The Internet Is Not the Answer (32 page)

In the European Union, where there is a particular sensitivity about data privacy, one controversial answer lies in establishing a “right to be forgotten” law that bans inaccurate and accurate but unflattering online search engine links. While this law, at least in its mid-2014 form, is slightly impractical,
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it is nonetheless an important beginning to the legal debate about controlling online misinformation. “Discombobulated geniuses” like the hypertext inventor Ted Nelson might think that the network shouldn’t have a “concept of deletion,” but for the rest of us—especially those whose reputations have been compromised by vicious online smears—there is clearly a need for some sort of “right to be forgotten” legislation that enables us to delete links to these lies.

And yet if there is just one answer, a single solution, to the Internet’s epic failure, it is the opposite of forgetting. That answer is more memory—of the human rather than the computer kind. The answer is history.

It’s not just Michael Birch who has seceded from time and space. Fukuyama may have thought that history ended in 1989, but it’s that other world-historic 1989 event, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, that has unintentionally created another, more troubling version of the end of history.

“I recently took my 16-year-old daughter Adele to see a section of the Berlin Wall that has been preserved as part of a museum devoted to the division of the city, Germany and Europe. It was a bright Berlin morning,” writes the
New York Times
columnist Roger Cohen about revisiting the divided Berlin of Erich Mielke and the Stasi. “Adele, born in 1997, with just a toehold in the last century, wandered around. She examined these curious relics. Every now and again she checked her Facebook page on her device. ‘This just seems so ancient,’ she said, leaning back against the wall. ‘I mean, it feels like it comes from the 19th century.’”
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At least Adele Cohen has a sense of the past, even if she misidentifies it by a hundred years. But for many of her generation of Internet natives, the only time is the perpetual present. As the
Guardian
’s Jonathan Freedland explains, today’s networked generation, in their preoccupation with “trading Instagrams and Vines,” has created an intimate, always-on culture that will—like a disappearing Snapchat photograph—vanish forever and leave nothing to posterity. “The point is that a fundamental aspect of human life—memory—is being altered by the digital revolution,” Freedland warns.
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The savage irony is that the more accurately the Internet remembers everything, the more our memories atrophy. The result is an amnesia about everything except the immediate, the instant, the now, and the me. It’s the end of history as a shared communal memory, the end of our collective engagement with the past and the future. “Once we had a nostalgia for the future,” warns Mark Lilla. “Today we have an amnesia for the present.”
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“The libertarian age,” Lilla argues, “is an illegible age.”
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But this isn’t quite right, either. It might be illegible for a traditional historian like Lilla, but not for a seasoned observer of networked society like the American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. “I had been looking forward to the 21st century,” Rushkoff writes at the beginning of his 2014 book,
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.
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But “looking forward,” Rushkoff confesses, has gone out of fashion in our networked age of real-time technology. Twentieth-century futurism, he says, has been replaced with a chaotic twenty-first-century “now-ist” culture that resembles Jonas Lindvist’s pointillist graphical image on the wall of the Ericsson’s Stockholm office. Rather than futurists, Rushkoff observes, we are all now “presentists” locked in to a mesmerizing loop of tweets, updates, emails, and instant messages. It’s this “narrative collapse,” he says, that makes sense of our hyperconnected world. It’s what makes networked society legible.

And so to rebel against this world, to think differently, to question Silicon Valley’s ahistorical confidence, means reviving the authority of our collective narrative. It’s particularly through the lens of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history that we can best make sense of the impact of the Internet on twenty-first-century society. The past makes the present legible. It’s the most effective antidote to the libertarian utopianism of Internet evangelists like John Perry Barlow, who imagines the Internet as something like a fancy-dress rave in exclusive Marin County, where, perhaps not uncoincidentally, Barlow also happens to live.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind,” Barlow wrote in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. And this fantasy of imagining the Internet magically floating outside time and space, as an unplace, away from the authority of traditional laws, has become the standard justification for Silicon Valley disruption. No wonder the cult book among multibillionaire libertarian entrepreneurs like Sean Parker and Peter Thiel is Tolkien’s fantasy
The Lord of the Rings
. Thiel named Palantir, “the creepiest startup ever,” according to one British technology journalist,
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after the seeing stones in Tolkien’s trilogy. And Parker spent $10 million in June 2013 on a shamelessly meretricious
Lord of the Rings
–style wedding in the California forest featuring fake medieval stone castles, gates, bridges, and columns.

“For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say, or buy anything,” one of the young engineers I met at FailCon promised, articulating a faith in the Internet so magically redemptive that it resembles a Tolkienesque fantasy. He was, however, wrong. Not for the first (or last) time in history, believers are using dramatic language like
for the first time in history
to tout a revolution that isn’t really new. Yes, the decentralized network accidentally created by Cold War scientists like Paul Baran and Robert Kahn is original. Yes, today’s data factory economy is, in many ways, different from the factories of the industrial age. Yes, Internet technology is fundamentally changing how we communicate and do business with each other. But while all this technology might be novel, it hasn’t transformed the role of either power or wealth in the world. Indeed, when it comes to the importance of money and influence, Silicon Valley is about as traditional as those three thousand bottles of vintage wine in the Battery’s illustrious cellar.

History is, in many ways, repeating itself. Today’s digital upheaval represents what MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call the “second industrial revolution.” “Badass” entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick and Peter Thiel have much in common with the capitalist robber barons of the first industrial revolution. Internet monopolists like Google and Amazon increasingly resemble the bloated multinationals of the industrial epoch. The struggle of eighteenth-century Yorkshire cloth workers is little different from today’s resistance of organized labor to Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb. Our growing concern with the pollution of “data exhaust” is becoming the equivalent of the environmental movement for the digital age. Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have reassembled the Bentham brothers’ eighteenth-century Panopticon as data factories. Bentham’s utilitarianism, that bizarre project to quantify every aspect of the human condition, has reappeared in the guise of the quantified-self movement. Even the nineteenth-century debate between Bentham’s utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill’s liberalism over individual rights has reappeared in what Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein calls “the politics of libertarian paternalism”—a struggle between “Millville” and “Benthamville” about the role of “nudge” in a world where the government, through partnerships with companies like Acxiom and Palantir, has more and more data on us all
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and Internet companies like Facebook and OkCupid run secretive experiments designed to control our mood.

Nick Cohen describes the “cool capitalism” of the networked age as our “borderless future.”
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But while Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, and Tim Berners-Lee consciously designed the Internet to be without a center, that distributed architecture hasn’t been extended to the all-important realms of money or power. Here the future is actually as
bordered
as the past. And its center is in Silicon Valley, the home of Michael Birch and the other alien overlords of our digital age.

The Medium Is Not the Message

In May 2014, I spoke alongside Alec Ross, the former senior advisor for innovation to Hillary Clinton and a particularly smooth-talking Internet evangelist, at the European Parliament in Brussels.
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In this influential political chamber, where some of the most innovative Internet legislation is being enacted, such as the EU’s “right to be forgotten” law, Ross laid out a binary vision of twenty-first-century networked society. Rather than the old difference between left and right ideologies, he predicted, the key distinction in what he called “the shift in power from hierarchies to networks of citizens” would be between the good “open” society and the bad “closed” society.

But, like other Internet evangelists such as John Perry Barlow and
Without Their Permission
author Alexis Ohanian, Ross has mistaken the medium for the message. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” McLuhan wrote. And the error these evangelists make is to assume that the Internet’s open, decentered technology naturally translates into a less hierarchical or unequal society. But rather than more openness and the destruction of hierarchies, an unregulated network society is breaking the old center, compounding economic and cultural inequality, and creating a digital generation of masters of the universe. This new power may be rooted in a borderless network, but it still translates into massive wealth and power for a tiny handful of companies and individuals.

“In Darwinian terms these new corporate giants are just the latest stage in the evolution of the public corporation,” warns the Internet historian and journalist John Naughton about “open” Internet companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, and Google. “They exist to create wealth—vast quantities of it—for their founders and shareholders. Their imperative is to grow and achieve dominance in their chosen markets—as well as in others which they now deem to be within their reach. They are as hostile to trade unions, taxation, and regulation as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie ever were in their day. The only difference is that the new titans employ far fewer people, enjoy higher margins and are less harassed by governments than their predecessors.”
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In their infatuation with an “open” and “permissionless” future, Internet evangelists like Ross and Ohanian have failed to learn from the past. The first industrial revolution was, for the most part, a success because it blended openness with new laws to regulate its excesses. What George Packer calls “the great leveling” of the Roosevelt Republic and Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe as the “golden age” of labor was secured through progressive government regulation on labor law, taxation, working conditions, competition, and, above all, antitrust issues. Robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and industrial monopolies like Standard Oil didn’t just go away. They were legislated out of existence.

As the distinguished New York University and London School of Economics sociologist Richard Sennett notes, these progressives actually “set great store on the power of technology to build a better society.” But unlike “your garden-variety Silicon Valley billionaire,” Sennett explains, “the progressives of a century ago believed that once in power, the plutocrat would inevitably stifle talent which threatened his or her domain.”
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And that’s why, according to Sennett, “it’s time to break up Google.” The “problem is simple,” he says. “The company is just too powerful, as are Apple and many other big tech groups.”

“Were he alive today,” Sennett writes about President Theodore Roosevelt, the American president who trust-busted Standard Oil, “I believe Roosevelt would concentrate his firepower on Google, Microsoft and Apple. We need modern politicians who will be similarly bold.”
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“Imagine that it’s 1913 and the post office, the phone company, the public library, printing houses, the U.S. Geological Survey mapping operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive corporation unaccountable to the public,” Rebecca Solnit writes in an article about Google’s new monopolistic power. “Jump a century and see that in the online world that’s more or less where we are.”
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The answer, the most important solution to the Internet’s epic fail, lies in the work of political bodies like the European Parliament or the United States Congress, which,
with our permission
, controls “secretive” monopolistic corporations like Google. As Mathias Dopfner, the head of Europe’s largest newspaper company, Germany’s Axel Springer publishing house, and an outspoken critic of Google’s attempt to create what he calls a “digital superstate,” said in April 2014, “institutions in Brussels have never been as important as they are now.”
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