In the physical world, we have a cascading set of governments, councils and countries we form part of in a participatory process. If someone is smoking next door I can raise it with the home owners association. Or my local council. Or if laws need to be changed, I can talk to my member of parliament or get involved in the local political process. As a society we spent thousands of years and countless deaths to reach this fragile place where we take collective responsibility for our shared spaces and communities. Who pays for the roads? We all do. Who sets the rules for public spaces? We all do.
On the Internet, we absconded from our collective responsibility to invest in shared infrastructure. So, absent other investment, a bunch of US corporations went around creating “free” services. You don’t want to pay for infrastructure? No problem. We’ll cover the bill, so long as you don’t mind us tracking you everywhere, selling information about you to advertising brokers, and advertising to you directly. Don’t like the spaces we created? We’ll aim some of the best AIs humans have ever created at your mind to algorithmically find your attentional weaknesses. All to keep you hooked on outrage, so we can show you more ads. You don’t live in the US? We don’t care. We’re in charge and we’re enforcing American “decency” standards on everyone. Don’t like the feudal empire we built? You’re welcome to delete your account and banish yourself from our society. If we don’t do that ourselves first, automatically. Good luck with the other feudalist corporate empires down the road.
We’re all paying for this as we watch social trust fray around us. We’re paying with a generation lost to outrage wars on Twitter, antivaxers on Facebook, the capital hill riots, teen suicide, conspiracy theories, and witch hunts. All pushed on people by algorithms that our community has created in a desperate attempt to maximise “engagement”. All so we can show more ads at any cost. Never mind if democratic liberal society crumbles in the process.
We’re kings of the world, and the only responsibility anyone can name is to the almighty dollar. Somehow maximising shareholder value is held in higher regard than our responsibility to leave a functioning society to our children. Help us all, but we need to do better than this.