The Connected Creator
In 1904, Nikola Tesla was thinking of radio when he wrote:
“The entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were, capable of response in every one of its parts.”
But he may as well have been writing about the Internet. It has become a huge brain, immensely powerful, but not necessarily a brain that is thinking positively or is working for us. The Internet is no longer on our side. We need to get it back.
The End Of Trust, published by McSweeney’s, is an awesome collection of essays, interviews, and statistics that I’ve been underlining and highlighting like mad. The launch pad for its collection of ideas is how our trust in tech companies is eroding because of hacking, data mining, corporate surveillance, and law enforcement’s abuses of power. It is hitting home for me and not only because I deleted my Facebook account.
As Sara Wachtel-Boettcher writes in her perceptive essay in The End of Trust, everything happens so much. The world online has changed a lot since I started a Twitter account in 2009. Twitter has since turned ugly, an underground replacement for it called Mastodon can also turn mean, and Facebook has betrayed user trust so often it’s not even worth making a joke about it. The platforms I once enjoyed have been exposed as bottomless attention-sucking devices, sticky as quicksand. Once you log on you can’t figure out how to log off.
I still believe in what the Internet can be, and I connect with its early promise, as Jonathan Taplin described so well in Move Fast and Break Things. He writes that although the Internet was born of “the marriage of counterculture idealism and Defense Department funding in the 1960s,” by 2002 it has been transformed into a vast surveillance platform controlled by “a new cadre of libertarian übermenschen, a group of men who believed they had both the brilliance and the moral fortitude to operate outside the normal structures of law and taxes.”
Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch, describes how new communications technologies began as “optimistic and open media, each of which, in time, became a closed and controlled industry.” History, he writes, shows how information technology begins as a hobby and eventually turns into an industry; from an accessible, open channel to one strictly controlled.
Open to closed. There’s a pattern here. At the start, the promise of the Internet was wrapped up in its openness. It was amazing how Twitter allowed you to talk with almost anybody, how platforms like Facebook, WordPress, SoundCloud, and Amazon allowed you to publish whatever you wanted. Some of that capability is still there, but mostly the web has turned against us, used by corporate and government interests as a means of control, as a channel to gather information about us to be sold to third parties. A lot of that information is vacuumed up without our control, consent, and certainly with little awareness or understanding about what is really happening. We trade convenience for privacy and access for a little bit of our soul’s light every day. It doesn’t have to be that way. The search for a way forward has begun. Peter Fleming, in his book The Worse Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide, calls for creative pessimism. He’s on to something, even if his book is a depressing.
While optimism is not the best way to exorcise the dark futures whispering at your door, neither is nihilism. — Peter Fleming
You can be morbidly entertained by Bruce Schneier’s books Data and Golaith and Click Here to Kill Everyone. He’s a cryptographer, cybersecurity expert, and crafter of the best book titles ever. Data and Goliath is about how corporations collect your data. Click Here to Kill Everybody compellingly extends his arguments into the Internet of Things. So now you can worry about not just your email being hacked, but also your car.
The übermenschen Taplin refers to, Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, have been talking for years about uniting the world, making information freely available, and cataloguing everything. (Well, not Thiel — he doesn’t bother with any positive PR-friendly talk.) They all believe they don’t need to ask for your permission before taking over your data and using it for their own purposes. They don’t have much interest in privacy, except their own. Zuckerberg has bought the houses surrounding his house to increase his buffer zone to keep the public away from him. But he wants you to keep sharing.
Taplin points out that the Internet was supposed to be a boon for artists by clearing away the gatekeepers. We all would be able to post what we wanted. This is still true, though the monetary value of an online creator’s work has been steadily drained away because of platforms offering it for free. Publications, writers, musicians, podcasters and others are working to solve this problem before they go completely broke. I’ve started a futurist podcast network that will address podcast monetization. This platform, Medium, makes an effort to pay creators. Substack is an email newsletter with a way to collect paying subscriptions.
I don’t have the answer today. But I know that we’ve already invented the platforms. It’s the attitudes that have to change.
