From Newsgroup: comp.misc

How The Internet Got Gentrified
===============================

March 4, 2026

By Jess Kung, Gene Demby, Leah Donnella

We all know what gentrification looks like IRL--boxy, corporate-owned
apartment complexes, places to get a quick bowl for lunch, streets
that are dubbed "cleaner" and "safer" (even at the expense of the
people who used to live there). But what does gentrification look
like online? We're talking to Jessa Lingel, who studies digital
culture at the University of Pennsylvania, about her argument that
the internet has become gentrified, and that we're all suffering the consequences.

* * *

I'm Gene Demby. All right, y'all, so I am talking to you right now
from this little recording booth at NPR headquarters in Washington,
D.C. And it's mad cold in here. But anyway, when we first moved into
this building, there was basically nothing over here. Mostly just
parking lots. There was the D.C. Housing Authority and some other
local government buildings that sat mostly empty. There was an aging
public housing complex right across the street. There was this
notoriously poorly placed Wendy's on a lonely island at the
intersection of a bunch of highways and major thoroughfares for some
reason. Like, it was very dangerous to go there just because you
could lose your life trying to cross to get there. There was no place
over here for lunch. Like, only a few places to really walk to.

My old Code Switch teammate, Hansi Lo Wang, we would have to, like,
amble around to find something to eat just to eat something
different. I want to resist the urge of romanticizing that time or
place too much. But, like, those folks at the housing authority, they
would have these big barbecues when the weather would get warm and
they'd invite everybody in neighborhood to come through and get some
food. On Friday nights, there would be movie nights in, like, the
empty parking lot next door, like, just people sitting on the
concrete to watch, I don't know, "The Princess Bride" or whatever. To
be clear, it was not perfect, but it had, like, texture, you know?

Now, sing along if you know this song. This neighborhood today is unrecognizable. Like that Wendy's, those housing projects and the
people who lived in the housing projects, they're all gone. There are
at least a dozen of those big, boring, five-over-one style apartment
buildings, you know, the ones run by corporate landlords, and they
sit next to each other, stretching up and out in every direction, all
with the same amenities and that basically cost around the same
amount of way too much. There's a Gold's Gym and REI. And now there
are plenty of chain slop bowl places in walking distance and lots of installations meant to keep unhoused people out of the area. And the neighborhood, of course, got the inevitable rebrand with a name
change and everything. It's called NoMa, which is really hard to say
without feeling self-conscious.

This neighborhood in D.C., like neighborhoods in almost every
mid-sized city, is cleaner, more convenient and there are, like, way
more people over here now. But even with all that capital coming in
here and all that construction, it's not exactly a neighborhood--you
feel me?--even if it is easier to get lunch. And while we all see
this stuff happening in the built world outside, IRL, these same
things have been accelerating in our online lives. Everything is more convenient, is cleaner. But, like, there was a time in which we were
all congregating in very different corners of the World Wide Web on
little message boards and niche sites or blogs. Remember blogs, you
know, with other folks who shared our dorky interests? Shout out to
my folks at Okayplayer.

And again, I'm trying to resist the urge to be, like, too nostalgic
about that time in those spaces because they had their own issues and
all the problems that come with being in messy community with other
humans, even if that community was digitally mediated. But, like,
those spaces have all been mostly swallowed up by the cleaner and
easier functionality offered on the platforms run by these giant,
amoral tech companies. Like, we are doom scrolling and not going to
the store to try and clothes and arguing with these randos on rage
bait posts. Like, we are all more online than ever, and we are
clearly not having a good time, y'all, like, offline or online,
everything, it seems, is being gentrified.

Jessa Lingel:

In a lot of ways, you could say that the history of the internet is a
history of commercialization, consolidation, moving the messiness of
digital culture to the margins and really trying to make it clean and sanitized.

Demby:

That voice you're hearing belongs to Jessa Lingel. And Jessa studies
digital culture at the University of Pennsylvania, and she's the
author of the book, "The Gentrification Of The Internet: How To
Reclaim Our Digital Freedom." And on this ep, we're talking to Jessa
about how we got here to this very segregated, very surveilled and
very samey-feeling internet.

Lingel:

I mean, it's hard to remember now, but there was a time around right
when I started studying digital culture when really people genuinely
believed that digital technologies were going to make the world
better, that social media was going to make the world better, that it
was going to make us more democratic and people were going to use it
to break down barriers. And we've all gone pretty cynical on that
vision now. But when I was first coming to studying digital culture,
that was the main vibe. And I was interested in that, but I was also
pretty sure that that wasn't matching up with everything that I was
seeing with the communities I was involved with.

Demby:

And you said we've become more cynical about the way the internet
moves. And your 2021 book is called "The Gentrification Of The
Internet." So how would you say that our online lives are gentrified?
Did the gentrification happen after you sort of started paying
attention, or was it something that was already happening?

Lingel:

It was already happening.

Demby:

OK.

Lingel:

And the platform that started that shift was Facebook, and it's
also--you know, Facebook, now, people kind of roll their eyes like,
oh, Facebook, that's where my mom is or my grandparents are. But
Facebook in--people--young people in 2004, 2005, talked about
Facebook the same way that young folks now talk about TikTok. But
Facebook got us started in this gentrification journey with their
real names policy, you know, with their insistence that if you wanted
to use a platform, you had to use your real names. And they were
trying to do that to sort of originally lock down idea of the
internet and digital culture and social media as something that was
only for the elite. Like, literally, you had to have a harvard.edu
email address if you wanted to use Facebook. Then it became the Ivy
League, then it became college students and then it busted out to
everybody.

Demby:

I distinctly remember that period of time when, like, we were all
trying to, like--at first, like, yo, can I--you got a Facebook
Invite? It was, like, really hard to actually get on Facebook. It's
so funny now, like you said, like, Facebook is, like, the most
populist, like, where everybody is now.

Lingel:

Yeah. There was even a time when Gmail was like that.

You had to be invited to use Gmail. It was a big deal to get that
Gmail invite.

And now people are like, what? Which Gmail? I have five different
Gmails, you know? Like, and the sense of exclusion, like you're
saying, is gone from Facebook. But the policies that kept that
exclusion in place are still there. So you had to use your real name.
You had to, you know, be tied at first to an institution. And that
was a real shift away from an earlier form of digital culture where
you were anonymous or pseudonymous, you, you know, messed around with
your identity. You were experimenting. So there was a real change
that Facebook instituted, and that change continues to proliferate
online today still.

Demby:

Can you--are there examples of the ways that kind of exclusivity is
working, like, that we just take as a given today?

Lingel:

Yeah. I think there's a couple ways that I see it. One is the idea
that if a platform is going to succeed, it needs to scale. It needs
to be as big as possible. And the other way that you see that is that
new features are expected. If your platform is getting left behind
rather to--you know, relative to other platforms, then that's a
problem, and you start to have questions about, is my--the community
where I'm building on this platform, is it getting left behind? Do we
need to update to move on?

Demby:

So how do people usually respond when you introduce to them the idea
that their online lives are gentrified?

Lingel:

I see the idea as something that people experience all the time, and
they're just happy to have a name to describe it. Honestly, I don't
think I've ever talked to anyone who's like, I don't feel that way.
My online experience feels very authentic and noncommercial.

Demby:

(Laughter).

Lingel:

So the idea for me calling it gentrification was really just to name
a phenomenon I'd been seeing for a long time. And that's very
familiar to people. I mean, I say this at one point in the book, but
I was so struck by how my students have changed in the last 15 years.
You know, when I first stepped into a classroom, there was a lot of
excitement about digital technologies. People saw it as, you know,
something that was going to be useful for them through their careers,
but also important for community. And, you know, this was a tool of
democracy. And then, 15 years later, I step into the classroom, and
students cannot believe that that was ever true, that anyone ever
genuinely felt that way. Which kind of took the wind out of my sails
a little bit as someone who's, like, my early career was all about,
like, hey, what about privacy? Hey, what about, you know, people on
the margins? How is this going to affect them? And now everybody's
kind of on that same page, and we're really in this long techlash
moment, as some folks call it.

Demby:

What do--I mean, it's really interesting to hear that your college
students are disappointed (laughter)--broadly disappointed with the
internet. Like, what kind of things do they say about their online
experiences?

Lingel:

Yeah, they are pretty resigned, you know? They feel like there isn't
really an option to be offline. So the worst thing you could say to
them is, like, why don't you just spend less time online? 'Cause that
just doesn't feel possible for them or doable for them. But they know
that they are a product. They know that their attention is a product.
They know that everything they look at online feeds into an algorithm
and a data profile about who they are. The shift I've had to make,
especially when I teach more about, you know, privacy and
surveillance, is just because you have to give up some of your data
most of the time, does not mean you have to give up all of your data
all of the time. And that has been pretty successful for students,
where they're like, you know, you're right. Like, just because I want
to location share with my friends doesn't mean I need to do this all
of the time. So for me now, it's kind of about breaking through that resignation and trying to get them to think about the ways that they
do still have some control and power over their online lives.

* * *

You know, gentrification, whether you're talking about neighborhoods
or technologically, it's not just a couple of people coming in and
being like, this sure is a cheap place to live. I'm going to come in
here, and then I'm going to set up a coffee shop, right? It's
actually about a more structural set of rules.

Demby:

We've been chopping it up with Jessa Lingel, who studies digital
culture at the University of Pennsylvania, and she makes the argument
that our online lives have been gentrified and cleaned up in a way
that looks really similar to the way that gentrification is playing
out IRL. So I asked her, how does this stuff actually work?

You say that gentrification is happening on the internet in so many
ways, but it mostly affects these three main categories. There's
culture, there's industry and there's infrastructure. So let's talk
about how this is showing up in culture first.

Lingel:

So I, you know, have been studying counter-cultural groups, you know,
different activist groups, and they have faced this struggle for a
long time over, do we use the platforms that are already out there,
or do we try and build our own? And some of the communities who have
built their own platforms, they see their platforms are functioning.
They work. They, you know, help people connect with each other and
push things forward in the ways that they want, but they can't help
also know that there are these other tools out there that are getting
more sophisticated and bigger all of the time. And it really reminds
me of living in a neighborhood like in South Philly, where your house
looks perfectly fine until a big old monster house moves in right
next to it. And suddenly, your house, which had always been fine for
you and your family and your neighbors, suddenly looks much smaller
and just, like, a little bit shabbier just 'cause you have this other
house that's way out of step with the rest of the neighborhood.

And so there's that sort of sense of we have to compete with these
larger platforms that is introduced by these larger platforms. It's
not anything going wrong in your own community. And we've seen that
with, you know, some of the smaller platforms that I've studied, you
know, many folks have never probably heard of. I studied a platform
called BME for folks interested in body modification, and the
platform was designed by people from that community. It was always
designed to be small. It was never meant to have more than 10,000
users. It was literally coded that way so that it couldn't have more
than 10,000 users. And it was based on, you know, the designers had
read this stuff about how, like, small communities shouldn't grow
over a certain size or you lose that sense of social connection.

And that meant that they had more control over, you know, people knew
each other, people were never more than a couple degrees of
separation away from each other. You know, they could control
content, you know, content that was interesting to them about body
modification would have totally been censored on a platform like
Facebook, but it was part of their community. It was, you know,
around modifications and stuff like that. So they had more control,
and everything was fine for a while. That site goes back to the early
1990s. And then once Facebook came around, users kind of got
restless, like, well, why can't we have stuff for mobile? Why can't
we have--you know, why are we locked into, you know, a certain amount
of image content? Why is our messaging feature so crummy? And it's
just that sense of comparison to something bigger and better, really
sort of bleeds into a sense of discontent for many folks.

Demby:

Yeah. And I guess if a lot of those folks try to recreate that
community on Facebook, which has all the, you know, on the top line,
all the functionality, it's just such a much more, like, unruly,
unpleasant experience, right? 'Cause it's just like--just mad people
was, like, scaled up. Like, early internet, like, we have kind of,
like, weird obligations to each other as people online. You know what
I mean? Like, we know each other but we...

That's all gone because it's, like, you know, you said this site was
originally for 10,000 people, but if it's a hundred thousand people,
or a hundred fifty thousand people, it's like a different--completely
different experience, you know? Just, like, even if you don't like
somebody, on a small platform, you don't pop off at them because you
have to see them online. And now, just, like, all of our exchanges on
these bigger sites are with folks we may never encounter again. So it
just feels like the maximalist response all the time.

Lingel:

And that's what happened is the community did move online, onto
Facebook, and they did that in part 'cause people were like, oh, I
can get so many more clicks for the images that I post here when the
audience is bigger. But with that came more harassment. Like,
suddenly, people who were like, I don't want to see all these
piercings. Ew, that's gross. Why would you do that?

So that comes in. There's more harassment. You know, people were
getting their content shut down 'cause Facebook doesn't have the
same, you know, sense of norms around those photos as a small
platform does. And it was much more fractured. And it's not like--you
know, like you're saying, it wasn't--BME wasn't some magical
community where everyone got along. I mean, it wasn't some nirvana,
but there was a sense of accountability to each other, even for folks
who really, really didn't like each other. And once you moved on to a
bigger platform, it just opened the door to a whole bunch of
stigmatization, which was the very original reason that the site was
created, was to have a place just for people interested in body
modification who wanted a judgment-free zone for the things they were interested in.

Demby:

For sure. One of the other categories you see that gentrification is
happening too online is industry. Can you say more about that?

Lingel:

Absolutely. And, honestly, that's only probably gotten worse since I
wrote the book.

Demby:

Since your book.

Lingel:

Yeah. So we know what the problems are in the tech industry. Like,
it's not on--you know, it's not a mystery, right? Like, the tech
industry as a whole is much whiter. It skews more heavily towards men
than the working population as a whole. And there's also a real age
bias, and this is especially true right now in AI. It blows my mind.
Like, the average AI, and I'm even talking executive, is under 30, as
opposed to, like, the working population as a whole. And so you just
have a lot of people who are very young, very, very white and that is
a population that even if they have the best of intentions, is just
not going to be able to anticipate how their decisions or their
design is going to affect a broad group of people and, you know,
really important thinkers like Safiya Noble have talked about this.
There's lots of folks who have called this out. And we were making
some progress around that for a while, right? Like, there was a kind
of push to, like, higher women and more people of color, particularly
more Indigenous Black and Latino folks, but that has really been
pushed back with the second Trump administration. There's been a real
pushback on those DEI initiatives.

Demby:

And the last category you talk about is infrastructure. Can you say
more about that?

Lingel:

Yeah, I think this is the one people don't think about so much, but
there was a time in the United States when the actual infrastructure
of the internet, and I'm talking there about, like, the internet
service providers or ISPs, was much more fast and loose. There were
way more providers that would compete with each other for customers.
So customers actually had much more--many more choices into the early
2000s. We're talking like six, seven ISPs per neighborhood, where you
could choose to use that as your service provider. And now there's
many parts of the country where you just have one option, or maybe if
you're lucky, two, so, Fios and, you know, maybe, like, one other
option across the country. And that is bad. So it means that
consumers have less choices.

It means that they're going to pay more. And when I talk about
choices, you might be thinking, I don't care if my internet goes
through one router or another, but you might, actually, if the way
that these companies compete with each other is to protect your
privacy or just lower your bill. So we've even seen on a very
infrastructure level, there's a lot of consolidation and less
choice.

Demby:

Yeah. It's like, oh, I have Verizon or I have--I don't even know what
the other one will be. You know, it's like...

Lingel:

Comcast.

Demby:

Comcast, exactly. And, like, every--in all these, like, surveys that
come out every year, like, they're, like, the two worst rated
companies. Like, these are the worst companies to deal with...
Comcast and Verizon. Again, that's right.

Lingel:

And here's my thing about that. It's, like, I have a lot of students
who I talk to who they really want to go into tech, or they really
want to go make a lot of money, and, you know, they're like, oh,
you're just, you know, some anti-capitalist. And I'm like, hey,
having a choice as a consumer is, like, the thing capitalism wants.
Like, a free-market economy is supposed to mean you have a lot of
choices, and it's supposed to drive innovation among companies and
protect the consumer in terms of prices. So there's a lot of stuff in
that book and other things that I've written where it's like, yeah,
you're right. I am pretty anti-capitalist. But I'm actually making a
deeply capitalist argument here, which is that this conglomeration
and consolidation is bad for innovation. It's bad for
entrepreneurship. So I'm actually able to change some hearts and
minds on that piece, at least.

Demby:

We were talking about sort of, like, everything that's, like, lost
when, like, the big platforms like Facebook, pull these small
communities in that direction for reasons of functionality and
whatever, right? And it feels very much similar to the way that
gentrification works in the real world, which is, like, or the way we
talk about it is, like, there's always a sort of debate that we're
having. It's like, well, is there a way to get the sort of, air
quote, "good parts" of gentrification without destroying the original
community that was there before?

Lingel:

So I really believe that the same things that can protect communities
from gentrifying neighborhoods can also make a difference online, and
it really goes back to regulation, and it really goes back to
government rules that are meant to protect people from this kind of
thing. So, you know, gentrification, whether you're talking about
neighborhoods or technologically, is not just a couple of people
coming in and being like, this sure is a cheap place to live. I'm
going to come in here and then I'm going to set up a coffee shop,
right? It's actually about a more structural set of rules. So in
Philadelphia, for example, like, we have tax abatements that really
encourage developers to come in and then not pay taxes once they've
built a more expensive property. And that's, like, a rule that the
city put into place, right? So taking away those rules or providing
other, you know, like, tools at the literal level of regulation can
actually protect people in those neighborhoods from getting priced
out and then having to move elsewhere. And that need for regulation
exists online, too, where you just say, hey, you cannot turn people
into data in this same way, or you can't just shut down a community
when it's no longer convenient for you, without giving people the
tools to archive their history.

So there are possibilities where regulation could do the right thing.
The thing is, when it comes to gentrification, those rules are best
enacted at a very local level, like, the city level, and it's really
hard to find ways to--that's the part that doesn't translate. It's
hard to find what that local level would be when it comes to the tech
industry.

Demby:

Yeah. Another aspect of gentrification on the internet is
criminalization. Like, I mean, like, doorbell cameras come to mind.
They're everywhere, right? And people are seemingly shocked when they
find out that their doorbell cameras are being used in law
enforcement, which also is then being used for, like, ICE raids and
things like that. But also with things like how sex work is regulated
or how the drug trade is treated. What do you think it is important
to understand about how crime and safety, and our conversations about
crime and safety, translate to our online behaviors or just the
infrastructure of the internet?

Lingel:

Yeah. That's a really interesting question to think about 'cause for
so long, the idea of, like, crime and digital culture was about,
like, hacking. And then it kind of came into, you know, like, spam,
but also sort of, you know, scamming and all this stuff. And now
we're seeing the ways that our digital lives are so embedded in our
everyday lives that you really can't separate them anymore.

I will say my friend, Jenny Lee (ph), has been doing a project in
Philadelphia on doorbell cameras, and she writes very interestingly
about how there are many folks, you know, Black folks in particular,
who see their doorbell cameras in a way--as a way of, like, looking
out for their neighbors, caring for their neighbors. I just think
it's partly about you have so little control over how that data is
going to be used.

You know? Like, when you're buying a Ring camera that is the largest
mesh network in the world, right? Like, these doorbells are all
connected to each other, and they're all connected to a major, major
tech company that's super, super powerful. And you do not get to
choose how that footage is used.

Demby:

Even if you're using it in this very particular way, which seems like
really analogous to so much of our online behavior. It's like, oh,
well, I'm using it in this way that is community-minded--right?--and
maybe really well intentioned, but it is also, like, inextricably
linked to this larger apparatus.

Lingel:

Yeah. And you don't get control over that. Like, you don't--it's on
your front door, and you do not get to control how that is used I
think, is something that we've sort of started to learn from, like,
body cams and stuff, but I think we're still learning about doorbells
'cause, again, it's in our homes. So...

Demby:

Like, conversations about crime, almost, like, invariably turn into conversations about young people, kids and minors, right? And many
people have noticed that, you know, young people go outside less
because there's--one, there's like, fewer places to go, and also
there's, like, all these sort of online things to do--right?--all
these sort of screen-adjacent things to do. And so, you know, one
solution that people point out, it's like, oh, we should build more
third spaces so people can, like, have things to do that aren't at
school or home. But the online world itself has become, like, more
hostile to minors. I'm curious about, like, how, like, this lens of gentrification, like, helps us understand the way that we talk about
crime and kids online or just, like, the jeopardy that minors find
themselves in online.

Lingel:

I mean, part of the problem with gentrification in a neighborhood is
that it keeps you from knowing or trusting your neighbors. So
neighbors that have known each other, grown up with each other. And
again, I don't mean this in a way that everybody gets along all the
time, but there's a sense of we're all here. We all have history. And
that actually provides a really important layer of looking out for
each other's kids, saying, like, hey, why are you talking to that
guy? I don't know that guy. Don't talk to him. Or, hey, what are you
doing out of the house? I know your mom's not home, you know? So that
sense of looking out that doesn't require we necessarily like each
other.

But does require a sense of, I know you. I know your mom's schedule
roughly, and you shouldn't be where you are talking to that person.
That drops out after your neighborhood gets disrupted, your
neighborhood gets gentrified, people are forced to move. People don't
have that same sense of connection to each other. And I think there's
a real parallel online where, you know, spaces get fragmented. People
don't know, you know, the communities that are online. People don't
know necessarily what kids are doing. And there's this sense--and I'm
a parent. Like, you kind of got to throw your hands up at a certain
point, and be like, I'm never going to understand that meme.

I'm never going to understand that joke.

I don't know why you're spending so much time in this space, and I
don't want to think about it. But there's that sense of, you know,
we're just not clear on who's looking out for each other in these
spaces. So I think that's one of the connection. And it also is true
when you're talking about all these, you know, like, age-gating and
these different rules, I have to say it pokes a hole a little bit in
some of my own argument where I'm like, regulation, regulation,
regulation. Well, you see how hard it is to design a rule that's
really going to work for the greatest number of people, you know? I
mean, I do worry about age-gating when it means, like, well, what
about when some kid wants to go online, and that's where they find
support because they're autistic or that's where they find support
'cause they're--you know, they think they might be trans or that's
where they find support because they have some rare illness, right?
Like, there's all sorts of super legitimate, very compelling reasons
that people might need to be online, having tough conversations with
strangers, intimate conversations with strangers.

So how do you design a rule that's going to protect kids from, you
know, harassment and protect kids from violence or harm, but that
also allows for, you know, the best parts of the internet, which are
connecting to people you don't know over things you really care about.

* * *

The episode you're listening to right now was produced by Jess Kung.
It was edited by Leah Donnella, and our engineer was Jimmy Keeley.
And I'd be remiss if I did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch
massive. I mean, come on. That's Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez,
Kayla Lattimore, Dalia Mortada, Yolanda Sangweni and B.A. Parker.
As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy.

From: <https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5720754/ how-the-internet-got-gentrified>
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