From f0b416831833b1cb38e9d0171d4cf52e41a62d4c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Wang Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2017 00:34:30 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] first set of updates --- 0 Introduction.md | 41 +++++++++++++++ 1 Web 2017.md | 118 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2 The Web We Lost.md | 74 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ README.md | 48 ++++++++++++++++-- 4 files changed, 278 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) create mode 100644 0 Introduction.md create mode 100644 1 Web 2017.md create mode 100644 2 The Web We Lost.md diff --git a/0 Introduction.md b/0 Introduction.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..79236b4 --- /dev/null +++ b/0 Introduction.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +# Introduction + +In this series of essays, I argue that the web is fundamentally broken, and many of the terrible phenomenon we've witnessed recently such as cyberbullying, "fake news", information diabetes, and the like are all symptoms of deep and fundamental flaws in the construction of the Internet. By identifying those root problems, we can also begin to approach ideas for new information architectures which do not suffer from these problems. + +One of my fundamental contentions is that we cannot simply "hook up people" the way we network computers. All of our existing online communities are engineered around software that is built on a centralized, client-server architecture that lacks strong identity management and data security. This is the heart of the issue. + +Rather than simply looking at how to patch specific failings of some existing website or platform, I believe we need to *invert the problem statement*. We must start by looking at what people and societies need from a communications medium, and on that basis, we must architect and engineer a new Distributed Information System which provides for those needs. + +--- + +Throughout time, human communications has served many goals, including the building of trust, the establishment of family and tribal values, and establishing a person's sense of identity in the face of an ever-changing (and oftentimes threatening) world. But fundamentally, humanity as a species relies on solid social communications in order for groups of people to live together. + +The accelerating mindless, heartless conversion of all human communications into digitized channels threatens every aspect of our persons as well as our overall civilization. + + * It is *accelerating* because technology is enabling greater bandwidth into more locations, and that bandwidth is increasingly connecting high-fidelity audio/video sensors with AI on one end, to vast server farms with infinite storage on the other end, but managed exclusively by corporations whose only business demonstrated model has been to take advantage of human attention by selling advertising. + + * It is *mindless* because all of the organizations involved in building, maintaining, and innovating in this technical area are for-profit entities whose management and boards have consistently taken the standard excuse of Growth Capitalism, namely, increasing profits for a shrinking and decreasingly happy pool of shareholders. + + * It is *heartless* because despite all the obsession over "UI/UX", only the tiniest sliver of people in the technology sector focus on their users' overall well-being as their central, greatest concern. Nearly the entirety of the Techno-tainment-Complex exists at this point to find more ways to make people more dependent on more centralized products and services. With the digital revolution successfully hijacking nearly all human communications, we are able to manufacture desire and bend taste, and get very close to perfecting consumerism. It has been said that virtually all types of markets are moving into a "Winner Take All" dynamic. If this is true, it is in large part due to the fact that consumer communications technology is aggregating every aspect of our lives an "All" which can be "Taken". + +I strongly believe this is an active threat to civilization, because if we do not do anything about it, we will continue down a path to a very dark, very unhappy place. We will have boundless technology, incredible technical talent to apply to any problem, and yet we will only seem to create more problems than we solve. We will sit by and watch children starve and die, needlessly, as we twiddle our thumbs pointlessly over so many millions of smartphone screens. We will see ancient grudges and feuds grow in strength, fueled by ignorance and restless resentment at "the whole system". + +I contend that these massive geopolitical and socioeconomic problems are tied to the brokenness of the web, because **we need revolutionary change in our modes of thought about economics, society, and how to live a meaningful life in a connected world where human labor is of decreasing value**. + +Our technology is good enough, but unless we have a resilient Communications and Information System, we will not be able to bring about needed changes. Much of what must be done will threaten existing business and political interests, and they will abuse the control inherently available within the Internet and current social media apps to fight the change agents. + +As a species, we are at a point in our technological advancement where we must start to be intentional as a global civilization. And that has to start with how we architect digital communications systems for *homo sapiens*, which are rapidly evolving into *homo sapiens digitalus*. + +--- + +My interest in this topic emerged not from a single subject, but rather from a series of realizations and events. I have been acquainted with topics in the general area of "Internet techno-utopianism" for over 20 years now. More recently, I have been aware of blockchain concepts, and web-of-trust concepts. But only in the last 18 months have these all synthesized in my mind as technologies that are desperately needed to solve a global crisis for human civilization. + +Obviously, the level of mass psychological manipulation in the American 2016 election marks a significant breaking point. While many dwell on the manipulation itself, for me, the more interesting thing was watching the response in the population. Existing social narrative technologies from the 20th century utterly failed to stop or even slow down the direct manipulation of the world's most wealthy, most technologically advanced country. Every TV, radio, web site was just more water on a chemical fire: more hydrogen and oxygen for the burning. + +I actually started writing down my thoughts into a notebook called "The Web We Lost" starting in January 2016, well before a lot of the electoral shenanigans, and before Russians, the alt-right, and Team Trump were visibly weaponizing social media. Since that time, I have been both dismayed and embolded by a string of continuing failures in the internet and the web. Dismayed, because the world is obviously hurting and broken by bad technology. Emboldened, because with each failure, I could see my ideas validated and refined. I've also had the good fortune of finding many fellow technologists and humanists who are thinking much along the same lines. + +I have appreciated their dialogue and feedback. But I have also not seen anyone quite articulate a holistic picture of the overall system failure, and therefore many partial solutions are posed. I feel that on this topic, I take a view that is both broader and more theoretical in scope, but also reaches deeper into the lower levels of both technology and human behavior. + +So, while I will link to many other writings and narratives that line up or overlap with parts of virtually every aspect of what I have to say, I believe that my unique contribution into this space is to provide a more holistic narrative of the many dimensions of our current problems, and to encourage technologists to consider the human factors of social interaction as a core part of the problem they are attempting to solve. It absolutely permeates almost every single engineering design question that comes up. + + diff --git a/1 Web 2017.md b/1 Web 2017.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d3613e --- /dev/null +++ b/1 Web 2017.md @@ -0,0 +1,118 @@ +# Web 2017 - Failures At Every Level + +(Image: Iraq Oilfields burning) + +First, to get us all on the same page, I'd like to survey the landscape of all that is broken in 2017. If you're reading this, you're probably acquianted with many of these. An exhaustive catalogue of the many failings of modern social media would fill an entire book by itself, but a few recent things stand out in particular, spanning many different kinds of tech. Although we might come up with specific, targeted fixes for each one of the failures, I contend they only scratch the surface, and that the problems are all deeply related. + +If you get tired of reading the entire Beastiary list, feel free to skip to the [Attention Economy](#the-attention-economy-servant-of-growth-capitalism) section after it. + + +Contents: + * [A Beastiary of Obvious Failures](#a-bestiary-of-obvious-failures) + * [The Attention Economy, Servant of Growth Capitalism](#the-attention-economy-servant-of-growth-capitalism) + * [From Connection to Consumption](#from-connection-to-consumption) + * [The Chinese Model](#the-chinese-model) + * [An American Model](#an-american-model) + * [Further Reading](#further-reading-and-sources) + +## A Beastiary of Obvious Failures + + * **Libyan rebels calling in airstrikes by tweeting @NATO** - I saw this in an episode of Anthony Bourdian's TV show, of all places, and [The Guardian reported on it](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/15/libya-nato-gathers-targets-twitter). + + * **Snowden's revelations** - To some extent, any of us who have been paying attention since the 1990s, when ECHELON and Room 641 have been discussed endlessly on Slashdot and Reddit, should not be surprised at most of what Snowden revealed. + + * **Paywalls for content, auto-play video ads, anti-ad-blocker tech** - It's a real shame how many man-centuries were poured into W3C standards that carefully separate content from presentation in HTML, only to have the embed of a general-purpose runtime (Javascript) into what should be a content viewer create an evolutionary battle over creepy access to user behavior. + + * **"Fake News"** - The "fake news" stuff emerging from the 2016 election is the most severe impact of the failure of social media, but I am worried about different things than the immediate, concrete things which seem to occupy most others. On a basic level, the move to push "fact checkers" was perhaps a decent stopgap, but failed to recognize that the real danger was synchronized hijacking of attention. When everyone is marching in unison over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, it doesn't matter if the song they're marching to is played off-key. + + * **Imdb message boards shutting down.** - Earlier this year, IMDB [shut down its message boards](http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/imdb-message-boards-shut-down-1201977581/) because they were filling with accusations of racism, angry culture flamewars between total strangers, and general trolling. This has nothing to do with "fake news". But it's a related symptom of the overall systemic failure of the Internet as a communications medium to connect humans. + + * **[Verizon Supercookie](https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/7/11173010/verizon-supercookie-fine-1-3-million-fcc)** - Telcos, which should be safely considered as common carriers for dumb bits, have repeatedly engaged in behavior that makes their users ultra-targetable. [Verizon & AT&T track users' location and detailed information](https://www.androidauthority.com/verizon-att-selling-information-807684/). Laws and regulations and fines will not work. Relying on big public entites with thin margins to police themselves will not work. Even if we could hypothetically assume that they always have pure intentions, rogue employees and buggy implementation are a perpetual vulnerability. Invoking the principle that "Code Is Law", we need a digital communications infrastructure where this sort of exploitation is *simply not possible*. + + * **[Apple refused to unlock an iPhone for the FBI](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-wants-apple-to-help-unlock-iphone-used-by-san-bernardino-shooter/2016/02/16/69b903ee-d4d9-11e5-9823-02b905009f99_story.html)** - The famous case a few years ago when Apple refused to unlock a suspect's iPhone for the FBI. So, instead, [the FBI paid a 3rd party $900,000 and got the job done](https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/08/fbi-paid-900000-to-unlock-san-bernardino-iphone/). Our device manufacturers control too much of an integrated stack, and just like the telcos, we rely on them to self-police. + + * **[Google deletes Dennis Cooper's blog](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/opinion/sunday/the-blog-that-disappeared.html)** [(second link)](http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-blog/) - It's not just that Telcos have inappropriate access to private data and give us no choice in yielding sensitive metadata about our browsing habits and physical location. Rather, with Google established as the central namesystem of the internet, it gains incredible, unchecked power. In this case, it is citing violations of its Terms of Service as cause for pulling an artistic blog with controversial content. + + * **["Dear Mark, I Shall Not Comply"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12457004)** - Norwegian newspaper posts famous Vietnam War photos, Facebook pulls the photo and the article. When the author of the article creates a new post criticizing the action, [Facebook proceeds to kill *that* article](https://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/i/dPQmO/Norsk-forfatter-midlertidig-utestengt-fra-Facebook-etter-a-ha-postet-bilde-fra-Vietnamkrigen). Even when trying to enforce moral standards and values in another Westernized, European country, Facebook failed. + + * **[600Gbps DDoS takes out Krebs on Security, forces it off of CloudFlare](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/why-the-silencing-of-krebsonsecurity-opens-a-troubling-chapter-for-the-net/)** - This is not a social media failure. Rather, it's a case where deficiencies in TCP/IP allow for malevolent actors to reach up and kill content. + + * **[Blue Feed, Red Feed](http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/)** - A Wall Street Journal interactive exploration of what a targetable medium looks like. If only Marshall McLuhan were around to witness this. The medium is truly now massaged. + + * **[The CIA's "Siren Servers"](ttp://sociable.co/technology/cia-siren-servers-social-uprisings/)** - AI will definitely emerge, as learning computers have to make predictions and take actions in a network that is as smart or smarter than them. + + * **[Counterfeiters on Amazon](http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2017/02/13/after-selling-millions-family-run-makin-bacon-battles-amazon-counterfeiters/)** - Because Amazon centralized the online consumer experience, they are now the target of significant counterfeiting. Even with their money and resources, they have to employ manual teams to play Whack a Mole, and they're failing. And ultimately this is on them: in their rush for market share, they reduced the friction for random people on the internet to set up a store and start selling things. The structural failure behind this failure is that we have defaulted to relying on email address and website to be proxies for identity. I want an internet where people know you're a dog, and where I can require that other entities I interact with have some history in my social sphere. + + * [Smartphone addiction among teens leads to psychological and emotional problems](http://time.com/4974863/kids-smartphones-depression/) + + * A web where this kind of thing is possible: [Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/world/europe/russia-finland-nato-trolls.html) + + * **Cyber-bullying and trolling are rampant, and virtually unstoppable**. Online communications tools and social networking sites/apps are a substrate on which social expression and dynamics can manifest. Nowhere are social dynamics more chaotic and stressful on individual identity than in high schools. And instead of providing students tools to connect empathetically and build trust, we do the dumbest thing possible ("Anyone can post anything about anyone else and other people can join them in a chorus of abuse!"). + + Kids are literally killing themselves because of bad UX design. Facebook and Twitter should feel the blood of those kids on their hands, just as engineers at auto manufacturers feel culpable for deaths resulting from poor design of their vehicles. The communications vehicle that the social media companies have provided to us are blowing up left and right, and they hide behind some weaksauce about "Terms of Service". + + +## The Attention Economy, Servant of Growth Capitalism + +We can shake our heads at the above, but they are merely the most obvious and visible failures of current technology. It is harder to see the buried signs of what is to come, and they are far more troubling. + +Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins puts out an annual report on the state of the Internet. [Her latest report](http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends) shows a rapid ramp up in advertising ownership by social media platforms. A huge portion of the report then talks about all the different kinds of new approaches and technologies that are being deployed to have pervasive "brand engagement" (i.e. advertising). This includes location tracking, AR/VR, and a host of other tech. + +Ultimately, all people really want to do is chat with friends, and meet in the town square, and hang out with real people, without every moment being surrounded by targeted ads. But so long as the cost of operating that technological infrastructure is large, the people who provide such technology will have to monetize it somehow. I think a general principle should be that one *should* expect to pay for communications infrastructure. Otherwise, the digital commons disappears and turns into a giant Times Square of blinding billboards. + +André Staltz has written an excellent blog post, "[The Web Began Dying in 2014, Here's How](https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html)". +It summarizes some of the economic dynamics of the largest networking companies: Facebook, Google, Amazon. It references [Scott Galloway's excellent presentation, "The Four"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWBjUsmO-Lw), which is another must-watch for those who want to understand the economics of how communications and consumption are becoming fused into a Huxleyian monstrosity. + +## From Connection to Consumption + +The 2017 Meeker report states that the average American spends almost 6 hours a day consuming digital media, and nearly half of that is via mobile devices. Our deep-seated human desire for interaction has been funneled into a new kind of scarcity - attention - and all the major technology companies are in the business of coupling attention scarcity to traditional economies of scarcity. + +All economic forces within the United States are oriented towards increasing consumption. For at least 30 years now, since the Reagan Revolution, our government at the highest levels has mostly abdicated from any kind of significant social mission, and primarily exists to facilitate corporate economic growth (as measured by dollars transacted). Pollution, mass extinction, climate change, and others are all mere "externalities" of production and Growth Capitalism. + +The explosion of Mass Media via cable TV coincidentally occured through the same time period. This created a lot more eyeball-hours to monetize, and coupled with the rise of Chinese manufacturing and the box-store-fication of America, has led to a national zeitgeist of consumption, individual experience, and a divestiture of social involvement in local institutions. We don't buy local, we don't read local, we don't sell local. Instead, we aggregate demand, attention, dollars up to ever higher, ever larger global entities. + +This sea change in the tapestry of American life has been gradual but its effects are devastating. America, more so than any other country, has a fixation on the glory of individual freedom and achievement. But no one really thought through what happens when we destroy the social institutions that provide a culture and a medium for individuals to attain higher levels in their Maslow pyramid. + +While many people are discontent with this state of affairs, there are many more who are less resilient, and fall prey to the engagement tricks and gamification of social media platforms. It is an open question whether we have passed the point where we could truly innoculate the full population to such manipulation. As a point of pragmatism, those who are interested in fixing the situation may have to factor into their model that some large percentage of the population will remain digital herd animals, whose mental states are being micro-auctioned off to the highest bidder. + +We now know that in 2016, the Facebook and Google platforms auctioned off portions of our fellow Americans' brains to Russian manipuation and false propaganda. If they were Japanese companies, where shame and honor are meaningful concepts, the entire board would have come out and committed seppuku. The fact that they have not, tells us all we need to know about the future trajectory of these attention markets. + + +The Chinese Model +----------------- + +But we don't need a time machine to see what comes next; we just need to look at China. China has a set of domestic social apps that perform similar functions to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Ebay, and Amazon. The difference is that these apps (WeChat, QQ, etc.) are fully surveilled by the government, and they do not hide this fact. More savvy users will use VPN technologies to circumvent the Great Firewall, and the Chinese government lets them mostly get away with it, because under normal conditions it is fairly harmless. However, they freely exert control when they need to: In the weeks leading up to the Communist Party meeting in October 2017, they started locking down VPN services to reduce risk of agitators organizing protest. + +The Great Firewall itself is an amazing piece of technology. When the Chinese government tries to remove information about the bloody Tiannamen Square protests in 1989, they have to really work at it, because the information is spread around in so many places. But when news of the Panama Papers broke last year, they [blocked it instantly across the entire Chinese Internet](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/05/all-mention-of-panama-papers-banned-from-chinese-websites) and with exceptional efficacy within hours of the news breaking. They have content filters at every service and every tier, and shameless track every second of user engagement with any online resource. They have even wired up an entire province into a police state, [forcing residents to install surveillance apps onto their phones](http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2102484/sweeping-counter-terrorism-measures-chinas-xinjiang) + +We do not know how much access the backend surveillance system provides to Communist Party officials of different levels. One can only imagine the breathtaking levels of power, backstabbing, and intrigue that govern the operations of the Ministry of Information. + +An American Model +----------------- + +Of course, we imagine America would not put up with such overt surveillance, but the danger is that we won't even be asked. AI will make this 100x worse because it's good enough to fool us into not realizing it's there. + +Law enforcement officials at every level of jurisdiction are starting to look to data science and machine learning to better predict crime. Even without new surveillance technology like drones and [low-flying aircraft](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-surveillance/), there is significant gray area to be encroached. The first time that Facebook or Google or Verizon reveal that they have statistical modeling that can predict potential shootings with 90% accuracy, or domestic violence with 95% accuracy, we're going to enter a whole new world. + +Furthermore, there's no reason why government actors wouldn't create games and ads and other kinds of "engagement honeypots" that refine their crime likelihood models. A group of suspected "at risk" folks get sponsored ads for a gun show in their area, and they linger *just a tad* longer over the ad as they scroll by, compared to their baseline response from months prior. A data breach of Pornhub reveals browsing habits by IP address block, and gets cross-correlated with sex offender address records. A new kind of browser fingerprinting reveals when children are potentially in violent domestic situations. + +Our AI future is one where law enforcement and governments, acting under the best of interests, will lead us incrementally down a road to hell: each of us lingering over every keystroke, every swipe, wondering what it's doing to our model weights in some giant, opaque model of our potential for crime. + + +## Further Reading and Sources + + * [Does Each Click of Attention Cost a Bit of Ourselves?](https://aeon.co/essays/does-each-click-of-attention-cost-a-bit-of-ourselves) + * [Fantastic multi-part series on narratives, storytelling, and attention](https://blog.collectivejourney.com/why-is-this-happening-d1287d5ee4ee) by Jeff Gomez. Start from the beginning, or if you're short on time, just read [Superpositioning: How Digital Communication Is Blowing Us Back To the Stone Age](https://blog.collectivejourney.com/superpositioning-fef1e10ff24c) + * [The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/the-mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-is-a-blueprint-for-destroying-journalism/517113/) - We can't rely on Facebook to fix The Feed because the concept of a "The Feed" is itself the problem. + * [Pizzagate is nothing new: GamerGate and revenge porn laid the groundwork]((http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/06/technology/tech-pizzagate-online-harassment/index.html)) - Chemaly points out that the business models of companies like Facebook mean that they benefit from clicks regardless of the content. She got Facebook to crack down on photos that perpetuated violence against women and rape in 2013 by pointing out to advertisers that their ads were next to these questionable images. The financial incentive for Facebook helped force its hand. "You have to change the way [tech companies] compensated," she added, adding that otherwise, she suspects "we're just going to see more" instances like Pizzagate. + + * [Global Guerillas blog post "Three Choices"](http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2017/02/three-choices.html): "Trump's currently trying to adapt this insurgency to govern. Where will it take us? Early results suggest that Trump's insurgency is better suited for dismantling a large, bureaucratic government and international order than running it. It's also the type of network that will erode the rule of law over time. ... My bet is on a participatory political system made possible by social networking. It's the best chance for a better future. A system where we put social networking to work for us instead of against us. Of course, the reality is probably something different: we're prepping for a civil war." + + * [We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs) + + * [Dissecting Trump’s Most Rabid Online Following](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-rabid-online-following/) + + * [Who controls the Internet? Analyzing global threats using property traversal graphs](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/05/19/who-controls-the-internet-analyzing-global-threats-using-property-traversal-graphs/) + + + diff --git a/2 The Web We Lost.md b/2 The Web We Lost.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ca921a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/2 The Web We Lost.md @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +# The Web We Lost + +As I reflect on all the things that have happened over the last few years, specifically in the realm of technology as it pertains to human society, I can't help but wonder how I would describe the world we've built to the 12-year-old version of myself, who was first discovering BBSes and the Internet. + +We lost the sense that an open, efficient, safe communications network is a Commons for every person. There were actual online communities that thrived on the basis of humans building trust with each other. One could stumble into them, learn their values and rules, and become enriched. We could actually learn to build trust with total strangers. + +The "End-to-end" nature of the internet got replaced. It's not actually a network anymore, it's just a centralized place for *networked apps*. + +We've been disabused of the naive and mistaken notion that the Internet is resilient. Geeks used to proudly proclaim, "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it!" Sadly, they were incorrect, and to some extent it has never been true. The Internet can only route around broken IP links. It has cannot distinguish the source of breakage: carefully crafted rules in Cisco routers in the Great Firewall of China, or a careless backhoe driver. The Internet cannot route around censorship because the concept of "censorship" does not exist at the *Internet* level. + + Censorship is a concept in the plane of human relationships. That plane is inhabited by individuals and organizations for aggregating, curating, and amplifying communications. Because the modulation of human communications is a kind of power, the communication plane is a battle space for other human organizations: churches, corporations, governments. + + We currently use an infrastructure that is both centralized *and* vertically integrated: just a handful of companies control everything from the chips and memory, through the operating system, up to the browser standards. Every pixel on every screen becomes an explicitly managed, tiny television set, and every interaction and non-interaction becomes a surveillance dataset. We are rapidly headed into becoming a society where all significant interactions between individuals is mediated by a private infrastructure that is up for sale to the highest bidder. + +----- + +[Walter Isaacson writes about a couple of the core tech issues](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-starting-from-scratch-heres-how-id-fix-isaacson): + +> "There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet. + +> Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content. + +> This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk. Its inherent lack of security has allowed Russian actors to screw with our democratic process." + +Isaacson’s ideas are not far off the mark, but they are not sufficient. The reason is because they do not consider the *social* impact of the communications infrastructure, instead looking at the security and provenance of single interactions. Even if we were to fix these specific technical shortcomings, we would still end up in a situation where a site that satisfied humans’ desire for socialization (sharing, group chat) will gain a user community, and if certain design constraints are not respected, then the same kinds of interaction anti-patterns will manifest. + +More deeply, cyberbullying is only one aspect of the overall problem. The aggregation of human attention into centralized infrastructure creates a situation that is ripe for exploitation, manipulation, and mass control. It condenses the fluidity of social communications into a more interlocked, crystalline form, that can be used to amplify and broadcast messages. Goebbels understood the potential of newspaper and radio to perform this function, and he exploited it. Putinate Russia has done the same. + +------ + +There's a famous science fiction story from the 1950s which compared humanity's development of atomic weapons to giving a child a loaded gun. [[LINK]] It asked the moral question of whether or not we are ready for this technology we have created, and the terrible consequences that may await us. + +Social media and the evolution of Internet-as-medium-of-social-validation is potentially a similarly disastrous technology invention. But rather than vaporizing cities in a mushroom cloud, it roots in everyone's brains and lets them hear only what they want to hear. + +Other terms that have been used for this include "information diabetes", but focus on the quantity of electronic content people consume, as opposed to the actual nature of that content. We shouldn't be too alarmed if people are just loading up on Plato and Shakespeare. Instead, it's a viral stream of clickbait that is designed to appeal to the worst in each of us. + +This is the most difficult thing to acknowledge: Technologists are culpable here. The creators of software systems, network protocols, application interaction patterns, monetization schemes, etc. are all directly or indirectly responsible. + +And if we are to go one step further, and fully embrace Voltaire's maxim that "Man is guilty of all the good he does not do", then the rest of us who *could* build alternative, open networks that promote positive human engagement are guilty of not doing so. + +----- + +As an optimist and an idealist, I would like to think that this is because most of us haven't realized just how fundamental of a problem this is. We laugh over beers about the crazy people we know on Facebook who post insanely right-wing and bigoted things, not realizing that those people are basically eating such hatred and venom for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The social impact of that information diet is *real*. We have now discovered that if you take a population the size of the United States, and link up all of its ignorance, fear, hatred, and desperation on a computer network, the resonant frequency of that nasty medium is a shrill tone we can defined as "Trump". + +There's a recent story about alt-right people creating a [consipiracy theory about antifa planning mass decapitations of white parents](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-surveillance/). We have created broadcast platforms that can be targeted towards selected groups of the population, and then proceeds to give anyone the ability with broadcast without recourse. When someone falsely yells "Fire!" in a crowded theater, we hold them culpable. But when someone targets millions of right-wing racists and riles them up with false conspiracy theories, and then organizes them to go out in armed protest, we shrug our shoulders. + +Because after all, what technology fix, or legal solution, can we point to, that can structurally solve this problem, but doesn't violate the business rights of companies like Facebook and Twitter to attract users to their websites, and facilitate communciations with them? + +The answer lies in Lawrence Lessig's brilliant observations that when it comes to technology, Code Is Law. We cannot simply legislate things like fact-checking or try to create slow-moving government commissions that dictate the features of private web sites. Even if such things were legally feasible, it would never be effective. We have to solve this problem via code, by building a better alternative mechanism that *cannot* be exploited in this way. + +My belief is that by constructing a system of communications that is architected and engineered to facilitate *real* human trust and conviviality, our users will be able to achieve a depth of connection and experiences which are simply not possible with centralized attention farms. + +In order to build the right system, we have to focus on solving the right problems, and understand them at their most fundamental level. + + +Further Reading +--------------- + +* From a post about a model (Emily R.) getting nasty responses on Twitter after tweeting that she supports Bernie: + + "You may be wondering what the significance of all this is, but there is none. Social media is often a toxic place, even more so for women. The companies running these websites do little or nothing to change the environment, and we continue to use their products in spite of that. So it goes." + + The makers of tools of communication must recognize their power and take responsibility for the culture that emerges within the fabric of their tool. This is especially true for tools which facilitate communication between the mass of people, who are typically not excellent at self-reflection and empathy. + + + * Back in 2012 Anil Dash wrote a piece called "[The Web We Lost](http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html)", but he could not see what the advertising-based business models would do to these "great sites" (as he calls them). His main point was that: + + The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks. + + The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit, whether that's about Twitter's business model or Google's social features or anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current generation of dominant social networks. + + + + diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index c0ec939..6aaa2ea 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -1,10 +1,52 @@ -# lostweb +# The Web We Lost, and The Web We Must Rebuild -The Web We Lost, and The Web We Must Rebuild -============================================ +by [Peter Wang](https://twitter.com/pwang) This site is a reflection on how the web (and really, how the internet as a whole) has failed. This serves as background reading and context for my interest in the emerging initiatives around "decentralizing the Internet", or the "peer-to-peer web". I'm writing this for a technically sophisticated reader. I'm also writing this for myself, to help organize my thoughts on this topic, and to provide an intellectual breadcrumb trail; that's why I provide a "Further Reading & Sources" at the end of each section. I don't expect anyone to read every link, every piece of background material, but I have tried my best to cull & curate so as to present only the best of what I've read so far. If you are already convinced that the current Internet/web is broken, you can skip ahead to section 3, "The Root Problems", to see if my formulation of what's broken and what's at stake aligns with your thinking. + +## Contents + + 0. [Introduction](0 Introduction.md) + 1. [The Web In 2017 - Structural Failure At Every Level](1 Web 2017.md) + * A Beastiary of Obvious Failures + * The Attention Economy, Servant of Growth Capitalism + * From Connection to Consumption + * The Chinese Model + * An American Model + + 2. [The Web We Lost](2 The Web We Lost.md) + 3. The Root Problems + + 4. A Humane Network + * The Core Challenge - What is the right technological infrastructure that supplements, extends, and scales human networks, to achieve greater engagement, deeper trust, and emerges collective intelligence? + * Computer Networks vs. Social Networks + * The role of decentralized communication technology in bringing about a new, sustainable human ecology + * Sensemaking is not optional (draft) + * The Internet Is Too Much + * Anomie (in Clipped Articles Civ 2.0) + + 5. What Comes Next + * What are current stop-gap tech approaches, and why are they not enough? + * 4 Layers of Fail + * Challenges for any distributed data application system + + 6. Beaker and Dat + + 7. Appendix A. What About _____? + * ZeroNet + * Matrix + * IPFS + * Fermat + * Urbit + * Ethereum (and ether-related, e.g. https://www.uport.me/) + * (Hardware stacks) + + +---- + +All contents within this site are copyright 2017 by Peter Wang, and licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA. +