The four ways that ex-internet idealists explain where it all went wrong

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611805/the-four-ways-that-ex-internet-idealists-explain-where-it-all-went-wrong/

by jesperht • 8 years ago

119 95 8 years ago

api• 8 years ago

This is fairly shallow. It doesn't really explain why surveillance and manipulation became the dominant business models of the Internet.

I think the culprit is "free." Everything has to be "free." As a result, some indirect means must be found to pay for it. The most convenient model is to turn it around and make the user the product. Use free services to attract users, then surveil and manipulate those users for paying customers -- advertisers, governments, intelligence agencies, think tanks, etc.

mcphage• 8 years ago

I think the culprit is "free." Everything has to be "free." As a result, some indirect means must be found to pay for it.

That raises an interesting point... discussion about "free" often distinguishes free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech, but maybe we were mistaken in thinking that it was ever not going to be about money.

smallnamespace• 8 years ago

It's not about money, it's about the allocation of scarce resources. The point is that there is always some resource that is a limiting factor, be it time, labor, energy, natural resources, land, or other inputs.

Imagine a world where there is no money and no price mechanism, e.g. the Star Trek economy. Society still needs to collectively implement a mechanism that determines what should people do today, and how should we make sure they are able to do it? I'm sure in TNG you can get enough replicator credits to eat like a king, but not everyone gets a starship or prime New Orleans real estate [1] because there's still not enough for everyone.

In fact, prices are often useful as an internal planning mechanism even when there is no market or money changing hands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price#Constrained_optim...

This is exactly what Soviet central planners did: try to set 'reasonable' prices for every single good in their economy while also setting input and output targets for every single piece of fixed capital and organization in the USSR.

'Free as in beer' is an ideology that states that 'prices of particular goods and services ought to always be zero'. Why would we expect that to conform to the reality of how valuable a service really is to people, especially as the cost to produce those particular things are always changing?

[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sisko%27s_Creole_Kitchen

topmonk• 8 years ago

I think the “customer being the product” happens regardless. Take a look at how credit card agencies sell people's purchase habits, or grocery store loyalty cards that do the same.

It's naive to think that not every economic niche won't be exploited regardless of the existence of another one.

ukyrgf• 8 years ago

"Free" worked for me 10-20 years ago. There was the old "if you aren't paying for it, then you are the product" adage. Now, even if you pay, you are being sold.

disqard• 8 years ago

Fair point, but there are some exceptions. For instance, the Atlantic's Masthead subscription gives you ad-free access to their audio podcasts.

Overall, I agree with you: once I am a paying subscriber of NYT (say), why should I be served the same ads as a non-subscriber viewing the same article in an incognito window?

egypturnash• 8 years ago

It’s kind of funny. I run a Mastodon instance. I keep it small so I don’t have to spend more than about twenty bucks a month to keep it running. Pocket change, really.

And yet my users regularly poke me to set up a Patreon, so they can help me cover the cost for it.

Hell, I paid for Livejournal back in the day, before it turned into a thing that had to expand user numbers at all costs, and had to try and pay the rent of multiple Bay Area employees, and started putting in ads.

boomboomsubban• 8 years ago

Why did propaganda become the dominant model for the printing press? Controlling information has been a main objective of the ruling class forever, the issue isn't with the Internet.

amanaplanacanal• 8 years ago

Even in the days of the print media, the user was the product. The real money wasn't in subscription prices, it was in advertising. I don't think that much has changed.

adriand• 8 years ago

This reads like an article that got half-written before the author said, "fuck it" or ran out of time. The first half is excellent but it gets shaky with "The Hopeful", then falls apart in "The Revisionists" with what sounds like ad copy for a design agency. The worst part is the ending: there isn't one.

It's a shame because I feel like there's a whole article lurking in there somewhere, with some interesting ideas underpinning it.

ashleyn2• 8 years ago

I mean, George Carlin said this best. Garbage in, garbage out. Maybe something else sucks around here...like the public.

Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. Today, it's been democratised enough to allow your racist aunt to ramble on Facebook about how Obama is actually an alien born on Pluto, sent to America to destroy Christianity. The remaining escapes on the Internet devoid of this are vanishing.

We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values, motivations, and competencies. The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it. Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.

hnaccy• 8 years ago

Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests.

This doesn't match my experience at all.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

This doesn't match my experience at all.

Ditto. I remember when the internet was apolitical. Not liberal, not conservative. That only became widespread in the last five or ten years.

Before this decade, the internet was mostly nerds working to solve problems involving math and science, not social studies and history. Then the nerds got rich and started caring less about technology, and more about “changing the world.”

h4b4n3r03• 8 years ago

Could you expand a little on the notion of “correct values”?

__jahh• 8 years ago

reciprocity is a favorite

ashleyn2• 8 years ago

Pretty obvious stuff we can agree on, like "hate is wrong" and "facts are indisputable."

anonytrary3• 8 years ago

We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values, motivations, and competencies.

Who exactly are the right people to be using technology? How do they decide what constitutes correct values, motivations and competencies? Your sentiment seems to carry a lot of hubris behind it. The world is just not that simple.

The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it.

This sounds like a generic pretentious sentiment. What are you exactly trying to say? Because I'm pretty sure that widespread access to the internet has resulted in an overwhelming net good for the world, allowing people to learn more and do more than ever before.

DennisAleynikov• 8 years ago

the tech is rarely the issue at scale. When almost everyone uses something you run into the same problems you get from any crowd. traffic, deviancy and abuse of resources. humans are animals and we need to keep that in mind for when we expect large groups of them to act like anything but a herd

lkrubner• 8 years ago

"How do they decide what constitutes correct values"

Unless I'm misreading you, there is an element of nihilism in your comment. You seem to be suggesting that there are no correct values, or that the correct values can not be discovered. I'm sure you must be aware that in the West we've been having a conversation for the last 2,400 years regarding how to discover correct values and live one's life according to them. If your comment was meant to dismiss or side step the importance of that conversation then your comment can be read as anti-intellectual. But to whatever extent you accept the importance of that conversation, I imagine you'll be willing to admit that many people nowadays are mis-using the Internet, as the parent comment suggested.

AmericanChopper3• 8 years ago

Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests

This is a complete fantasy. The internet has always been a fermenting pot of stupidity and intellectual garbage.

We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values

I honestly can’t tell if this is a satire? What the hell are ‘the correct values’?

Eupolemos• 8 years ago

I agree with this, with one exception.

Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.

To me, this part comes off as implicitly defeatist. I don't think "people" change, and while general education makes a difference, it isn't a solution we can rely on on its own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment).

But I think we can make a difference when shaping how people communicate on the internet. Facebook is - as I see it - made to make us interact in the most basic, emotional way, so the company can farm our dispositions. That doesn't make for healthy conversation.

If we shaped and popularized the means of being social on the internet in a more responsible way, we might see people acting in a less soulcrushing manner.

The trick, of course, is to make people like such a social platform.

TheOtherHobbes3• 8 years ago

It's not about conversation so much as the easy industrialisation of propaganda and election fixing.

FB and TW make it far too easy to set up bots and troll farms to influence public debate for relatively tiny amounts of money.

And FB has also been used to supply individually targeted political advertising - which makes it easy to swing an election or a referendum by influencing a few million, or even just a few hundred thousand, people - by lying to them.

This is part of a bigger problem in the Western democracies, where it's considered perfectly okay for billionaires to use media empires to influence voters with knowingly fake outright propaganda.

The conversation part is largely irrelevant. A lot of people will simply parrot talking points they're given by the media, so there is in fact no real conversation or debate happening.

pervycreeper• 8 years ago

This is more or less the establishment view, held by those who shepherded in the current state of affairs.

scruffyherder• 8 years ago

correct values

Wow, just wow.

scottlocklin• 8 years ago

Funny, the first thing I remember doing in 1991 when I got on the internet on an actual z-19 terminal hooked up to an Ultrix machine ... arguing with holocaust revisionists and young earth creationists on Usenet.

I'd say the internet population in those days was higher IQ as it required literacy rather than instagram accounts, but it was if anything significantly less 'liberal' than it is now. More libertarian, really. It was also not run by authoritarian nincompoops at Google and Facebook.

sp332• 8 years ago

Aza Raskin, a pioneer of infinite scrolling, also has regrets about the effect the design has on users. https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-44640959

luxpir• 8 years ago

S/He says, sharing an amp link... here:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959

Clean!

rapnie• 8 years ago

Aza Raskin is one of the co-founders of The Center for Humane Technology [0] which aims to 'Realign technology to humanity's best interests'

[0] https://humanetech.com

newsbinator• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, what's best for capturing our attention isn't best for our well-being:
* Snapchat turns conversations into streaks, redefining how our children measure friendship.
* Instagram glorifies the picture-perfect life, eroding our self worth.
* Facebook segregates us into echo chambers, fragmenting our communities.
* YouTube autoplays the next video within seconds, even if it eats into our sleep.
These are not neutral products.
They are part of a system designed to addict us.

natmaka2• 8 years ago

The Center for Humane Technology could use J. Ellul work ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique ).

MichaelMoser123• 8 years ago

The tragedy of the commons is another explanation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons you have a common playground where some players start to spam the mailing list/newsgroup/discussion board for their own benefit, this destroys the commons as more spammers join in. Eventually you need moderators and centralisation, now the policeman tends to have an agenda of his own - and the common ground has been appropriated. Where is the new element in that? Self regulation works in small groups but it all breaks down when the group is larger than a village.

syshum3• 8 years ago

Centralisation is the problem on the internet today, not a solution.

What we need is MASSIVE decentralization, and open protocols,.

natmaka2• 8 years ago

Indeed. Moreover whenever something is wrong, something is too big, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy.

u801e• 8 years ago

some players start to spam the mailing list/newsgroup/discussion board for their own benefit, this destroys the commons as more spammers join in. Eventually you need moderators and centralisation,

Mail and news clients have sophisticated filtering abilities that could deal with that issue. I've always wondered why people in general are more than willing to rely in a central party to vet the content they get to see rather than handling it for themselves.

sarcasmic• 8 years ago

I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs where the engine handled all but the content, and the barrier to entry of sharing personal details was lowered. Correspondingly, the depth of the material got more shallow, but the breadth of it got wider.

This transition was happening as commercial ventures first moved beyond sites that were mere billboards, individuals began reading news portals and opening webmail accounts, and communities like phpBB and vBulletin forums flourished as pseudonymous, do-it-yourself takes on newsgroups of old. Aggressive moderation typically kept the conversation in check.

There were corners of the web where moderation was shallow, and some of these places achieved notoriety for being cesspits of depravity, and eventually, hate. The depravity was authentic. But there was an air of privileged bravado about the hate, where its expression was used as a shibboleth to an in-group more so than an authentic expression of beliefs. If you were a true hater, finding other true haters was not a trivial task.

Early social networks were pseudonymous. It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Ten years of Facebook moved the Overton window quite a bit, and now there's a set of people who aren't afraid to bare their cards, or of doxxing and reprisal. And now, they too have tools to build online communities of their own and find like-minded people on the web rather than in person, regardless of the popularity and acceptance of the views they hold.

Meanwhile, e-commerce is now everywhere, and so is content and services that can be consumed with no upfront cost. Both of these are supplemented by adtech-like schemes that harvest and correlate user behavior. Despite real harm having occurred from these practices, jurisdictions have been slow to regulate them for many reasons: ineptitude, lobbying, corruption, and ineffectiveness in enforcing regulations in a global, dynamic, resilient system. Shady, underground actors and mainstream actors alike will continue these practices until widespread, debilitating user backlash, or widespread regulation puts and end to them. If they are regulated, only ruthless actors will engage in this behavior: trolls, stalkers, profiteers, and intelligence services.

adventured• 8 years ago

I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs...

The labor-of-love deep topic authors came to entirely dominate across the board.

They sit at the top of every single search result, under the Wikipedia.org domain.

They moved from writing in-depth on their personal blogs/sites, to writing epic volumes on a site like Wikipedia instead. A place where that vast glorious compilation of human knowledge can easily be shared with all in a quite friendly non-profit, non-soul-eating sort of way (ie the anti-Facebook sort of way). I don't have to get lucky browsing around or dig for hours to find their obscure topic content there, I just conveniently type words into a search box or click one page to the next. No filtering through tons of trash results or in-result ads on Google to find decent quality content.

DuskStar• 8 years ago

And then other people arrived on Wikipedia and decided that five-page articles on every single character in the Star Wars extended universe (pre-Disney) weren't desirable, and deleted them.

droopyEyelids• 8 years ago

You're reading a different wikipedia than I am. Or describing what you hope it could be?

The Wikipedia I read is a collection of sentence fragments that sometimes contradict each other before the period, and the sentences often contradict each other within the paragraph. Then, that confused mix is filtered through an army of agenda based editors.

The example of this that killed the joy I found in wikipedia was the Hookah page. My friends and I were smoking a lot of hookah in college, so I decided I wanted to learn more about it. The wikipdeia page was incredibly pro-hookah, and cited various stores that sold hookah equipment. When I researched it fully, I found the WHO did a study that showed hookah smoke contains a tremendous amount of tar, users hold the smoke in their lungs longer, absorbing more tar, and the 'shisha' (tobacco) is actually burned- not "roasted," which is the word hookah promonets use to dissemble.

It was completely impossible to get that information onto the page, despite learning tons of wiki culture and really working at it for months.

After that I noticed the same thing on a huge quantity of pages. Writing and organizing information is hard. It can't be done well by an unfocused committee of people, even if they care. Add in self-interested saboteurs, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

syshum3• 8 years ago

> It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online.

Do you believe this is a good or bad trend. I personally see it has universally bad and is could directly be attributable toxicity of those communities, as the most extreme people, the people that either have nothing to lose, or do not fully understand the risk are the only ones that engage in any meaningful way, those groups then feed upon each other. Everyone else either leaves or self censors so the only remaining conversation is an extremely toxic one where people are talking past and over each other yelling into the void. There is no moderate middle as the moderate middle shuts up for fear of pissing off both extremes.

Anonymity is a bed rock foundational element of free speech, even the founders of the US understood this which is why most of the Federalist papers, and many other pivotal writings in history were written under Pseudonym's.

This idea that "real names" policies improve discourse is simply false and IMO lowers discourse

Synaesthesia• 8 years ago

As Chomsky put it, in the mid 90’s, the internet was handed over to private corporations for their own use, mostly commerce. It’s now even more in the hands of private power, with net neutrality being gone.

paulsutter3• 8 years ago

Remember Geocities? Friendster? MySpace? Facebook is just another point in the curve. And we’ll get there. Don’t panic.

The optimists are still right. These are all just growing pains while everyone competes to find the right formula.

PhasmaFelis• 8 years ago

You say "we'll get there"--get where? The curve you describe is sharply descending at all points. I see no evidence that it's working around towards something that's overall positive. You're right that everyone is competing to find "the right formula," but they're trying to maximize profit, full stop. They're not optimizing for anything related to the public good, except incidentally.

paulsutter3• 8 years ago

Then look at the larger pattern of human history. It’s a little absurd to suggest that the general directing of firearm progress has suddenly reversed.

Agathos• 8 years ago

Geocities was a lot more fun than what we have now.

sandov• 8 years ago

Both optimists and pessimists were right. The Internet is the most powerful tool we have to spread knowledge, but it's also the most powerful one to spread bullshit. If you hang around smart people you'll get positive effects from the internet, if you are an idiot or hang around idiots, you'll get crap. Author seems to be of the second kind.

krapp• 8 years ago

Yeah... to me this is like complaining that the printing press was a bad idea because it was once only used to publish scholarship and now it's mostly coffee table books and pulp fiction.

beerlord• 8 years ago

As long as websites are funded based on eyeballs, this will continue.

We need to move to a model of micropayments, where I can pay a few cents easily (and automatically) to visit a site or read an article. The total amount could be aggregated monthly, like Patreon does.

blindgeek• 8 years ago

"Even boosters now seem to implicitly accept the assumption (accurate or not) that the internet is the root of multiple woes, from increasing political polarization to the mass diffusion of misinformation."

I certainly don't accept that the Internet is the root of increasing political polarization. It's nothing new. Ever heard of the Nika Riots? Polarization is a story as old as time, Internet or no Internet.

On the other hand, top-down culture is breaking down on account of the Internet. How many people watch the CBS Evening News anymore? There was, in the minds of American "thought leaders", a sort of cultural consensus. It doesn't exist anymore, never mind that it was probably always more myth than reality. The facade is being shattered, and a lot of folks are running scared, blaming the newest technology for their woes.

There are ways out of the crises we face, but neither blaming the Internet for our problems nor treating it as a panacea is one of them.

captainmuon• 8 years ago

New, disruptive technologies "want" to change society. The problem is people assumed that would happen automatically. What happened instead is that the establishment insisted on keeping society the way it is, and managed to shoehorn the new technologies into the old social molds.

Example: File sharing. This would easily make it possible to give everybody access to all media for free. But artists (and entertainment industry workers) need to be fed, and we apparently don't know how to do this without turning music and videos into a commodity.

I would rather try to solve the general problem: How to feed somebody whose labor is not required by society. But the obvious solutions to this would be unconditional basic income, or communism, or something else people don't like. Instead we invent DRM and pretend digitalization didn't happen.

Another example is cryptocurrency. Instead of bringing upon the anarchocapitalist utopia/apocalypse, it just got regulated to hell in record time.

We (as "hackers" / "tech people") should not blindly believe that disruptive technology will bring upon social change by itself. Instead, people should address the hard social and political problems directly. Don't ask what's the next Uber, Bitcoin, Internet, but rather what's the next Democracy, Capitalism, Enlightenment, ...

KarlRutnick• 8 years ago

People get the leaders they deserve, they are only a reflection of the population in general. No wonder it all went downhill when that collective came online. And yet in that process things have changed for the better. The old guard has to fight to preserve their hold on the narrative. Technology is the great equaliser and really the only thing that changes externalities apart from resources and nature in general. Externalities lead, then humanity follow. Culture and finally politics adapt, the rest is just rationalisation. I doubt this will change short of genetically altering ourselves. So if you want to improve the world, forget politics. I remain hopefully because today even just one person can write a piece of software and change the world

zoomablemind2• 8 years ago

The article seems to narrow the scope of problem with Internet to its effects on social dynamics. All means of communications held at some point the manipulative powers over the socium (TV, newspapers etc.). New means will have them too. So nothing to regret here.

Meanwhile, as technology Internet provided goods of wider access to knowledge, should one needed it. Indeed, it also promoted the freedom of speech too, should anyone needed to be heard!

It's just inevitable that Internet got saturated just as well, such that signal-to-noise is below quality threshold. Same as your cable channels, or bookstores back in the gone century.

So now people need either to devise a better selectivity or invent and use a new clear channel. All of current 'social messngers' are effectively trying to offer a clear channel.

zoomablemind2• 8 years ago

I wish the author pointed the spotlight at an increasing bloat of the general Internet traffic.

Comparing to Internet early days we now have communication pipes of gigantic bandwidth... yet somehow they get overrun, ISPs still peddle more bandwidth for more coins.

Ratio of usable content to aux (scripting, ads, cosmetics) just keeps dropping. The pages are not only byte heavy, they now CPU heavy (due to scripting, SSL etc).

In retrospect, I'd rather wonder wheather the current __implementation__ of Internet is the right one. Perhaps now one could envision an alternative implementation, leaner, more secure (or less reliant on that), more analog/human?

After all the base purpose for Internet was to connect computers, now it's used to connect people lives.

The four ways that ex-internet idealists explain where it all went wrong

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