How the internet has turned into a tool that subverts freedom

Opinions are my own. This article is part of a series called “The Rebuild”.

Two decades have passed since the invention of the internet. It’s early beginnings were full of positivity and hope for a utopian world created through free access to information. We shifted society from the TV living room to a personal computer. We went from curated mass media to person to person media. We democratized the right to create value and distribute that value to anyone in the world, at any moment. We heralded the coming information revolution as a gift to civilization.

“We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain. “— Stephen Hawking

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore 94′

“We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” — John Perry Barlow 96′

“The Internet isn’t free. It just has an economy that makes no sense to capitalism.” — Brad Shapscot

However, for some time now, deep worrisome cracks in the internet have been widening. A cartel of internet giants have been hoarding our collective attention and power structures have leaned in to channel that attention in a game of misdirection. These giants, not inherently evil by design have evolved destructive characteristics because they sit atop an internet that is broken. If we don’t do something within our lifetime, we’re likely to reach a point of no return in the loss of individual freedom.

The internet’s corporate owners want it to become a technique of marginalisation and control. — Noam Chomsky

Monopolization of the Internet

Market forces are at the heart of this problem. A few early-internet pioneers were able to exploit the immaturity of the internet to their own ends before we were able to adapt as a society. It started with the reality that:

Applications are run by businesses

We interface with the internet through applications run by businesses. Their corporate structures still live in the tangible world of market forces, quarterly returns, and demanding shareholders. The result is entities that must find ways to establish themselves, create competitive moats, produce revenue and grow(endlessly). Since the internet requires a new set of domain expertise, it has allowed for a few to accelerate the formation of monopolies fuelled largely by investors playing a money making game on behalf of their limited partners. These businesses have operated in most cases for more than a half decade at revenue losses in a battle of attrition against their competition. They have produced unshakable network effect based monopolies around the services we rely on every day.

This trend toward monopolization is one we should all be worried about. While subsidized service offerings are compelling, the long-term sustainability of these monopolies require profit. The need for that profit to continually grow leads inevitably to necessary rent-seeking behavior on behalf of the monopoly. In many of these cases the end user is forced to bear the burden of increased costs to fuel this insatiable machine.

Free forever is an exploitative, dangerous business model

Often labeled the advertisement and engagement based model, it is used by web giants like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Google. The model incentivizes product managers and engineers to optimize their offerings to maximize a users time spent in the application to collect increasingly preposterous amounts of data to boost advertising relevance and targeting. These optimizations result in compelling applications that prey on our lesser instincts, force us into unhealthy relationships with our phones and are effective at placing us in the passenger seat of our own lives. It’s a race to the bottom of the brain as more and more “innovative” apps compete for our time and attention borrowing fringe concepts from the sciences to get an edge over their competition. They weaponize our cognitive biases by forcing us into micro tradeoffs between convenience and control.

Monopolies are in an arms race to hoard your data

The free forever model gets better as it learns more about you. In a race to make you more engaged and to earn the respect and dollars of advertisers, internet monopolies are heavily invested in collecting, buying, and forming their own inferences about who you are, what you want, where you’ll be, and what you believe.

Prevailing characteristics of these online businesses include:

• focus on consolidating monopolies through network effects
• operate at a loss to destroy the competitive landscape
• if possible be free forever, monetize through ads
• design your experiences to addict users, maximize time spent in the application.
• hoard data to graph a user’s desires, fears anxieties and intents

The Polarization of Individual Belief

This race for our attention has led to the creation of social media and news algorithms that reward outrage, false facts, and filter bubbles. This reward structure strengthens and further polarizes existing ideological factions. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the United States, a country already beholden to a binary two-party system has seen further polarization and less moderate outlook among its voters. Identity politics have become a game played by vocal minorities that distract us.

The monopolization of internet services, followed by the prevalence of the engagement based model has divided us, so we can no longer agree on the truth.

Today, we spend an increasing amount of our time on the internet and when we rely on these services to inform us, we become on a macro level — less informed. It’s not too difficult to reason about how these patterns are already beginning to form something much more sinister.

Widespread Nation State Mis-information

The monopolization of our attention and the polarization of individual belief have made us targets for mass manipulation. Notable early examples of this have shown themselves in countries with big investments in mass media propaganda. Historically, the “influence” game was cemented on a universal truth: “credibility is king, and the truth will always win”, however, in a world dominated by the ill effects of a broken internet, new manipulation strategies have emerged and the propaganda game is getting much more sophisticated. US based think tanks like RAND Corporation are increasingly focused on publishing reports with recommendations on how the US must learn to adapt and “compete” with foreign state propaganda.

From it —

Russian propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency. Although these techniques would seem to run counter to the received wisdom for successful information campaigns, research in psychology supports many of the most successful aspects of the model.

“A ceaseless shapeshifting, that is unstoppable, because it’s indefinable.” — Adam Curtis

Even more concerning is that effective manipulation strategies are adopted by centralized authority of all kinds, and we don’t need to venture far to see these influence tactics played out by those we are supposed to trust. It is becoming increasingly difficult to know what is real and with the consumer availability of technology like deepfake and lyrebird our definition of “real” is changing in parallel.

No nation is immune to this, the end game is an undermining of societies perception of the world so that we never know what is really happening. A constantly changing piece of theatre and an effective subversion of our freedom. Left unchanged, the internet as it exists today will magnify society’s illnesses, not limit them.

…However, there is hope.

A Path Forward

These issues have a continuum of public responses, from the defeatist attitude of surrender to the reactive regulatory efforts of Government to enforce consumer privacy and data ethics. Neither of which speak to the core challenge or provide a compelling and optimistic alternative.

Legislation will not reverse these trends

In a game of public opinion and four-year political cycles, it’s very hard to see a path where legislation can keep up with the internet’s pace of innovation. This disparity between legislations ability to update and the pace of technological innovation is amplified by the geographic boundaries governments face when imposing rules. We could look to inter-governmental bodies however their designs and bureaucracy impose speed reduction as a feature.

“The internet is global and its impact is scaling quickly; governments are local and face natural scaling issues.” — Matthew Spoke

If we were to rally behind a legislative solution, these internet giants will not let the debate wage without them influencing the conversation.

Can we fix the internet itself?

A growing number of us are starting to believe that we have a chance to reverse course, by reforming the internet itself. Some have been labeling this movement web3, the third iteration of the internet.

Web3 uses decades of innovation in cryptography, decentralized network design, digitally native assets, mechanism design and an increasing number of tools to rethink the core protocols that run the internet’s underlying infrastructure.

What kind of value do we get out of a new internet built on these innovations?

It may be difficult to grasp now, but imagine an internet where you can prove who you are, or pay for something without the need for any centralized authority to confirm your identity or your account balance. The new internet has currency baked-in, which will allow applications powered by business models that align user and developer interests. Your data will be provably private, and you won’t need to hand over control of it to gain access to the systems you enjoy. The new internet will change who owns the “inventory” of the network from a particular company to the initial creator. If you give the network value, you will be the recipient of it’s value creation.

We’re still in the very early stages of reformation, but we’ve seen progress. The Bitcoin project has proven that we can have an international currency without the need for a central bank. The Brave browser has proven that we can create consumer products that revert the ad model and pay you for your time and attention (involving users in the business). IPFS has proven that we can spin up distributed copies of websites like Wikipedia that can’t be censored by dictatorial nation states. It’s these early breakthroughs that give us hope, and we venture forward.

However, we need help. Like any new movement, we lack mature thought leadership in specialized fields that are better equipped to help us navigate this reformation. We need a generation of reformers from economics and the sciences, as well as the humanities and engineering. We need artists and story tellers to spread the message. You made it to the end of this article, we need you!

This post represents the first of a series we’re calling “The Rebuild”. Its purpose is to highlight humanities progress towards rebuilding the internet. We’ll highlight projects that are paving new trails, patterns that are achieving success at scale, as well as our take on what the outcomes could look like.

Please share this article and subscribe for updates as they become available. ??