Did 2018 Mark the Beginning of the End for Social Networks?
Though I cannot see a time when we will not need social utilities, I can see a time when we will not need social networks.
Facebook’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal was to blame developers and third-party apps while restricting developer access to its platform creating an even greater moat to its considerable centralized ocean of data. Mark Zuckerberg assured the senate that we should trust our data to Facebook who in turn would protect us from Russia and bad actors like Cambridge Analytica going forward by restricting access to its data and using AI to police their platform further for fraud and fake news. Recently exposed Facebook hacks have exposed the folly of this reasoning and argument. The problem is much more profound than Zuckerberg is ready to admit.
It primarily is about centralized data security and control versus decentralized ownership and control. Centralization versus decentralization is likely to emerge as one of the key debates of this century. This issue is at the heart of the blockchain and crypto movement. Decentralization not only reduces the manipulation and illegal as well as unethical exploitation of our data it is also the most robust way to provide us with reliable personal data security.
Another important truth about the Web 2.0 social web movement is that while companies like Facebook and Twitter have led the way in developing social utilities at scale, in recent years the internet as a whole has evolved into a social medium. Many of the utilities brought to mass scale by the leading social networks have been integrated and proliferated across multiple web properties en masse. Sharing, liking and posting comments are as much a part of the experience on traditional media sites as they are on social networks. In this sense there is now less of a need for social networks such as Facebook as there is a need for social utilities. Also as access to the Internet is increasingly being recognized around the world as a human right it can be argued that the access to social media should or at least could be provided as a public utility.
That said there are serious problems with the Web 2.0 framework such as concentration of data in centralized silos leading to increased threats from hacking and ever more invasive surveillance. However, a new architecture is being put in place for the web that promises to upgrade it to mitigate many of the problems of the 2.0 web with an improved Web 3.0 operating system that is more secure, safe and citizen centric.
With distributed, self-sovereign data that is contained and programable, that is owned and controlled by us all individually, an emergent class of decentralized applications (DApps) can be built to deliver social utilities in a distributed manner that reduces our information’s exposure to either unethical or illegal exploitation.
2018 may well go down in history as the year of the beginning of the end for social networks. In a rendition of a famous statement from the world of banking it might be safe to say — Though I cannot see a time when people will not need social utilities, I can see a time when we will not need social networks.
Dele Atanda is founder and CEO of metaMe and founder and 1st Citizen of the Internet Foundation.
