I agree with the sentiment of this article, but only to a degree.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Open Standards and the Digital Age, by Andrew Russel. The book is a partial refutation of the idea of an 'open web' using historical examples, the most shocking being the failure of open and democratic methods to build an open Internet standard versus the success of Serf and Kahn inventing TCP/IP in a closed and corporate environment, funded by the military. The reality is that some systems critical to the operation of the Internet, such as DNS, are highly centralized, un-open, un-private and un-free, or at least when compared with cyberlibertarian expectations of how the Internet should be. It also addresses other perversions of 'open', such as the irony that some of FLOSS's biggest customers are megacorps like Apple and Microsoft, who up until recently contributed way less back than what they took.
I don't think the web was 'stolen' from 'us', I think people just don't realize how controlling it was before. They're mistaking an epiphany for an actual loss of freedom that may or may not have been there in the first place. We need to fight for a free and open Internet, but let's not kid ourselves with inaccurate and misleading language.
In agreement with your comment allow me the indulgence of posting a favorite passage from the great Don Quixote:
After don Quixote had satisfied his stomach, he took some acorns in his hand, and, examining them with great care, raised his voice to speak words like these: “What a happy time and a happy age were those that the ancients called Golden! And not because gold—which in this our Age of Iron is so valued—was gotten in that fortunate time without any trouble, but rather because the people who lived then didn’t know the two words yours and mine! In that holy age all things were commonly owned. To find their daily sustenance, they had only to raise their hands and take it from the robust oaks, which liberally offered their sweet and ripe fruit to them. Crystal clear fountains and running rivers, in magnificent abundance, offered them their delicious and transparent water. In the fissures of boulders and in the hollows of trees, the diligent and prudent bees formed their republics and offered to any hand, without recompense, the fertile harvest of their very sweet work. The robust cork trees shed their lightweight bark without any artifice other than their own courtesy, with which people began to cover their rustic houses, built only for protection against the rigors of the heavens. Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony. The heavy plow had not yet dared to open nor visit the pious bowels of our first mother, for she, without being forced, gave everywhere from her fertile and broad bosom that could fill, sustain, and delight the children that possessed her then.
“It was then that the simple and beautiful young shepherdesses could travel from valley to valley and from hill to hill, either in braids or with their hair flowing behind, with only enough clothing to cover modestly what decency requires, and has always required. And their ornamentation was not like the Tyrian purple and silk woven in a thousand different ways that women esteem nowadays, but rather it was of intertwined green-dock and ivy, with which they carried themselves with perhaps as much dignity and composure as our courtesans do nowadays, strutting about in extravagant dresses. In those days, literary expressions of love were recited in a simple way, without any unnatural circumlocution to express them.
“Fraud, deceit, and wickedness had not as yet contaminated truth and sincerity. Justice was administered on its own terms and was not tainted by favor and self-interest, which now impair, overturn, and persecute it. Arbitrary law had not yet debased the rulings of the judge, because in those days there was nothing to judge, nor anyone to be judged.
“Young women, with their chastity intact, traveled about on their own anywhere they wanted, as I’ve said, without fearing the damaging boldness or lust of others, and if they suffered any ruination it was born of their own pleasure and free will. Nowadays, in our detestable age, no young woman is secure, even though she be hidden and locked in a new labyrinth of Crete, for even there, through the cracks or borne in the air, the plague of lust finds its way in with the zeal of cursed importunity, and brings her to ruin in spite of her seclusion. As time went by and as wickedness grew, the order of knight errantry was instituted to defend young women, protect widows, and help orphans and needy people.
“I am a member of this order, brother goatherds, and I’m grateful for the hearty welcome and reception you’ve given me and my squire. For, although under natural law all living souls are obliged to show favor to knights errant, it’s still fitting that—knowing as I do you received and entertained me with no knowledge of this obligation—I should acknowledge your good will with utmost gratitude.”
All of this long speech, which could well have been spared, was given by our knight because the acorns brought the Golden Age to his memory. And he was moved to give that useless speech to the goatherds, who, without saying a single word, were listening to him open-mouthed and amazed. Sancho also remained silent as he snacked on some acorns and visited very frequently a second wineskin that had been suspended from a cork tree to make the wine cool.
The worst part is that if you're employed, it's probably a job requirement to use at least one of these surveillance capitalism platforms.
Most people I know in tech have to be on Slack. Most people I know in advertising and PR have to be on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For some jobs, like journalism, even the "troops on the ground" are required to post and tweet. Even for jobs without the social media taint, a lot of companies use corporate gmail, so now Google is way up in your business.
In 2007, you could probably just chalk it all up to poor personal choices. In 2017, I don't know if that's entirely true. We're in a situation that cries out for regulation, although that will probably not happen in the US until after a calamity, since regulation is seen as one of the heads of the beast in our money religion.
It all went wrong at the firewall. As soon as peer-to-peer was over and NAT became a security layer as well as a technological construct to put more than one host behind one public IP it was essentially game-over.
If you want to reboot the web then you need to reboot the internet first, solve the insecurity of privately hosted servers first and convince ISPs that symmetric connectivity should be the rule.
Operating some server software on the wimpy VPS is very different different from having everybody's daily-use computers be fully networked with other computers. Also, you likely already have an Internet connection so the marginal cost is zero. And you don't need a credit card to do it.
To get network effects, it's all about low friction and low barriers to entry.
The consequences of that asymmetry go much further than just a price difference. It's about a whole raft of applications that are simply impossible or at best extremely hard.
The internet was meant to be peer-to-peer not server-to-consumer.
Adding more servers, even at $5 won't change that.
The internet started as a server-to-client effort, and the peer-to-peer nature evolved much, much later. The entire purpose of ARPANET et al in the early days was to give researchers access to national supercomputing centers across the US. If anything, what we're seeing today is a regression to the days of old because large corporations provide centralized value to consumers, and consumers can't pry themselves free.
But it can never be truly peer-to-peer or decentralized due to the economics of last-mile connectivity. Connecting machines in a neighborhood is more expensive and difficult from an infrastructure perspective than hooking up a computer in a server farm.
This in of itself changes the costs and expectations of the parties involved which means things will likely slump back to a permutation of this status quo even with a different standard.
Only if you assume high bandwidth cost. If it's more convenient to do something at home, it is cost-dependent whether people opt for the more cumbersome but cheaper centralised solution.
The current last-mile problem is that there is not enough demand for high-bandwidth applications to justify rapid improvement (we'd all have 10 gig connections by now if the 2000's trend had continued).
This is just unnecessarily divisive. Look, this is the way commerce works. Checks on corporate behavior come in two realms, legal and ethical. Companies will violate ethics if everybody else is doing it. Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs.
If unethical practices become normal, the thing to do is to get a law passed. It's the way this has always worked. Laws change the entire landscape of commerce. They shake things up enough to where a new status quo is found. Law isn't perfect but it can shift the ethical regime more in the direction of the people.
The author's recommendation of a world without kings is a fantasy. If you eliminate hierarchy that means everybody must become an institution. Being an institution is not fun. It's fun to fantasize about building your own house but only the really motivated actually do it. Kings do us a favor by creating structure where there once was none. Silicon Valley is ultimately a force for good.
> Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs
I would suggest that in general companies violate the law if the benefits of doing so exceed the costs (risk of penalties, imprisonment of officers and so on)
I would say there's certain segments of markets that will violate the law. I think this fits within the "bad egg" characterization I made before. New laws are often targeted directly at these segments, it changes the fabric of the market.
The web wasn't stolen we gave it to them. You didn't have to sign up for Facebook. You don't have to sign up for googles services. Look how people like RMS use the web .
It shows the problem with short-term vs long-term interests. For people it made a lot of sense to use these services individually. But collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes.
Clearly, there have been very desirable outcomes for most people using these services. Otherwise, no one would use them. I don't think the short-term vs long-term tipping point has been reached quite yet.
I'd say what's described in the post is an undesirable outcome.
"Otherwise, no one would use them."
Cigarette smokers also find value in what they do (opportunity to contemplate, enjoyment, socialize) - yet the cost (for the individual and the society at large) is much bigger than the benefit. So just looking at the perceived value alone is not the best measure to evaluate the overall impact.
There seems to be a lot of antagonism directed at Google and Facebook in this piece, making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data.
I know sometimes it's easy to play the evil mega-corp card, but we need to ask ourselves the question: what is the goal here, to take down Google and Facebook? 'Cause if you're worried about an internet with extra surveillance and restrictions, taking down Google and Facebook doesn't really solve things.
Plus, even in a world with Google and Facebook out of the picture, there will still be political trolls hired by other companies and nation-states. There are also alternate-Googles that can just swoop in and fill the void you create if say you do take down Google. They are not necessarily better than Google today.
> making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data
Both Google and Facebook are engaged in exactly those practices. Stolen and forced are apt adjectives to describe their behavior. Stolen like Whatsapp data after acquisition by Facebook, like contact lists, location history, voice recordings from your Android phone. Forced like Facebook constantly demanding you provide them your phone number, and making it clear to you that it's not an option by removing the 'no' button and replacing it with my favorite dark pattern 'i will provide it later'.
The problem with both is they're so much more than just a web service. They're pervasive in all facets of life in the developed world. You can't get away from then no matter how much you want to, because they're using your friends to effectively spy on you. And to an extent, both now hold most of the population hostage. I can only begin to imagine how I would need to change my entire lifestyle if I wanted to stop either of these companies from pervasively tracking me. Give up my smartphone, browse the web only with NoScript, only on sites that still work with it, never let my friends take photos of me and upload them, never use any of the popular chat apps to stay in touch with them, etc. Basically the only way to unplug from these monsters is to live like Stallman.
Given the amount of people deeply involved in the tech industry who read hn probably my opinion will not be very popular. But I feel obliged to add a few lines about WhatsApp.
In a worrying technological landscape, it has been for a long time an application with a good tradeoff between privacy and convenience.
I have always respected and praised this application, due to its philosophy: Acton and Koum made millions of dollars without the need of advertising.
> Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
> These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.
> Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
> When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”
Like me, many people I know do not use social media (I'm 25 and not all of us use them, it's real), but virtually all of us use WhatsApp to keep in touch, share photos, locations, media, and even to create groups to discuss, meet, organize events.
We use the application in a so pervasive manner that we started considering it as a part of our daily routine: phrases such as "How long do you need to get there? Send me your position." are now regulars.
The reason we use wa, is because wa is not a social media.
Because "At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it."
Because when my mobile connection exceeds the data limit and my ISP applies a bandwidth throttling (32KBps) it is the only application that is able to send messages without making me worry about additional costs.
Because when loading an image, this is compressed in an automatic way.
Because it allows me to call my relatives and friends easily and simply when I'm abroad.
The problem is not only the integration of wa data without prior permission, but also the recent decisions taken, aka "status".
Status is a social media thing, and nobody wants another useless social media.
All my friends are asking me
- They do not know what to invent to know everything about us, right ?
- Why this after end2end encryption ?
- Do you see how little this is used ?
- The reviews on the store are the worst of all the time ! Why did they do this ?
- Not here ! Can I get the old version ?
- I hope in many are gonna leave, which are the alternatives ?
When I see certain things I ask myself: `who made this decision and why`.
I don't know if I have the answer to this, but I do not like the attitude.
If things are going to get worse, I will uninstall without looking back.
But it's a real shame.
This pattern has been emerging since the FaceBook acquisition,
so I would bet this is intentional, it's an attitude, it's a vision.
The intent is not to "play the evil mega-corp card",
I don't want to take them down,
it's that I would prefer to pay a decent annual fee to a great service rather than being used as a product.
It's fascinating that people find it so pointless to change platforms for the sake of their own privacy. Generally when I suggest to my peers we start chatting via Signal, they think I'm a conspiracy nut or something, it's fascinating and a little disappointing. Strangely, this "why bother" not only seems to apply to passive family users who don't understand what's behind these systems, but people who do.
Signal is too difficult to be used by my relatives, but do not underestimate the issue. Dad uses the app to work and has not uninstalled, while mom, did the upgrade, came to ask "why the gardener of the nearby sends me pictures while he's kissing his girlfriend?", and then uninstalled the whole, she's now using sms again.
I don't think the point is so much about taking them down, as not letting them decide the future. From a larger perspective 2005-2015 is almost like a lost decade of companies implmenting things on new platforms under properitery ownership. Like many other things, the discussion about social networks and reliable information is sort of early 00s. So I would say the goal is to get back to a less short term outlook on development of the Internet.
Just like the Newton and the Palm Pilot -- the solutions to this problem came too soon. Diaspora, GNU social, Ello (?) probably others. Perhaps in ten or twenty years a breaking point will come along.
That said, I think there's a real market for closed content like FB's. And even though I find a decentralized system more appealing, I can imagine a new, closed/centralized system taking FB's place in the future.
I've been thinking of closing my Facebook account, but I'd lose contact with so many friends and family. They don't use email or any kind of instant messenger any more, and nobody makes phone calls any more. If you're not on Facebook you might as well not exist.
Then don't exist. My wife and I dropped our accounts. Been great. We don't get involved in the SJW or the almost alt-right furors. We text our immediate loved ones. I call my mom.
In their place we have actual friends. Real people that we play Cards Against Humanity with. Who understand that IBS means me dashing off and having my wife play my hands for a few hours. Then we go out and have a good time.
If it's a choice between virtual existence and not-existing virtually, but living, as Moses said, "Choose life."
It's funny -- the different perspectives among the generations. I never got an account and don't feel like I'm missing much (though my wife has one). But I suppose if I'd gotten used to sharing the minutiae of my life and seeing my friends'/family's, switching to life without it might be hard.
^This. I know people who use FB, but I'm not friends with anyone who's using it as a tool in their daily lives. I've never seen the strong appeal, and always seen many downsides.
Well, it's not that, not for me. It's that event planning and invitations now happen exclusively via FB.
FB already separated the messenger from the main service. I'd love to see them spin off the event invitations into a separate service, too. That I would happily use.
I still exist without Facebook. The people in my life I care about know that they can email me (to a non-Gmail account).
It's not that impossible to be "off the grid" so to speak. The vast majority of Facebook interaction I see is pretty banal anyway. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
I cancelled mine this week and it's been great. I still reflexively try to open it some...it's that ingrained.
What I realized is that it's a social crutch. I've live in the same town for 13 years and I don't know nearly as many people here as I should by now...largely because I could fall back on people I've known since college.
It gives you an out to avoid forming new friendships because your distant friends are so accessible. At least for me I realized it was.
I'm in college right now and oscillate between having one and not having one, but most of the social life is organized through Facebook and I end up looking very odd for ritualistically avoiding it (well and Google Docs but that's a different kettle of fish).
I've had a Facebook account for 9 years now. When I first joined all my friends were on there if you wanted to go out for drinks you'd create an event. Party this weekend? Create an event.
Sometime around when I turned 30 people just stopped posting anything. Nowadays my feed is people I once knew in high school posting photos of their kids and my teenage cousin posting memes.
I can go weeks without checking the feed and miss nothing. I'm not going to shut down my account, a huge part of my 20's are stored there (holiday photos from multiple overseas trips etc) but I'm a very infrequent user nowadays.
I got on Facebook for the exact same reason when I was in university, and it was necessary as a way to know about events and art openings from acquaintances.
The key is just limiting how much time you spend on there. Not installing the mobile app or Messenger helps.
Convince them to install Whatsapp? If they have a phone its an easy way to keep in contact and send text/image/videos without all the FB BS. I wished I used it sooner!
Have any visionaries written what an alternative web looks like I.e we still need the services of Google and Facebook but done in a privacy conscious way.
The argument is an angry version of "if it's free, you're the product," which at this stage is very uncontroversial, and only comments on the "we've lost control of our data" point made in the original post. The link between what author calls "people farming" and "surveillance" is not compelling.
That said, I personally agree with the author in identifying the main problem of the web as people tracking. In my opinion, Tim Bernes-Lee points about misinformation and political advertising are not specific to the medium, but rather to the times we live in. People are pissed, people are scared, they need something to blame, they need some fantasy to believe in, they make up scary news, they vote for the guy that gives them a dream.
What's specific to the web though, (and that is starting to spread out of the web) is the data tracking. Whether for advertising ends or for surveillance purposes, data tracking creates a power imbalance between people and systems that is unbearable.
That power imbalance is the weirdness you felt the first time you saw a gmail ad related to the email you were reading. It's the anger that heats up your cheeks when the sales guy asks for your email address when you just want to buy shoes. It's the 2-hour phone call to the customer service that ends in "I'm sorry there is nothing I can do for you". It's the "late fee" mails you automatically receive for a service that you cancelled. It's realizing that the app your employer installed on your phone can tell them your location at all times. It's the swatting that reminds you not to shop for pressure cookers online. It's the cameras. It's the cars. It's the lightbulbs.
We as people are weak. I don't think Silicon Valley intended it that way. I think they genuinely wanted to improve the world. And in order to keep it cheap, they found money where they could, and in the process, they undermined people's privacy in a way that is making the world a lot worse than it was.
I personally feel hopeful. Countries are made of people. And I think that people are starting to get it. We need rules to prevent this. Laws that force companies to automatically give you the option not to track you. The same laws that forced mailing list senders to have the unsubscribe button (thank god for the unsubscribe button!). For this to happen, we need lobbying, we need awareness. We need a "this website is not tracking you" label. We need privacy checks.
I really like the comment at the bottom which mentions the structural flaws in attempting to democratise the web while client-server architecture is still king.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Open Standards and the Digital Age, by Andrew Russel. The book is a partial refutation of the idea of an 'open web' using historical examples, the most shocking being the failure of open and democratic methods to build an open Internet standard versus the success of Serf and Kahn inventing TCP/IP in a closed and corporate environment, funded by the military. The reality is that some systems critical to the operation of the Internet, such as DNS, are highly centralized, un-open, un-private and un-free, or at least when compared with cyberlibertarian expectations of how the Internet should be. It also addresses other perversions of 'open', such as the irony that some of FLOSS's biggest customers are megacorps like Apple and Microsoft, who up until recently contributed way less back than what they took.
I don't think the web was 'stolen' from 'us', I think people just don't realize how controlling it was before. They're mistaking an epiphany for an actual loss of freedom that may or may not have been there in the first place. We need to fight for a free and open Internet, but let's not kid ourselves with inaccurate and misleading language.
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