Nothing new under the sun: Jose Ortega y Gasset and the governance of the internet.

Abstract

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1, v.9 In 1930, Jose Ortega y Gasset published, in Spanish, a work called La Rebelión de las Masasi. He tells us, in his Prefatory Note, that this publication consolidates and completes ideas which he had initially proposed in España Invertebrada in 1922. What Ortega had been considering since 1922 was the phenomenon of the rise of the masses – the “agglomeration” of “undifferentiated man” (his terminology). His research was carried out in the period between the two world wars, long before the internet existed. He was considering the situation in a Europe squeezed by the menace of very different political ideas. In Western Europe there was Fascism, in Eastern Europe Stalinist Communism. Across the Atlantic a “new” society was evolving in the New World and offering itself for comparison. There was a strong element of Nationalism everywhere. Totalitarianism insisted on a “sameness” that was intolerant of deviation from the norm. His intention was mainly focussed on the phenomena of population explosion and population aggregation – what is currently sometimes described as “massification”. The intention of this paper is to identify the components of Ortega's arguments with a view to examining their utility as a way of considering the “agglomeration” - the aggregation/massification phenomenon - which is the internet.