I think it's interesting to consider how Odell is describing something academically that we have all experienced in a day to day setting throughout our life. We have all seen the evolution of the internet unfold, but i dont think that many of us in this class thought about it that much while it was happening, as it was coincident with our own development. The main trend that Odell identifies throughout the development of the internet is the adaptation and assimilation of internet media to be part of consumerist and polarizing culture. The sentiment she expresses is one of nostalgia for the early internet and dissatisfaction with the way it ended up. Though it has its origins as a military technology, Odell describes how the internet was originally used in a much more cooperative and transparent way. And now, the internet is more reminiscent of its militaristic origins, but not in terms of exerting military power, instead being the primary tool today for exerting socio-political or cultural power. It has become the tool used to maintain the status quo.
This harkens back to Audre Lorde’s paper “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,” in which Lorde argues that the setting of normative or maybe conformist goals for advocacy is not a truly effective pursuit of liberation. Lorde counters that the goals of a movement should not be for inclusion into a current system which can be seen to be underlyingly hegemonic, but to find a new way of operating which can acknowledge the differences in the way that our society sees and includes different people.
Considering the application of this idea to the modern internet, we can identify one of the main problems that the internet perpetuates as the polarization of different communities, particularly across differences in political ideology. We could try to make a platform on the current internet to facilitate connection across these differences, but it would still be in a net space that carries these polar connotations. Maybe the solution to this problem of polarization lies outside of the current mode of operation of the internet, or outside of the internet altogether.