The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Well, maybe the 2020s will look like Neocities.
I’m a really firm believer in this. The Henry Ford quote is the most succinct way to describe it I’ve ever seen, but the topic of “miswanting” is dear to me.
We've known for years that tech companies have made their money off collecting data, profiling users and selling access to the users and their profiles. The general public never cared before. They signed in with Facebook around the web, knowingly gave the app permissions to read their personal data, and agreed to give third party apps access to that information.
People are not stupid. They traded privacy for convenience. Why act dumbfounded now? Why blame Facebook instead of ourselves?
In other words, a person who is taking all the necessary steps and doing everything right in terms of the privacy of their digital footprint, is either off the grid, or is likely considered a tin foil conspiracy theorist by peers. Human survival instinct usually overrides such thoughtfulness.
Why is it news to you that a large proportion of the population aren’t privacy savvy?
The same people who are worried about Facebook are still fine giving WhatsApp unfettered access to all the contacts on their phone, so it knows who their bank, dentist, and employer is. Go figure.
As to FB, if you were there in the beginning, you can definitely watch the scope creep:
Some of us hopped on Facebook in college when it expanded from Harvard to other schools (02? 03?) and it was a completely different beast. You could add friends or people from your classes, send messages, connect with that cute girl in your class (because you could search by classes), personalize it with quotes and photos, etc. It was basically a cleaner MySpace. As it expanded, I used it as a personal address book to keep track of folks I met while abroad and could see what they're up to. Over time though, it really changed, was less useful, and I honestly had no reason to go on it except for once a year when people would chime in with a happy birthday and I would catch up with them.
I'm much more worried about how integrated Google is into my life or the flashes of guilt when I order something from Amazon, which used to book that quirky bookseller with a poorly-designed website that had free shipping (5-10 days) but is now a behemoth that sells everything on a poorly-designed website that has different tiers of shipping which might be leading to abusive practices of its workers.
Even when the information is readily available (and obvious to those who know), if nothing prompts you to look for it, you won't see it.
That is new.
Worse, the same media power that turned the election into a reality show is now aimed at tearing down its results, washing their hands in innocence and tagging it Resistance.
If they weren't upset before, then they're not upset now because it happened, they're upset the "bad" people used it to accomplish the "wrong" goals.
I think the phrase "limited world view" applies to this quote.
The real problems will start when the censorship and leaching of data is moved to the entry points for the 'net, i.e. the internet access providers. The only way around such an obstacle would be some form of "darknet", either a "virtual" infrastructure on top of the physical one offered by the 'net or something which bypasses it altogether. We're not there yet but it doesn't take that much thought to realise that once some form of self-hosting takes off - with more and more fibre-connected users this becomes a viable proposition - those who call for censorship will not be satisfied much longer when they see the efficacy of their filters dwindle.
If you actually want to take the internet back, join SSB or build a decentralized web like with https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... .
It could be regulation; it could be anti-trust legislation to break up those tech giants that act as virtual monopolies. I like Derakhshan’s idea of obliging Facebook and others to open up a marketplace of algorithms: if you don’t like the current social media preference for popularity (retweets) and novelty (“latest”), you should be free to choose a different algorithm that acts on different values.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
To my mind, there is something inherently wrong about the techniques used to sway opinion about products and services. They prey on our animalian reflexes and bypass the part of the brain even capable of consent. Marketing "should" (and I don't use that word often) be prohibited to use such tactics, and instead be an exposition of the product and service and any traceable, trustworthy qualifications bestowed upon it. Such a system is still hackable (selling awards for instance), but it's a way better alternative to marketing practices than what we have today.
Devils advocate, even us tech people don’t 100% understand the scope and reach of Facebook, what they are doing is unprecedented. It’s not like there could be really informed typical users.
Thanks to social media, the internet had apparently
decentralised power. In the old days, information was
passed down from the mountain top – by a government, say,
or a news organisation – to the crowd below. Now the crowd
could speak to each other and to the world. At least one
aspect of the techno-utopians’ early hopes seemed to have
materialised.
And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered.
For what we now understand is that those at the top, the
political parties or governments that could afford it, have
been engaged in a radical act of recentralising power. They
saw the way social media was working, empowering
individuals and networks of individuals, and they decided
to grab those same weapons for themselves.
Seems more accurate to say, that hope was shattered when people gave up on decentralized infrastructure like RSS and email in favor of Facebook's walled garden. Now there's an opportunity to go back (to the future!) and do it right.
It might go beyond the ethos of HN, but I honestly wonder how much we should consider arguments like, "Normal people won't be able to use it" and "You won't be able to build a business on that because only a tiny fraction of people would want to use it". I often think about PGP/GPG (and especially web of trust) that way. I know it's useful to me and I know that the people I want to use it with are more than capable. But they decline.
RSS is an even better example. Why are we not building RSS tools? Why are we not building a brand around blog posts, FAQs, etc that contain RSS? Why is it not the "secret password" that opens the gate to the "good content that's not being gamed for the masses"?
Do you mean the eternal September [0]? Going back to the Internet being only for governments and universities is a bad idea, a bad thing to want.
I think the complaint at the moment is not the that masses are controlling the shape of the Internet but that a few corporations are both directly shaping it and, intentionally or not, shaping the masses.
RSS could maybe make a comeback. Podcasts are RSS and are more popular than ever. Subscribing to YouTube channels, following people on Twitter, these are actions people understand and do, it could be extended, "hey, why not use this thing that lets you subscribe and follow your favorite stuff not on individual web sites but everywhere?" The problem is, it makes it harder to make money off those eyeballs than to keep them in your walled garden.
Email is great because there is no vendor lock in. Open source is great because large groups of people can decide to fork it (or even inividuals).
The blockchain tech now opened a lot of applications that could rival these current tech giants.
Just 1 example: OpenBazaar received 3 million dollar investment. I'm curious what these kind of web 3.0 techs will change.
The illusion that "no-one is in control" of blockchain applications is going to meet the brick wall of regulatory reality pretty hard.
But that's got exactly zero in common with funded organisations making applications using the blockchain.
You can't monetise what you don't control.
Yes, they got 3 mil for developing their open source platform further, which in my opinion, is mind blowing. Especially since they don't have any clear plans on how to make revenue out of this.
all cambridge analytica and every retargetting ad firm does is to try and trick that power into mistakenly choosing against the powers own interest - but that has always been true, and the old solutions, of free press, free association and education are still the solutions.
where those rights are enshrined in the real world we will triumph, where they are not we will have to fight a bit harder.
I recognise the value of articles like this in highlighting the problem, but it's not hopeless, it's actually the opposite - the web is awesome, and now we get to keep the awesome, and clean up the problems ready for next time.
The real way forward is decentralization. We need to remove the authoritarian's 30-50% cut from everything.
It was better before Wikipedia (a legitimate giant) existed and Google sent them vast traffic to help them build out their service.
It was better before Yahoo gave me access to free, rapidly updated stock quotes.
It was better before Netflix carved up the old TV content monopolies. Those awesome days when old media held me entirely hostage.
It was better when classified ads were spread across the entire country in localized newspapers and you couldn't easily access them in a centralized giant service like Craigslist.
It was better when real estate pricing and information was a black book.
It was better before Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Amazon, YouTube gave me easy, low cost access to all the music I could ever possibly consume.
It was better before Amazon made shopping online easy, with a vast selection, relatively inexpensive for shipping, and very consumer friendly customer service.
It was better before I could easily and inexpensively send money to other people using PayPal or Venmo or 37 other solutions.
It was better before I could take ten minutes, plug in a few things, and accept payments via Stripe or Square.
It was better when I had to use a janky static Mapquest, or spend money on cumbersome physical maps just so I could navigate a new city. Back in those amazing days when hunting for stores or locations was so much fun.
It was better when I had to go through hell to operate my own hosted infrastructure. This whole insta-infrastructure AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, stuff must stop. And who the hell wants a free CDN, down with Cloudflare!
Those old glorious days.
The very existence of this article and its prominence on a news aggregator site refutes it.
IMO, the internet was in many ways better around 2006-2010. I liked the web better when there was google reader, a google blogsearch, and google forum/discussion search and not everything was completely centered on twitter and facebook.
Is it surprising that when authors use clickbait, people ignore the substance and reply to the most egregious part? Especially if an awful title gives no desire to read the content.
Yes, I just called Google crap. And Apple, and Amazon, and Clouflare, and Netflix, and Spotify. Yahoo!, Hotmail, do I need to mention Facebook? Centralised, monopolising, giant corporate crap. I avoid them whenever I can.
The web most definitely was better before they got their grasping claws on every aspect of it.
We had IRC/ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger!
We had Newsgroups & Mailinglists!
We had millions of PHPbb Forums for any thinkable niche, running on 50$/Month Shared Hosting!
We had Websites lovingly created with Frontpage!
We had Gameserver Browsers that ran as Desktop Software, without Ad placements!
We had "underground filesharing" websites that took 700MB Games and split them in 300 parts and uploaded them to 20 different "free hosting" providers so you could be as much of a pirate as you wanted!
We had Toplists of Websites (and Toplists) where communities and content providers fought over the highest rank which more often than not were completely arbitrarily awarded!
We had Online Shopping where we could send a wire transfer before the items were sent!
We had a world where the general public didn't want or need the Internet!
I don't find the guardian article very interesting, it has it's own problems with a click-baity title. But your response simply loops over an irrelevant shopping list of "my favourite things about the internet".