Barnes TechI have to admit, my thoughts and feelings on the internet (and to some degree, tech in general) have soured quite a bit over the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, I still use the internet every day, my job heavily depends on it, and many aspects of it I still geek out pretty hard with, but in many, many ways, the internet as it should have been is completely dead. I’m not the first one to say this, and I know I won’t be the last, but my thoughts are slightly different than what most people I have heard talking about it say, so I wanted to outline some of it here.
Although I’m not sure I would have ever considered myself a complete internet libertarian, I’ve always thought there should be some rules in place, but I definitely found the idea of an “open internet” appealing. I largely felt that you should be able to do whatever you want on the internet, essentially as long as it was legal, and you’d have to pay the consequences if it was illegal. Frankly, similar to how real life is. Do whatever you want, but if it’s something illegal, you may have to pay the price for it.
This was probably fine when the internet was full of personal blogs and a few low-traffic sites. The majority of people who roamed the internet early on were just having fun for the most part. Security and privacy weren’t a concern because it was a fun new toy that everyone could use and seemed to basically only be upsides. I know there were exceptions and dark places of the internet, but it didn’t really impact you unless you went looking for it.
I don’t need to go through the whole history, but the two things that I think began the rot were “personalized” advertising and social. Particularly together. To some degree, this is oversimplifying, but honestly I don’t think it is a whole lot. When surveillance advertising started to work really well, and social media saw this, the birth of engagement-based timelines was born, and everything on the internet shifted. On the surface, engagement-based timelines don’t seem awful, just slightly annoying. I think it has become clear over time that this just amplifies our worst attributes and that the most engaging content is usually rage-based, fear-based, etc. We also tend to find ourselves in echo chambers of whatever hot-topic item we find engaging, all while becoming more and more addicted to whatever service it is we are using, and becoming more isolated from each other. See also - enshittification
The large tech companies that run these engagement casinos have shown over and over again that they do not care how this impacts anyone. They take to the stand in Congress and pretend like there’s nothing they could have done for the teenage suicide caused by negativity and the relative anonymity of social media, coupled with the constant “engagement” with harmful content. Harmful content doesn’t have to mean terrorism, or drug use, or pornography, it could be as simple as amplifying a teenager’s insecurity by constantly showing them unrealistic body expectations, or any number of other topics that are easy for companies to claim don’t ever cause any harm, while refusing to even allow anyone to study the effects or any of the engagement algorithms.
Finally, more recently, the whole argument of constitutional “free speech” has come up, which is something that really bothers me. Social companies have enjoyed the problematic Section 230 which has essentially shielded them from any form of responsibility, allowing them to print money as fast as they feel like at the expense of our mental health, privacy, and arguably the foundations of democracy. They personally don’t care because they make so much money, coupled with the fact that they essentially legally have complete legal immunity on their platforms. Section 230 was meant to protect utility companies, such as your internet provider or phone company, from any liability if you did something illegal while using their service, or a blog site that someone posts a problematic comment on, but it has been wielded by social media and search giants as a shield from needing to do any of the hard work of protecting people. Section 230 has come under fire recently, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the conversation has been taking a hard right turn to claiming “Free Speech” instead of hiding behind a law that no one likes.
This to me is ridiculous. Should you have free speech online? I definitely think so, but I do not think that is connected to social media companies at all, not to mention “free speech” is wielded as a weapon by people who typically don’t understand what it even means (or know exactly what it means but want to convince people not paying attention that they are right). To me, free speech means you can host whatever you’d like on the internet. You can spin up a server and put whatever filth you want out there. If it’s illegal, law enforcement should be able to shut it down and find you. I don’t think that means that companies out there should have to host your information, and it certainly does not mean anything for “promoting” content on algorithmic timelines. These are private (or publicly traded) companies running commercial enterprises. They are not a “Town Square” or a platform you should just get to say whatever you want.
When the government even implies that they want to provide some guidelines, they freak out and claim “censorship” as if they were some crucial bastion of a democratic society, but then they choose what to amplify and what to demote so no one ever sees it all based on an algorithm clearly motivated only by selling the most ads by keeping you addicted to doom scrolling, and they keep it in a tight black box that no one can ever see. They act like it’s “too complex to understand” but panic like a toddler when you try to take a toy away any time someone tries.
This has slowly shifted to starting to say that the whole concept of content filtering is essentially authoritarian censoring, but they literally never even let you see things the way you want to. It is ALWAYS their version of what you see. In other words, it is literally all filtered all the time, no matter what. It’s just in their financial favor. Filtering things to be more healthy for the rest of us, or turn the heat down on a certain topic, just turns down their free money spigot a little, so why would they? Why would you stop promoting Covid misinformation when lots of people will click on the content (doesn’t particularly matter what you believe, because it’s a charged topic either way)? So keep the unlimited money train coming and throw a fit about “censorship," then go hide in your giant bunker in Hawaii so you don’t have to actually be around the rest of us when the democracy you live in crumbles around you.
On the flip side, somehow unironically, some states are trying to simultaneously rage about “government censorship” when it comes to accountability of rich white adults, but also trying to force religious conservative values onto these platforms and the internet as a whole by law. Believing in these things isn’t good enough; you have to force everyone to follow your religious beliefs apparently. This is what Texas tried to do by forcing any tech online to verify people’s age and then filter out content considered “harmful material” to minors. What does “harmful material” mean? It doesn’t say. I’m sure that would never be a problem, since it could just be interpreted as anything, right?
But on the flip side, as reported by The Verge - Social networks can’t be forced to filter content for kids, says judge - the other side of the argument seems to be back to what I was talking about earlier. “You can’t force these companies to filter anything because they are immune from everything” is the essential argument. This is also a huge problem. Neither side is right in this case, and there seem to be more and more of these coming up all the time.
This is the kind of thing that is pushing the internet to essentially die. There is a lot more to the internet than social and search, powered by algorithmic timelines, but if you look at the traffic and time spent, the rest is a vanishingly small part of the overall internet. These lawsuits will come up and get struck down, and we keep spinning our tires and never doing anything, all while these companies cash in on taking advantage of all of us, surveilling everything we do and never taking any responsibility. Why would they, if they don’t have to?