens, Social Networks Are Suffocating The Internet As We Know It,” Fast Company, August 9, 2013. https://www.fastcompany.com/3015418/from-inside-walled-gardens-social-networks-are-suffocating-the-internet-as-we-know-it ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎