> In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the “natural laws of the Internet” and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.
Reading it written like this, I think I understand why it was that the Internet as it was couldn't last: it was, effectively, a state of nature. The Internet was a great frontier, where folks were finally freed of the constraints of the old order.
The problem is that the old order itself was formed out of the chaos of an older frontier still — and that frontier was populated by folks escaping an even older order, and so on back to the dawn of man.
The state of nature is inherently unstable, because people will band together to use violence and/or the threat of violence against those who violate their mores, whether those mores are going to church on Sundays in the Middle Ages (as various heretics discovered) or not giving to conservative charities (as Brendan Eich discovered). Some people want a frontier (generally, those who are relatively weak in the current order and wish to escape its establishment) but, once they have established a sphere of power for themselves, they defend it and become the new establishment.
If only there were a way to ensure a permanent frontier, where dissenters and freethinkers (and, yes, criminals) can escape and form their own orders, until their own dissenters and freethinkers escape away again.
I don't think most people want that, though. We saw it with the collapse of Ethereum's DAO. We see it every time someone says, 'there ought to be a law.' We see it every time a government forces someone to do something he would rather not do. People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.
Living through the evolution of the Web, it looks like money (especially ad money) and social networks encouraging people to broadcast their real identities (often doing so can be lucrative—see both traditional and Internet celebrities' use of Twitter, for example) are the main causes of (negative) changes.
Manipulative ad-spam typo-squatter sites basically took over the Web. Around '08 or '09 Google seemingly surrendered in the battle against them and took to just showing the same handful of trustworthy sites for most searches. Smaller communities and sites faded. Meanwhile, a huge percentage of "legitimate" sites have become nearly indistinguishable from ad-spam sites. The spammers won, in a way, by becoming the Web.
Youtube, briefly a kind of miracle of the information age, is so full of people trying to sell things or make a living at it that they've drowned out the earnest amateurs. Plus there's tons of advertising on it now. Just another bazaar full of haggling and people trying to pick your pocket, where once there was something like a community theater.
Broadcasting one's identity is valuable ($$$) but leads to the ongoing conflict between those embracing that and those viciously trolling them under what remains of traditional Internet anonymity. Now that there's money behind it, the old-school Internet reaction of "well yeah, why the hell did you put your real name and address on the Internet?" is being seriously challenged, even in tech circles, by "real names for all so we can hunt the trolls (oh, also anyone else we don't like, but surely that will never be a problem)!" The money in tying Web identities to real identities may well win, over the value of (even semi-)anonymous speech.
I don't see it as frontier versus civilization: I see it as pure human (and human-scale) expression versus (incomprehensibly massive and alienating) commercial exploitation. Commercial exploitation is winning.
There's another dynamic here, though: pure human expression is an inherently aristocratic thing. The early internet was dominated by academia, teen-agers with lots of time to build their Geocities sites, and a handful of hobbyists doing it in the side.
Producing pure human expression full time requires either an income stream or a pile of money to burn through. As the internet has opened up to more people, the reality of keeping it running has required the crass commercialism that is so at contrast with the early, aristocratic web.
I agree the current state of the web of fuedal and sub optimal, but the comparatively tiny boy's club of the early web wasn't terribly democratic, either.
> There's another dynamic here, though: pure human expression is an inherently aristocratic thing. The early internet was dominated by academia, teen-agers with lots of time to build their Geocities sites, and a handful of hobbyists doing it in the side.
"Aristocratic" strikes me as a strange way to describe at least two of those categories, and they hardly seem undemocratic (to take your comparison) to me. I mean, "on the side" and in the free time of students is where practically all democratic activity occurs! The exceptions would be full-time politicians and those making money from democratic processes (for the governmental sense of "democratic"), and those widely seen as exploiting the weaknesses of democracy to their advantage (think: wealth's influence on democracy) but I think it's fair to characterize those parts as (probably necessary) accidents of democratic society rather than the core expression of it.
What people do on the side is democracy, until the robots relieve us of our mostly-authoritarian day jobs (I'm not holding my breath on that one)
"In an important democratic innovation, pay for attending the Ekklesia was instituted in about 400 B.C., thereby ensuring that everyone, including citizens of the working classes, could afford to participate in the political life of the city. Bronze or lead tokens were issued to those attending the meeting, and these could later be redeemed for the assemblyman's pay of two obols (one-third of a drachma) per session."
The citizens assembly met every 10 days, so there were many opportunities for citizen participation.
Yes, participation is a difficult thing to ensure in a democracy, and even more so when it's online. A few years ago, I was a member of the German pirate party. We tried to implement "liquid democracy", using Liquid Feedback. It allows every party member to vote on anything or delegate their votes (based on categories, subcategories or single initiatives) to any other voter, and change those delegations at any time.
Because of the known security problems with digital voting systems, the system was supposed to work only as a tool to form opinions. Initiatives were then put to final vote in real-life assemblies, where everyone was allowed to participate. We didn't have any "classical" delegates.
Both of these steps posed their challenges in participation:
- Liquid Feedback was not the easies tool to understand and use. For non-technical people, it was quite the challenge. And of course, a computer in the first place.
- Full member real-life assemblies, particularly on a national level, require time and money for travel, accommodation etc. Because we didn't have "real" delegates, if you couldn't afford to go, you were out.
There were some suggestions to overcome these issues (like a "permanent assembly" which would work by postal -snail mail- vote), but that never came to pass. (Or at least I think it didn't, I moved out of the country since then and don't follow that closely anymore.)
You can't organize the opposite of commercial exploitation. It's something the individual has to value and oppose for themselves, a choice they make. But you can motivate commercial exploitation by dangling carrots in front of people who can be bent to compromise, which is many of us. So commercial exploitation can gain momentum.
One of my big takeaways from read a US history [0] was that conflicts were often solved by the dissenters moving somewhere else and settling that new empty space. Which is one reason why I think space exploration is important; there's plenty of room for multiple viewpoints out there.
[0] 'A History of the American People', Paul Johnson
It's fascinating to imagine it being possible and affordable for a specified minimum number of people to launch a sustainable ecosystem into space and never be seen/heard from again.
The Internet may allow the free exchange of information and ideas but every inch of the cable, routers, and other infrastructure that makes up the Internet is owned by either a government or by a telecoms corporation subject to government regulation, going all the way back to ARPAnet. There was never any chance of the internet remaining a free place, merely a brief moment between when the technology was invented and when entrepreneurs & lawmakers caught up. If anything, it's surprising that anyone ever believed otherwise.
There were and are links owned and operated by universities and colleges.
As in, the sysop at foo.edu called up the sysop at bar.edu (a mile down the road) and said:
hey bill, 50% of all our napster traffic from the dorms
is going to bar.edu, and it is going through my-isp.net
and your-isp.net to get there. Why don't you mount a
transceiver on a pole and I'll do the same and we'll
establish this alternative route for those packets?
It is unfortunate that it was also common to rent "alarm wire"[0] copper from the phone company for a point to point link over DSL... I don't think that product is available anymore, because VoIP vs POTS.
0: "Alarm wire" is the term I learned to use to describe an electrically connected circuit from point A to point B in a town, where neither A nor B is the telco. The copper might physically go through the telco's building, but there was no POTS on it and if you apply voltage on the point A end, it can be observed on the point B end... I think maybe the term "dumb circuit" could apply, too. Anyway, these were cool because you could upgrade the DSL modem on both ends to get a faster connection without paying more per month!
This point is critical to understanding how we ended up here. The weakest points of the Internet or anything that runs on top of it, like the World Wide Web, are the parts that interact with meatspace, ie. once you dig far enough down, you're subject to the whims of a third-party who is either a government, or a private corporation that answers, through laws, to a government.
The interests of these third-parties are different from ours, and they're subject to different pressures. We can talk about transparency and oversight all we want, but any positive progress for 'those of us in the middle' will just be populist concessions for our appeasement.
I agree with most of your historical analysis, and I agree with your final sentence (People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.), but I think, of the four things in that sentence, only the first two are fundamental, and the last two are mostly desired as a means to the first two. I.e., people want safety and security, and see the power to ensure others' conformity to their vision of how the world should be as a means to be safe and secure in the way they want to live.
I think if we can create enough freedom and opportunity for people to live as they want to live, in as much or as little community with like minded others as they want, where they don't feel that their particular way of life is threatened, then we will see much, much fewer attempts to control other people.
This is the basic standard of social coexistence: my right to control my world ends at the equilibrium point between my legitimate interest and yours. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is really great on this topic.
Very well written. I would also add they dont just want safety, they want someone else to make it safe for them. They dont want to be responsible for their own safety.
Reading it written like this, I think I understand why it was that the Internet as it was couldn't last: it was, effectively, a state of nature. The Internet was a great frontier, where folks were finally freed of the constraints of the old order.
The problem is that the old order itself was formed out of the chaos of an older frontier still — and that frontier was populated by folks escaping an even older order, and so on back to the dawn of man.
The state of nature is inherently unstable, because people will band together to use violence and/or the threat of violence against those who violate their mores, whether those mores are going to church on Sundays in the Middle Ages (as various heretics discovered) or not giving to conservative charities (as Brendan Eich discovered). Some people want a frontier (generally, those who are relatively weak in the current order and wish to escape its establishment) but, once they have established a sphere of power for themselves, they defend it and become the new establishment.
If only there were a way to ensure a permanent frontier, where dissenters and freethinkers (and, yes, criminals) can escape and form their own orders, until their own dissenters and freethinkers escape away again.
I don't think most people want that, though. We saw it with the collapse of Ethereum's DAO. We see it every time someone says, 'there ought to be a law.' We see it every time a government forces someone to do something he would rather not do. People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.