Fix the internet, or fix the world?
One of the longest-standing complaints we hear about the progressive popularization and evolution of the internet is that it is unsupervised and devoid of regulation; and needs “fixing”.
Half the planet’s politicians are working on rules to try to adapt the way the internet works to the environment that existed before its appearance, as though that environment was somehow the culmination of human civilization and should be protected at all cost from the barbarian hordes that roam the net.
The question that immediately comes to mind is whether we should spend so much time and energy on trying to “fix” the internet so that it works as the world did before it was invented. Or should we accept that the internet is just fine, and works according to a more advanced structure and is based on parameters that cannot be turned back anyway, and that perhaps what we should really be trying to fix is the way that the world as we know it works?
The expression “to fix the world” brings to mind great ideals, but ones that are largely impracticable, if not to say absurd. But let’s think of a few aspects of the internet that demonstrate this: if we start with economics, for example, we could talk about the demands of governments in the face of many businesses’ fiscal practices—and not just “internet companies”, supposing that the concept of an “internet company” meant anything in an age when just about every company is one—, such as using e-invoicing systems and tax havens to avoid paying taxes in certain countries and thus reduce their overall tax contribution.
Is this a problem to do with these supposed “internet companies”, or is it really a problem to do with the way that our tax system has been designed, and that allows these sorts of practices? All the evidence suggest that the companies that indulge in these kinds of practices are well advised and not doing anything illegal: don’t blame them, blame the system. In a world where each country has its own tax systems, some countries decide to be “worse neighbors” than others, and develop structures that allow for tax evasion, structures that are at the roots of their economic success and viability. The problem is not what Amazon or Google get up to, but the fact that tax havens exist in the first place, protected by legislation that allows them, with the help of technology, to stretch the rules.
Another obvious example can be found in politics: we live in a world in which spying is common practice for virtually all governments. But then one of these countries, which supposedly runs the world, takes advantage of its position as the home of most of the companies and infrastructure that control the internet. This country systematically decides to abuse its power, supposedly for reasons of security, but that in reality, as everybody knows, to simply further strengthen its global domination, using methods that would not be out of place in the hands of the megalomaniac bad guys in every James Bond movie.
Should we change the way the internet works so that this type of spying is more difficult to carry out, and in the process sparking a kind of arms race unseen since the Cold War? Should we now be seriously considering wearing tin foil hats from now on? Or should we think about changing the way that the world is structured, and isolate economically and politically those countries that carry out the kind of unjustifiable espionage that has recently come to light?
Instead, why not directly challenge US hegemony, and begin to move toward a de-Americanized world, as the official Chinese news agency Xinhua recently suggested? Without getting too carried away with such ideas and without even thinking on the alternatives, there is no denying that we are all beholden to a world power that spends way beyond its means, that carries out large-scale military operations based on lies, that assassinates people using drones in countries it has no legitimate scope to be operating in, that periodically threatens the stability of the global economic system by threatening not to pay its debts, and that has proved itself to be a bad partner by spying on its friends and allies. The United States moves closer each day to being a bad parody of the worst Hollywood movies.
Obviously, the idea of building a world in which national sovereignty becomes a thing of the past and that acts on globalized principles that would avoid many of the problems we currently face, is, at the beginning of the 21st century, a complete utopia.
But what we can and should do is to understand that the spread of the internet has not created new problems, but simply highlighted those that already existed, making them increasingly unsustainable. All our efforts to “fix the internet” are in reality, desperate attempts by an establishment whose inability to adapt to change times has been cruelly exposed, ignoring the need for greater transparency.
Should we really go on trying to “fix the internet”? Or would it make more sense to give some serious thought to trying to fix the world? It wasn’t the internet that started the crisis: the internet is, in reality, the proof that we are moving toward the end of an era, and that the way we have organized the world up until now must change.
