Document: WM-048 P. Webb
Category: Internet 2021.01.15
The Internet is (not) broken
Abstract
Resistence is futile effectual
Body
You will find no shortage of "tweet storms" or articles decrying the
current state of the Internet using adjectives like "doomed",
"broken", "ruined", &c. While I tend to agree with many of the points
shared in such posts, I stop short of feeling defeated. Maybe it is
because I am an optimist and I recognize my own power to create what
I wish to see. Maybe it is my decade-plus experience and work within
the tech industry and absorbing stories of those older than I who saw
success/failure in the dotcom boom. Whatever it is, a few things are
made clear to me:
1. People are not going down without a fight. The work happening in
the decentralization and cryptocurrency fields are proof of this.
Will these avenues catch on? Certainly not immediately, maybe even
ever. However, the exercise of creating/discovering solutions is
worthwhile regardless, IMHO (failures lead to advancement of new,
potentially better ideas).
2. These big evil tech companies? They did not start out that way.
"Mo’ money mo’ problems," shout-out to Biggie Smalls. If money
really is the root of all/most evil, maybe every company should
have an in-house ethics committee that is actually empowered to DO
THEIR JOB (Dr Timnit Gebru and countless other people of color in
the ethics space know this all too well).
3. Baseline technical IQ is rising — this means our bumbling
politicians who have immense difficulty deciphering non-answers
from facetious tech CEOs wearing shit-eating grins will finally
see what we see and shut that shit down. Well, AOC does not seem
to have a problem grasping technical concepts…she is also not 70+
years old so there is that.
Before continuing, it would be useful to recap what ails the Internet
as seen by enthusiasts of this wonderous platform. Rather than
enumerate, I will share a list off the top of my head:
- Too much of today’s Internet is dependent upon a handful of
tech companies.
- Most of "FAANG": Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google
- All these companies are based in the United States, and various law
enforcement agencies routinely subpoena (order) said companies to
hand over data in the interest of "national security." Half-truths
are technically the truth, right?
- The data brokerage economy, which is a fancy way to say your
personal data is sold and traded around the world for cheap, was
enabled by Facebook, Google, and a LOT of smaller companies you
have never heard the name of (but the investors you follow on
Twitter? Oh, they know).
- In all fairness you did agree to the terms and conditions of
these services you use so they can legally do whatever they
want with the data you give them…but does that make it right?
Ethics apparently has no place in law.
For fans of capitalism (like myself), this seems like
not-that-big-a-deal in the grand scheme of things. The best companies
became successful and just pivoted to what makes the most money.
Maximizing profits while keeping margins low? That’s Business 101,
babeee! Pull yourself up by the bootstraps! No pain no gain! Working
hard or hardly working? ARE YA WINNIN’ SON?!
But I digress.
Any time a major service like Google Analytics, YouTube, or Amazon
Web Services (AWS) is down, a couple technical people get on Twitter
and say "SEEEEE?! We shouldn’t rely on them!" but the fact of the
matter is, software is created by humans, humans are fallible, and
shit happens. And, servers falling over? Nobody wants to deal with
that, it’s annoying! For those of us who aren’t technical enough to
perform DevOps, the idea of managing a server (let alone setting one
up) is intimidating at best. So…the alternative is to quit
using/paying for one service in favor of a less "evil" or problematic
one. For example, the people who leave their grandparents behind on
Facebook in favor of Twitter. It is alarming that Twitter only
started to reign in the President’s fear-/hate-mongering and lies
in the weeks leading up to the election…not one time prior to 2020.
10 days left of the presidency he’s managed to hold onto and that’s
when Twitter FINALLY finds the guts to boot him off their
platform. Anyhoo…
Where do we go from here?
The pessimists of the tech crowd will say there’s no point in
creating alternatives.
- "No one will sign up for your service, what makes it better
than ⟨MAJOR SERVICE⟩?"
- "⟨MAJOR SERVICE⟩ has existed for years, you’re not just gonna eat
their lunch."
- "Normies want free, they won’t pay for your dumb idea"
- "How are you gonna handle moderation, if ⟨MAJOR SERVICE⟩ can’t
do it?"
I’m old enough to remember what is commonly referred to as the "Wild
West" of the Internet. Internet access speeds were excruciatingly
slow by today’s standards and web browsers were not capable of what
we take for granted now. Developers favored XML over HTML! Because
the Internet was still fairly new, there were no established norms
nor preconceptions. "Data harvesting" sounded more like a malicious
act some corporation in a cyberpunk novel would engage in. But, when
people wish the Internet was back to how it used to be, I believe
they are (usually) talking about the feeling of it, rather than the
limited functionality (interestingly, Gopher has seen a resurgence
lately along with Gemini).
When I was in middle school in the year 2000 I got an account on
homestead.com and was able to play around with the free website space
they gave me. I downloaded a website theme from some place and
learned CSS and HTML by tweaking parameters in Notepad and
re-uploading the changed files. As archaic as that process was, it
blew my mind that I could create a Megaman Battle Network fan-site
and have it reachable by a URL to show my friends at school in the
computer lab. As I got older I wanted a site without ads and more
storage space so I moved onto mediatemple and continued my web
development explorations there.
This level of access seems to be gone these days. Services are still
free, of course, but mostly services where you can be siloed in. This
is how brand recognition/loyalty occurs. Apple, Microsoft, and Google
are not giving schools free laptops and tablets out of (just)
kindness, it is a long-term play that usually pans out. Bah, I feel
pessimism settling in so onto solutions, as I see them.
YOU CANNOT PUT THE GENIE BACK IN THE BOTTLE
Tech companies have tasted the delicious nectar of wealth that is
user data and it is the gift that keeps on giving. Well, maybe it
should not be called a gift. The companies are spending investor
dollars to pay their employees to build features that will get you to
sign up and use their product in exchange for your usage habits and
keywords within your memes and online rants. You…well, they get
what they pay for. You get a nice park to play in and garden to eat
from while the wolves watch from behind that tree over there. To
reduce our reliance on said companies, we need new ones with our best
interests at heart to tackle:
- analytics
- blogs and free websites
- collaborative documents
- DNS and domains
- email
- search
- social
The easiest way to handle free services is to offer a more capable
paid service alongside it. Google currently has a monopoly over most
of this list and best believe, they want more. Poor Facebook just
cannot stop being creepy long enough for people to foolishly trust
them again and that is crushing their dreams of becoming
American WeChat.
As for me? Well, I am just one guy on the Internet with a voice and a
plan for every item on this list. I am also not afraid of not knowing
what I do not know so 2021 should be an informative year for me (us,
if you want to follow along). Watch this space. 🕸