At some point in the earliest days of e-mail, the internet began to take away our power of critical thought. It moved in slowly, taking hold like a cancer and then spreading. It preyed on our trust. It made us think it wanted to protect us from things or tell us about interesting things of which we were unaware. But the truth was, it was making us stupiderer. Soon, like the bleating sheep it wanted us to become, we began blindly forwarding an unwarranted tonnage of unfiltered bullshit. Some of us were telling everyone we knew about reverse phone-number scams and how to make famous cookies and how to avoid getting knocked out in parking lots by perfume-bottle-wielding bandits and how to get Bill Gates to give you a couple thousand dollars and how every e-mail you sent equaled five cents toward a kidney for some sick kid whom the doctors were otherwise just going to let die.
At first it was easy to spot because it came through our e-mail. All you had to do was look for this in your inbox:
Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Re:
This served two purposes. First, it let you know that a steaming load of incorrect information was coming your way. Second, it clued you in that you knew a gullible person who thought you were gullible and who knew a number of other gullible people with equally gullible friends.
internet
Weibo users’ conduct will be enforced with a points system (yep, they just gamified censorship) wherein you lose points for posting rumors or criticisms and earn points for, say, verifying your own identity. If you get down to zero points, your Weibo account gets terminated. You think terms of service are tricky? Check out this Chinese ‘code of conduct’ ☀
The Internet stands at a crossroads. Built from the bottom up, powered by the people, it has become a powerful economic engine and a positive social force. But its success has generated a worrying backlash. Around the world, repressive regimes are putting in place or proposing measures that restrict free expression and affect fundamental rights. The number of governments that censor Internet content has grown to 40 today from about four in 2002. And this number is still growing, threatening to take away the Internet as you and I have known it. Some of these steps are in reaction to the various harms that can be and are being propagated through the network. Like almost every major infrastructure, the Internet can be abused and its users harmed. We must, however, take great care that the cure for these ills does not do more harm than good. The benefits of the open and accessible Internet are nearly incalculable and their loss would wreak significant social and economic damage. Vinton Cerf ☀
A month ago I turned 40. I’m not particularly happy about the fact. I’m penniless, friendless (in the ‘someone I can call to bail me out of jail’ sense), companionless, and have generally failed to meet any of my personal or professional goals in life - even the downgraded ones after I realized I wasn’t going to rule the world sometime in my early 30s. This would be bad enough, but I’ve also simultaneously watched a variety of people I’ve known personally become multimillionaires in the meantime, or at least enjoy great personal success. It’s not only depressing, it’s fucking annoying.
Anyways, after taking stock for a few days, I decided to begin my mid-life crisis in earnest. First, I bought a new car (mostly to replace my rapidly dying Saturn) but the fact that it’s a low-end Kia and not a typical crisis Porsche didn’t really help. I also decided to quit posting to Twitter and Facebook, as I decided they’re really not doing much to improve my life and are actually quite poor substitutes for actual social interaction.
I didn’t go on an all-out Mark Pilgrim pout and cancel all my accounts and try to disappear in some passive-aggressive cry for attention, I just simply stopped posting status updates, and chose to write to my blog instead. No, I’m not trying to recapture my blogging glory days, I just decided that if I’ve got something to say, I should write it on my own space, and in full sentences. Blogging is great practice for writing, and by not blogging regularly, I’ve lost both the capacity to quickly whip up my thoughts when needed, and the ever-so-enjoyable ability to say to someone, “Yeah, I thought of that years ago - here’s the link.” (And I wonder why I don’t have friends…)
Now, I’ve been a pretty regular Twitterer (which reposts to FB) for the past couple years or so, with at least 3 or 4 links or comments a day. I’ve made thousands of updates over the past couple years and well over 7,000 since 2006. So with regular updates, 1,680 followers on Twitter and 250 friends on Facebook, one might think that after a few days of silence, someone might @ respond to me with a “what’s up”, message me or simply email and ask where I’ve been.
A month later, and I didn’t get a single message.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, speak as a keynote speaker at the 2012 Annual ITSM Pink Conference in Las Vegas.
He shared several concepts about how our brains are changing because of the internet. In part, he discusses studies that show a shift in us becoming more impatient the quicker information becomes easily available.
What I took away from the speech was that we are in a transition period. We may not realize it but, as a species, we are evolving to be heavily dependent on computers and the Internet to think.
Digital information, unconstrained by packaging, is a continuing process more like the metamorphosing tales of prehistory than anything that will fit in shrink wrap. From the Neolithic to Gutenberg, information was passed on, mouth to ear, changing with every re-telling (or re-singing). The stories that once shaped our sense of the world didn’t have authoritative versions. They adapted to each culture in which they found themselves being told. Because there was never a moment when the story was frozen in print, the so-called “moral” right of storytellers to keep the tale their own was neither protected nor recognized. The story simply passed through each of them on its way to the next, where it would assume a different form. As we return to continuous information, we can expect the importance of authorship to diminish. Creative people may have to renew their acquaintance with humility. John Perry Barlow ☀
Imagine trying to get online and finding out you’ve been cut off from the Internet.
It’s expected to happen to millions of unsuspecting computer users because of something referred to as the Internet kill switch.
It all started with six guys in, of all places, Estonia in Europe, who infected more than 4 million computers worldwide, half a million in the United States.
The DNSChanger Trojan virus takes over users’ domain name system settings.
…one of the reasons I’ve decided to shut the blog down instead of just letting it linger is that I have come to realize that it is unwise to leave unedited thoughts publicly available on the internet. Rondam Ramblings ☀
Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it’s an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor.
It is true that in any capitalist society there is going to be strong, even at times overwhelming, pressure to open up areas that can be profitably exploited by capital, regardless of the social costs, or “negative externalities,” as economists put it. After all, capitalists—by definition, given their economic power—exercise inordinate political power. But it is not a given that all areas will be subjected to the market. Indeed, many areas in nature and human existence cannot be so subjected without destroying the fabric of life itself—and large portions of capitalist societies have historically been and remain largely outside of the capital accumulation process. One could think of community, family, religion, education, romance, elections, research, and national defense as partial examples, although capital is pressing to colonize those where it can. Many important political debates in a capitalist society are concerned with determining the areas where the pursuit of profit will be allowed to rule, and where it will not. At their most rational, and most humane, capitalist societies tend to preserve large noncommercial sectors, including areas such as health care and old-age pensions, that might be highly profitable if turned over to commercial interests. At the very least, the more democratic a capitalist society is, the more likely it is for there to be credible public debates on these matters.
However—and this is a point dripping in irony—such a fundamental debate never took place in relation to the Internet. The entire realm of digital communication was developed through government-subsidized-and-directed research and during the postwar decades, primarily through the military and leading research universities. Had the matter been left to the private sector, to the “free market,” the Internet never would have come into existence. The total amount of the federal subsidy of the Internet is impossible to determine with precision.
As Sascha Meinrath, a leading policy expert, puts it: calculating the amount of the historical federal subsidy of the Internet “depends on how one parses government spending—it’s fairly modest in terms of direct cash outlays. But once one takes into account rights of way access that were donated and the whole research agenda (through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, etc.), it’s pretty substantial. And if you include the costs of the wireless subsidies, tax breaks (e.g., no sales taxes on online purchases), etc., it’s well into the hundreds of billions range.” For context, Meinrath’s estimate puts the federal investment in the Internet at least ten times greater than the cost of the Manhattan Project, allowing for inflation.
That is not all. The early Internet was not only noncommercial, it was also anti-commercial. Prior to the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation Network, the forerunner to the Internet, explicitly limited the network to noncommercial uses. If anyone dared to sell something online, that person would likely be “flamed,” meaning that other outraged Internet users would clog the individual’s email inbox with contemptuous messages demanding that the sales pitch be removed. This internal policing by Internet users was based on the assumption that commercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere did not mix. Corporate media were the problem, and the Internet was the solution. Good Internet citizens needed to be on the level; they should not hustle for profit by any means necessary.
When Google became public, they had much more of an obligation to prove their devotion to their shareholders’ interests. They did that. They cut programs. They have to show earnings growth. They have to show focus. The got rid of Google Labs. You don’t see Google talking so much about how every employee is going to have 20 percent of their time to do what they want. Douglas Rushkoff ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
