A Thousand Feeds: Knowledge, Authority and the Rhizome in the Digital Age

Caught in the Web: The Internet as Connection and Entrapment

Every time we open a social media platform, it is like becoming entangled in a spider’s web. A cooking video leads to a political argument. A political argument leads to a podcast. A podcast leads to a historian discussing colonialism. Somewhere along the way, an advertisement appears, followed by a war update, a stand-up comedian and a stranger explaining quantum physics. We move from one fragment to another without fully understanding how the connections were formed in the first place.

At times, we encounter little more than intellectual clutter. At other times, we stumble upon genuinely valuable insights. Perhaps what is more intriguing than the content itself are the pathways through which it travels. On the internet, ideas constantly escape the boundaries within which they were originally produced. Every thread may appear distinct, but each is tied to countless others. They are so interconnected that movement on one side produces vibrations across the entire structure. Similarly, a comment, video, hashtag or image released into the digital sphere rarely remains confined to its point of origin. Because of this the world is increasingly defined not by isolated facts or stable categories, but by intersections, flows and unexpected connections.

Yes, the internet is a connection but it is also an entrapment. We rarely choose the pathways through which information reaches us. Algorithms guide attention, hyperlinks redirect curiosity and recommendation systems continuously pull us towards new content. The result is that the journey feels voluntary, but its routes are not something we fully understand yet.

When Institutions Lose Their Grip on Knowledge

The difficulty is epistemological and not so much technological. In earlier periods, knowledge travelled through institutions that claimed authority: schools, universities, religious bodies, newspapers and publishing houses. Those institutions were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided visible structures through which information could be evaluated. In the recent times, digital networks have weakened many of those structures without replacing them with equally recognisable alternatives. The paradox is that we have unprecedented access to information, yet increasing uncertainty about how information should be assessed. Expertise competes with opinion, scholarship competes with speculation and evidence competes with virality. Knowledge has become quite easy to find. However, the problem is deciding whom to trust.

The scenario raises a deeper question about human understanding itself. What happens when knowledge no longer reaches us through established institutions but through networks that are constantly expanding, intersecting and reassembling themselves? The issue is ultimately one of authority. Who determines what counts as knowledge when information no longer flows through clearly identifiable centres? How do societies distinguish expertise from opinion, evidence from virality, or truth from repetition when every claim competes for attention under similar conditions? We often assume that more information produces greater understanding. Yet it is equally possible that abundance generates new forms of uncertainty. The question is not merely whether we know more than previous generations, but whether we understand what we know.

From Hierarchies to Rhizomes: Deleuze and Guattari’s New Map of Reality

For much of modern history, complex social realities were made intelligible through relatively stable intellectual frameworks. Adam Smith and Karl Marx offered competing explanations of economic life. Michel Foucault traced the operations of power through institutions and systems of discipline. Sigmund Freud redirected attention towards the unconscious forces shaping human behaviour. Despite their differences, these thinkers shared an assumption that social life could be understood through identifiable structures, whether economic, political or psychological. However, the arrival of postmodern thought challenged many of the stable categories through which earlier generations understood the world. It emerged from a growing recognition that reality often behaved less like a hierarchy and more like a network. Boundaries that once appeared stable increasingly revealed themselves to be porous, interconnected and constantly shifting.

Thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari solidified this observation into an argument. They said that social reality is rarely organised into neat, self-contained structures. Instead, it is composed of shifting assemblages: temporary formations in which technology, institutions, ideas, economic forces and human desires intersect and interact. Infact, Deleuze and Guattari offer a better image for understanding today’s world. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), they developed the concept of the ‘rhizome’: a root system that spreads horizontally beneath the ground, sending shoots in multiple directions at once. As they wrote, “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles.” The metaphor now reads uncannily like a description of life online.

Gutenberg’s Ghost: What the Printing Press Teaches Us About the Internet

However, this is not the first time a new information technology has altered the way societies think. When Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type printing to Europe in the mid-15th century, the printing press made information accessible to the commoner. Information was no longer controlled by religious institutions, royal courts and small circles of scholars suddenly. In a way, the printing press redistributed authority. At stake was not just access to information but authority over its interpretation. Martin Luther challenged the papacy during the Protestant Reformation and altered the traditional interpretation of Christianity and European politics. Readers could compare texts, question interpretations and encounter viewpoints that would previously have remained inaccessible. Now communities of thought emerged around printed material. The consequences were political, religious and intellectual.

Even so, the world created by print still possessed a certain order because the pathways of knowledge were visible. Books had identifiable authors, arguments unfolded within recognisable boundaries and readers could usually trace information back to its source. The same cannot always be said of digital networks, where information is constantly detached from one context and reattached to another.

Eternal Return: Old Conflicts, New Technologies

This invisibility has consequences beyond the circulation of information itself. When ideas travel through unstable pathways, they rarely remain unchanged. They acquire new audiences, new interpretations and new political meanings. Older social conflicts are drawn into new technological environments. Established identities encounter new forms of expression. Yes, there is a repetition of familiar patterns but they undergo a nuanced transformation as they move through the digital pathways.

In Difference and Repetition and later in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze develops a reading of Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Return’ that is relevant here. ‘Eternal Return’ does not mean that history endlessly repeats itself in identical cycles. Rather, it suggests that old forms reappear, but they are transformed by new circumstances, technologies and relationships. The digital age offers numerous examples of this process. Questions of caste, religion, race, gender and identity have not disappeared. Nor have struggles over power, inequality and representation. Older social tensions return, but they are reshaped in terms of how they are experienced and contested. But these conflicts increasingly unfold through new technological environments. In fact, research published in SAGE Open found that many users associated social media with negative effects on health, studying and personal finances. Connectivity, therefore, cannot be understood simply as empowerment.

The Internet’s Double Life: Power, Visibility and Control

In fact, the digital rhizome is not a neutral space.It does not merely transmit information because it reshapes the conditions through which information, power and social relations are continually reproduced and transformed. This lack of neutrality has produced sharply different interpretations. For McLuhan, new media technologies expanded the horizons of human communication and transformed the scale at which societies could interact. Deleuze and Guattari saw networks as spaces of emergence, where new connections, identities and possibilities could arise beyond established hierarchies. Others are less optimistic. For Foucault, greater visibility often accompanies new forms of control, while Shoshana Zuboff argues that the same networks celebrated for their openness have become instruments for monitoring, predicting and influencing behaviour.

At first glance, the internet seems to realise the promise of decentralisation. A local dispute becomes a national controversy through a hashtag. A personal testimony develops into a global movement. Anyone can publish, comment, organise or participate by bypassing the gatekeepers. However, this brings us back to an earlier question: if power no longer resides primarily in institutions, where has it gone?

The sociologist Manuel Castells argued that power in the information age operates through networks and influence now depends less on occupying a single centre and more on shaping the flows through which information travels. To influence the network is often more important than controlling a particular institution. This may explain why struggles over algorithms, content moderation, misinformation and artificial intelligence have become so politically significant. What is being contested is not merely information itself, but the routes through which information becomes visible, credible and influential.

That is why, the same networks that enable unprecedented forms of monitoring also create new possibilities for resistance. The technologies that permit corporations and governments to gather extraordinary amounts of information also allow marginalised voices to reach global audiences. Connection and control increasingly coexist.

This can be seen in the way social media shapes contemporary movements. The murder of George Floyd generated a wave of responses that coalesced into the Black Lives Matter movement. A judge’s description of young people as “cockroaches” sparked the Cockroach Janta Party movement. Similarly, the #MeToo movement transformed individual testimonies into a collective reckoning with sexual harassment. These movements demonstrate that authority over public narratives increasingly emerges through networks rather than institutions alone.

Their influence rarely depends upon a single leader, institution or centre. One testimony encourages another. One post leads to thousands more. Connections accumulate, and what begins as an isolated experience gradually acquires political force. In this sense, the domain of resistance and revolution has not disappeared. What has changed is the mode through which it operates. Agitation increasingly moves from screens to streets. Every scroll carries the potential to produce new connections, new solidarities and, occasionally, new forms of change.

These movements reveal more than a shift in political organisation. They also reveal a shift in the way individuals come to understand themselves. Social media does not simply connect people to information; it connects them to new communities, identities and forms of belonging. Political commitments are formed, challenged and revised through interactions that often extend far beyond traditional institutions such as family, religion, education or nation.

Deleuze, Guattari and the Digital Human

This is where Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming’ becomes relevant. Much of modern thought was organised around stable categories. Individuals belonged to classes, professions, nations and institutions that provided relatively fixed points of identification. Contrary to this, Deleuze and Guattari were more interested in movement than permanence. Human beings, they argued, are continually shaped by encounters, relationships and connections. Identity is not simply possessed; it is constantly produced.

The digital world appears to intensify this process. Political views shift, interests emerge, communities form and dissolve, and individuals encounter perspectives that would once have remained beyond their immediate social environment. Society increasingly defines itself through bits rather than ink. What matters is not simply the circulation of information, but the ways in which that circulation reshapes how people understand themselves and others.

The consequences extend beyond culture alone. Transformations in digital technology are also altering older assumptions about labour, production and power. Artificial intelligence increasingly performs tasks once associated with human labour, raising questions that Marx could scarcely have imagined. If industrial capitalism reorganised society through machines, contemporary capitalism appears to be reorganising it through data, algorithms and information flows. The digital subject is no longer a consumer of information but also a producer of data, continuously observed, measured and analysed.

Deleuze and Guattari push this argument further in Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism, they argue, does not simply organise production; it also organises desire. Freud located powerful forces within the unconscious mind, but Deleuze and Guattari sought to show how those desires become attached to larger economic and social systems. The endless cycles of consumption, aspiration and digital engagement that characterise contemporary life suggest that desire itself has become entangled with the circulation of information.

The questions of authority and trust raised by Gutenberg’s printing press did not disappear with the emergence of decentralised networks. They have intensified them. Perhaps this is why Deleuze and Guattari continue to feel contemporary. The world they anticipated was not simply more connected. It was a world in which connections themselves became sites of struggle, creativity, power and transformation. Whether such networks ultimately expand human understanding and freedom or create new forms of control remains an open question. What is certain is that the pathways through which knowledge, influence and desire travel have changed, and we are only beginning to understand the consequences.

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