Can the Internet be Saved?

The Rise and Fall of the Dot-Commons

Shackleton never made it to the South Pole, but he got his almost certainly doomed crew back safely. The story of the Endurance is a story of hope. I want to be hopeful, to provide some respite from the apparent doom spiral we seem to be witnessing. I am a techno-progressive and believe that our best days lie ahead. I want to give you hope too, but not out of fantasy. We have some grim realities to face. Technology can be part of our toolbox to build a better future, but it isn’t a panacea. Let’s reflect on the internet for a bit, the conduit for this past week’s insurrection, fomented and organized through tools that, at some time, we thought would save us. Our great ephemeral electronic commons has been spoiled, the tragedy now IS that commons. Is it possible to come back from the brink?

As an old fogey, I do a lot of nostalgic yearning for days gone by. My first experience with the internet was my local state university’s VAX cluster dial-up line. A high school friend had found a way to dial in and with it we could do rudimentary things like email, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Usenet groups, and could ping other locations of the system that already tied universities to each other. A year later I would attend that university and get official access, my own location in cyberspace, an email address I recall to this day and one I could not alter into anything meaningful: V052PXPF. That was me. And with that I was able to browse and share on usenet groups and participate in communications instantly around the world with friends who had dispersed to universities elsewhere, and strangers with whom I shared affinities of whatever kinds (all my Star Trek sci-fi interests). Oh, and I could play Zork.

The promise of this new medium to me as an introverted geeky teen, was in opening up a world to me that I knew existed but was unable or unwilling to take part in physically. A society was evolving that was truly international, that was utterly decentralized, and that was, for the most part, unmoderated and free. This was before the “dark web” and we were operating under the naive belief that decentralized autonomous communities could operate not only without the need for some oversight, but with the belief that it would be impossible (and certainly never desireable or necessary) to ever impose that. Soon, things would begin to change. Kevin Mitnick and worse hackers undermined the trust in online self-governance that drove our nascent internet, and big industry would step in to seize the moment. Finally, violent insurectionists, white nationalists, and hardened criminals would help seemingly make the case against the possibility for a new, online civil society.

Timothy McVeigh went to my local high school and ran a BBS (as did a few of us), where items of questionable taste had already begun to circulate. A few years later, he would be using online forums to become indoctrinated in a virulent white nationalist creed. By the mid 90s, the internet itself was beginning to consolidate and alter its early, promising techno-utopian forms and come under the control of monopolies and governments. What began in Haight-Ashbury’s denizens’ and alums pipe-dreams with legendary BBSes like The WELL (from the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link") - Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue gone online, and pitched by Timothy Leary and others in the pages of MONDO 2000 as the salvation from our worldly woes, and the age of Aquarius come to earth via cyberspace, our “consensual hallucination” realm where anything and everything was possible, finally ended up a dystopia. The past decade has cemented the social failure of the internet in almost every way.

The year 2000 was the first real turning point, a test of our vision versus our reality. We failed. That year I joined my first “internet startup.” Having written my PhD dissertation on The Ontology of Cyberspace, I was recruited to develop an “ontology” for Bowstreet.com, who raised a couple hundred million in financing, then went poof in the dot-com crash, and whose code was subsumed into IBM for something or ‘nother, who knows. It wasn’t long into my short time at Bowstreet until I saw that the idea of the Internet had been co-opted, taken over by greed instead of the liberation we once had been promised. The bubble burst, and with good reason, but instead of learning our lessons, the titans dug in harder and managed even greater acts of consolidation and centralization. The populace ceded their interest, for the most part, and here we are on the verge of societal and technological ruin. No kidding. I don’t use that term lightly.

How did it happen? Well, as I mention above, a fair amount of the blame can be placed upon greed. Greed leads to conglomeration, and with little oversight and no real checks the conglomerates that emerge have no real use for competition and seek ways to use the government to protect their interests with plenty of money to throw at willing leaders to ensure their hegemony.

After the dot-com bubble burst, the climate was ripe for just this to happen, and out of the ruins, behemoths like Facebook and Google could claim their territories. The dot-com landrush was a scramble to claim the most valuable, pristine domains upon which people could seek their fortunes, but the greed that accompanied hasty and ill-conceived IPOs built on often emphemeral business plans meant that the markets and the public lost faith in the internet as a frontier where good ideas could blossom.

Instead, mass-media models driven by safe investment strategies corralled by old-school capital ensured that there would be little innovation and no return to the blue-sky, wide open mentality that encouraged many of us pioneers in cyberspace 30 years hence.

So can we get back? Can we recapture the ethos that drove many of us, when we were idealistic young’uns, to cyberspace with utopian, peaceful and creative dreams? This is not a technological question, primarily, although there are some seeds for growth in new distributed tech like blockchain, but the problem remains that of human nature. The internet didn’t create white nationalism, it merely made the tools that allowed fascists and racists to cause havoc, mayhem, murder, and now attempted coups more available. While most of us want to organize to share Star Trek fan fiction, or meet online for D&D, or even share funny cat videos, some diseased subsection of the population will spread bomb-making tips, hitlists of prominent Jews to target, or organize violent action to overthrow democracy. No technology could solve this. The distributed, anarchic, creative freedom we wanted and had every right to expect the internet to release could still thrive, and the tools are there, largely, though overly centralized and monopolized. We still have a chance to realize the greatest version of our interconnected future. But we must start at home.

The internet cannot be saved until we are saved. We must start at home, offline, in our families, communities, and schools. We have to cut out the cancer of nihilism and hate, and heal our culture first. Then, maybe if it’s not too late, we can seek peace and freedom in cyberspace and reatake our rightful commons.