Every time I read some politician somewhere is trying to pass some ID verification bill or some other stupid online speech law I got more and more convinced that the internet was mistake.
Better (worse). The accessible internet was mistake. It is an elitist argument, I won’t deny, but unfortunately all these stupid regulations on online activities and even in our own devices (hello, Chat Control) is because our interaction with technology got too mainstream. If a 4 years old child and a 90 and something years old greatgreatmother is able to easily access the same content, the same websites from the same class of devices looks obvious shit is bound to happen when people with different goals, moral and backgrounds are going to interact in the “world wide web”.
When computers got small and affordable enough to put in our homes, only a handful of nerds were able to use them. They (the computers) were difficult to handle, you needed to know commands, you needed to understand how the machine worked. Almost nothing was automated, no shine buttons on a touchscreen to tap. Because of these natural barriers, the average computer user was very technical, very knowleadgable and, on top, eager to learn more. Then, the first home internet connections arrived, bringing low speeds and high prices. People naturally aggregate around BBSs, Usenet and other types of primordials communities, using terminal or other types or archaic interfaces.
It was not approachable for the average person, that needed to learn specific jargons and read long manuals. Nobody had time to that, except a bunch of nerds.
Then computers got even smaller, cheaper and we got broadband speeds. Smartphones were born. Seeing the future laying ahead, a lot of companies jumped in to have an online presence. E-commerce websites appeared, banks started their own web portals, newspapers posted articles, and government made public services available online. A bunch of people rushed in, spreading out the average internet and computer user demographic: less interested in the technology itself and only interested in a specific goal, let’s say buy something online or make a bank transaction. The technology was just the medium, not something to play with. The end goal was more important.
At this point, using the internet became mandatory to have a modern life (we live in a society…). Ok, it brought convenience, more services, time savings and if all of these make my family to lose less time doing what they need to do to live in a society (we really do live…), all power to it. I won’t be the one begging to return back to paper stamps for daily bureaucracies (I have a personal hate against notaries). BUT, the average person was kind of forced to navigate the dreaded internet sea, surrounded by pirates (the bad ones), maritime scammers, ad-mines and other monsters from the abyss. The communities that grew around a common and shared culture, where every one were able to take care of their own safety were stomped by this new crowd. The new internet users didn’t know a fucking thing about the internet itself.
Imagine the average (median, to be exact) person. Half of them is worse. Grab one by them by the neck and drop inside a noisy room with many groups having so diverging conversations. Maybe one group is having a diarrhea of curse words, other is saying stupid but shocking opinions, the cool guys are making offensive jokes, and others are making cat memes. The new guy will be shocked and spooked. “How this lawless cybersea even exist? Is there nobody to take care of this?”, is what they gonna think. And, look, I used “bad” examples here. Your community could be as inoffensive as to discuss, I don’t know, cardboard boxes. The culture around your community implicitly understand to never discuss plastic boxes. So the average person that likes plastic boxes arrives, starts discussing plastic boxes, get offended when somebody from the community rebutes, but instead of moving and creating a new community, s/he insists in call friends to overwhelm the previous community. Fights ensue, the old members, disgusted by the new change leaves, the new ones take place and change the community name to “All packaging boxes”. If you look at very basics, what happened was simple: there was a sense of entitlement. Entitlement. To be supposedly given the right to mold other people communities and culture into theirs.
Instead of looking away. Instead of finding their own niche.
After taking over, they socially shun the “undesirables”. If it doesn’t work, they force the platform to boot them out, by reporting for whatever reason. And if that doesn’t work either, they lick the papa-state boots claiming for “somebody needs to do something!”.
And all what they could have done was to ignore/block/close the tab/close the eyes/go fuck themselves. The internet is so big that’s fine if you don’t want to navigate turbulent waters you can live in a closed (supposedly) safe space like your favorite Big Tech social media, feeding all your private life into creepy surveillance machines in exchange for drugs (dopamine). You could even have your online life inside the “safe” Apple wallet garden, that cares so much about you that even blocks you to run whatever app you want to run and ask for your papers to prove you are over 18 at device level!. What I can’t fucking consent is, because of them, because of those people unable for whatever reason to understand how the internet, its communities, its technology works want to impose on me and like-minded users around the world rules that break all the liberty built during the early days of the internet. I never presented a ID to post in a forum, to use a social network, to talk with friend on Discord, to read mean words, so play a bloody game because at some point we really thought each person should be able to take care of themselves. I hope I will never need to show ID for these innocuous activities. I never needed a law to say what things I may find offensive and not allowed to see and must be removed (UK’s OSA, EU’s DSA, any speech control regulation). Unfortunately, the ones that only see internet, and smartphones, and computers, and these kind of technologies as a mere tool will be appalled by the kind of things that exist out there[1].
Given so many differences between the average person and your edgy group friends, I think we failed when we allow our communities to grow to accomodate the average internet user. We failed when we exchanged niche fansubs groups for popular anime streaming websites earning tons of money with ads. We failed when private trackers got too open. We failed when we stopped downloading things and instead we stream them. We failed when we moved our forums to Big Tech platforms like Discord. We failed when we abandoned decentralized and “ugly” software like mIRC and protocols like XMPP. We failed when we moved internal jokes to a large audience like Twitter. We failed when we ditched “best viewed in 1024x768” websites to Instagram. We failed when we openly bragged about using VPNs. We failed when the magic behind the screens got too easy that gen Z doesn’t even understand the concept of files and folders. We failed when we moved all our photos to cloud services, to be ingested and processed by almight and invasive algorithms. We failed when we didn’t use or incentivized the usage of parental control tools embedded in our devices. We failed when we didn’t realized the digital native generation could only use technology, not understand it.
We failed when, in name of digital inclusion, we thought it was all right billions of people to, in everyday life, interact with only half of dozen of tech companies so powerful to lobby for laws that only them can comply with.
We failed when we didn’t teach not everything is for everyone. I think this is a huge point. That is fine to not like something and move on.
I hypocritely failed when I decided to (at time of writing) host this website in Cloudflare pages.
Ironically, because we failed gatekeeping in the small scale, we got huge gatekeepers richer than many countries. They yield so much control that is just easier to deal with them when using angry mobs or writing laws, because they have the effective power to shut you down, even your income if you depend on them. Ask creators that got their Patreon banned or even Steam banning certain games under pressure of certain authoritarian groups.
As Peter Park’s uncle Ben said, “with great powers come great responsabilities”. When we collectively had the great powers to control our own online future, we failed to wield them. Now it is too late. The era of international, free access, free expression, anonymous and exciting public internet is over.
The only path forward is to go underground, controlling the gates this time.
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[1] Note I do think some kind of speech needs to be regulated, for example, immediate call to violence, commercial speech (ads, publicity), calumny, defamation, you know, things that are concretly damaging, not subjective. Even though, in general they must follow judicial review a posteriori. The laws I indicated do the oppositive, because it makes the platforms to judge if such speech is legal or not, instead of a judicial body, what is problematic. To be clear, I do think “fake news” and hate speech are valid expressions, by principle, but also because they are fuzzy defined according with the government in power. You know, “I don’t agree what you said but I will defend to death you right to speak”, something like that. I won’t die for you, however. ⮭
