The Internet was a Mistake...
Apologies for the click-bait title, but now that I have your attention let's discuss the state of the internet in 2022. Now do I think that the internet was a mistake? No. Of course not, that would just be silly. With it we have all gained access to the single greatest collection of data and information the world has ever known! However, that does not mean that all is well on the World Wide Web.
What was once a technological revolution that brought my generation up in a world of unlimited possibilities and countless hours of entertainment has now become a technocratic oligarchy where we are the goods being traded between financial institutions and technological megacorporations. Now don't get me wrong, I'm about as capitalist as they come -- laissez faire and all -- but there is a big difference between capitalism and corporatism. But I digress. Let's look at the Internet; what it was, what it is, what it looks to become, as well as some alternatives to return some sanity to this tangled Web we weave.
Web 1.0: The Information Super-Highway
I'm sure that all of the gray beards reading this will remember the glory days of the internet, what with Telnet BBS's, CompuServe, Newsgroups, and the like, but for me the glory days of the Internet started in the late 1990's. It was the era of AOL and Yahoo. Angelfire and GeoCities. Of Lycos and AltaVista. Of AIM solicitations and nefarious love letters. It was a golden time, when Windows 98 was all the rage, when Steve Jobs had just unveiled the beauty of the iMac G3, and a small startup called Google was just starting to make waves.
The internet at this time was expanding and gaining in popularity. Sure it had been around for years and many-o-nerd had taken up residence on message boards and mailing lists, but now everyday people were getting online and exploring what the world had to offer. I remember time after time after time when news broadcasters would explain just what exactly it was. "It's like an information super-highway..." they would say, and to an extent they were right.
For older millennials -- or Xennials, as I've also heard us called -- like myself, it was like we had stepped into a whole new world. I hung out in chat rooms and posted on Star Wars discussion forums. I shared stories I'd written, and wrote more with friends I'd made all over the world. Now it would be foolish of me to pretend like it was perfect. There were a lot of online threats, to be sure. However -- much like today -- if you practiced some common sense and some basic safety precautions you'd be fine. The problem was that everyone was so new to the internet that those safety precautions weren't very well known, and soon companies would join the fray bringing the internet to its second form that we're all familiar with today.
Web 2.0: eCommerce, Big Data, and the Social Experiment
I won't waste your time talking about the old days of eBay, Amazon -- back when they were just an online book store --, and the introduction of online banking. Those were there and had been there since the turn of the millennium. What I want to look at is the rise of "Big Tech", and "Big Data".
With the whole world embracing this new online world, it was only a matter of time before the business world would come looking for that sweet, sweet, cheddar (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). Banner ads had been around on the early web and served a purpose to help generate some revenue for their host sites, much like they do today. The big difference, as far as I understand it, is the rise in the trade of user data for targeted advertising.
Let's say, for example, that there is a company that sells online floral arrangements. In the old days, you might come across an ad at the top or the side of a web page for said floral arrangements on many different sites. It was just throwing ads out there with hopes that someone would be interested and click through to the company's website. In a way, it was a lot like the advertising model on TV and radio, but over time we harnessed newer and newer technologies allowing advertisers to identify us -- to fingerprint and track our online life -- to serve up "targeted" advertisements. So now rather than getting the occasional ad for getsomeflowers.com or whatever, we'll see the ad if the algorithms pick up that an important date from your calendar is approaching, or that Facebook argument with your mom or girlfriend ended poorly. Is this a bad thing? Well, I guess that really depends on your perspective, but to me it is a terrible invasion of our privacy. The worst part of it, is that we all know they do this, and we still sign away our rights with each ToS we agree to; and then there's the social media revolution of the last decade.
When I say the words social media I am certain that it will conjure up many different definitions. To me, social media means the sites and services designed to serve as a sort of online public square for the masses. They lack the focus of discussion boards, they lack the tech-savvy tax of a BBS, XMPP, or IRC and they centralize their users all in one place. Think sites like Friendster, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, and so on.
Now don't get me wrong, the early days of social media were pretty cool. They were fun places to be, and it was an opportunity to put yourself out there and keep in touch with distant family and friends. Heck, I even reconnected with my biological father's side of the family -- whom I'd never known -- after about 30 years through Facebook! With tens or hundreds of millions of users all sharing their likes, dislikes, photos, experiences, shopping and eating habits, these platforms found themselves in position of unimaginable wealth and power; and as we learned from Uncle Ben, "With great power comes great responsibility." Unfortunately, these companies have been very irresponsible. They feed us content designed to keep us engaged. They design their apps and notifications to drive more engagement, taking advantage of our psychology and physiology to turn record profits. They promote content that is designed to enrage and then wonder why people get angry, depressed, nihilistic, and radicalized. Yet despite all of the ways social media destabilizes us and how despised many of these platforms are by so many people, they are still wildly successful and pull their users back in day after day. If you can't tell, I'm not a fan and I just think there has to be a better way.
Web 3.0: Decentralized Utopia or Centralized Crypto Fantasy
As I write this there is a movement taking form to introduce the world to the next great-leap in Internet technology. The common name I've seen thrown around is Web3 or Web 3.0. Advocates for Web3 talk about the importance of decentralizing the sites and services that we use today, often by using blockchain technology. A blockchain, for the uninitiated, is a essentially a database. However, unlike your typical database, a blockchain database is distributed among the devices of individual users (nodes) rather than being hosted on a centralized server. An example of Web3 tech in use today would be something like Odysee.com.
Odysee is a video/content hosting provider similar to YouTube, but it's built on the LBRY protocol and uses a blockchain to host it's content. When you upload a video to YouTube it goes onto their servers and is served out to your viewers upon request. Odyssee, on the other hand, uploads your video to its node and to others watching it using the LBRY app who can then host it from their node. To my imperfect understanding, it's kind of like Napster or LimeWire back in the day using Peer-to-Peer sharing, but different. Apologies if my analogy isn't perfect. The learning curve on this stuff is pretty steep and I'm no expert in it.
This blockchain tech is also what forms the backbone of the crypto-currency economy and the sale of NFTs. It's -- theoretically -- unchangeable so it keeps track of who holds how much of any particular coin/token and the transactions of those values. But is this the solution we need for the centralized mess of today? Even if the tech giants of today decided to embrace this decentralized vision of Web3, would it resolve the grievances that many of us have with Web2? Many out there would say yes. I, however, am not convinced.
A Return to Form
The probelms of Web 2.0, as I see them, go beyond the predatory nature of companies like Microsoft, Twitter, and the FAANG* collective. They stem, ultimately, from our consumption habits and our embrace of modern convenience without regard for our own responsibility in the midst of it. I mean when was the last time any of us actually read the terms of service for any online service we signed up for? There are some of you who do -- and you people are weird -- but you are the exception, and the smart ones. If we realized just how much data is collected on us, and how it is used, I think many more of us would stop using these services all together, yet for many more of us, we know what they do, and use the service anyway. Ultimately, we cannot rely on or expect big tech to change. They have no incentive to change, so we have to change.
We can embrace a better way of browsing and using the modern Web. Sure we'll still need to use things like banking sites and the like from time to time, but we can minimize it as much as possible if we really wanted to. Rather than scrolling social media apps, look for groups with mutual interests on discussion forums. Move to decentralized social and chat networks Matrix, Mastodon (if you really need that social media fix), XMPP chat servers. Consume content offline with physical media or a your personal digital library. If you want to follow online content creators, try to move away from YouTube to alternative platforms like Odysee, Rumble, or BitChute -- as an added benefit, a good number of YouTubers have also started mirroring their uploads to these platforms or hosting them there directly! And rather than relying totally on online services, if you have the technical know-how, consider self-hosting your website, blog, or whatever else you use. And if you're feeling really adventurous, try exploring the alternative universes of Gopher and Gemini (I'll write more on these at a later time).
As I said at the start, I don't actually think the Internet was a mistake but mistakes have definitely been made. We let the business world and the government take control of the wild west that we used to enjoy and now we are all paying the price. Is it too late to correct those mistakes? Possibly, but only time and our actions will tell.
*FAANG = Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google
I also remember the early web. It was a cool place. I spent a lot of time there.
I would argue that the current tech bubble will eventually burst, and many of the current patterns will stop. Amazon has, over its history, posted a lot of down quarters, and many of the profitable quarters didn't beat the rate of inflation. The stock market has kept many of these companies afloat (low interest rates have that effect), but they may all collapse like the tech bubble of our younger years. The online ad business is likewise in bad shape. Ad blockers are very common now, and they're all but required to have any kind of decent online experience. That commonality is breaking the model that many companies have come to rely on. Worse for many is that their precious data economy is proving to be so hated that Apple can use it as a marketing tool.