Houston, we have a problem….
Written by Max Hinchman
Almost everyone in the world now has basically anything readily available for download or purchase with just a few clicks. Thank you internet/web. Yet, oddly enough, this influential technology is also the source of so many problems. For example, Facebook (in theory) has enabled anyone in the world to connect and carry out meaningful relationships over long distances. But the price for Facebook’s “service” is listed pretty clearly here in the Wikipedia page for “Criticism of Facebook” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook . It is like we have all been drunk for the last 20 years and are just starting to realize in the midst of an incredibly painful hangover just how much we charged on our credit cards last night. Just think that the average adult uses his/her smartphone for 2 and a half hours per day which amounts to about 30 total days a year. We are literally giving away our lives to the internet giants, but do we do we profit from this? No.
Welcome to peak Web2.0. Tim Berners-Lee, surely envisioned something with fewer hashtags, fewer Russian hackings, and more society transformation. But how did we allow it to become a data harvesting monster? Well somewhere along the way, we humans forgot that understanding technologies that we depend on for daily survival is actually kind of important. For instance, one could make the argument that humans from 300,000 years ago that lived long enough to reproduce were probably the leading academics of fire during time. Instead of staring at fire for 2 and half hours daily, they probably knew how to make fire, what to do with fire, what not to do etc. I am sure it played a huge role in their ability to pass along their genes before they succumbed to a horrific death by mauling from a saber-tooth tiger. On the other hand, the ancient humans that spent 2 and half hours daily just staring at fire, probably were mauled before they had a chance to contribute to the gene pool.
Fast forward 300,000 years and the modern-day fire academics are Google, Facebook, Tencent, and all of the other data overlords. The founders of these companies made sure to understand the internet/web better than everyone else at that time. Web-based businesses are largely dependent on ad revenues generated from user data. So basically, all websites together are a collective advertising super-machine. This happened largely due to unintentional technological limitations, and the internet giant founders (and supporting team) clearly understood this. The giants exploited the shortcomings and became billionaires many times over. Now, internet giants maintain their dominance but employing some of the smartest people in the world that spend their days thinking of ways to make sure users spend as much time as possible using their app/site.
Good news is that there is a movement to change all of this. But it requires that everyone, at the very minimum, understands a little more about how the internet and web. Along with our other posts on Block Street Journal, our Web3 posts will feature how blockchain technology is helping resolve the technological shortcomings that led to where we are today. This will include some history of the internet/web, key concepts/terms, and the current crypto/blockchain people that are quietly creating web3.0. The bottom line is that users should take back some control. I am sure that no one is willing to live in a house in which the developer or landlord tracked everything all movements inside the house and then sold that information to other companies. Why should the internet/web be any different?
