The Internet Is Not the Answer (34 page)

Silicon Valley has fetishized the ideals of collaboration and conversation. But where we need real collaboration is in our conversation about the impact of the Internet on society. This is a conversation that affects everyone from digital natives to the precariat to Silicon Valley billionaires. And it’s a conversation in which we all need to take responsibility for our online actions—whether it’s our narcissistic addiction to social media, our anonymous cruelty, or our lack of respect for the intellectual property of creative professionals. The answer lies in the kind of responsible self-regulation laid out in William Powers’s
Hamlet’s BlackBerry
, his excellent guide for building a good life in the digital age.
⁶⁷

“You have only one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg so memorably trivialized the complexity of the human condition. In our conversation about the Internet, we need to recognize that our multiple identities are often at odds. For example, the Internet is generally excellent for consumers. But it’s much more problematic for citizens. Internet evangelists, especially libertarian entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, see everything in terms of satisfying the customer. And while Amazon does indeed satisfy most of us as consumers, it is having a far less satisfactory outcome for citizens, who are more and more concerned with the reliability of information, the civility of discourse, and the respect for individual privacy.

It’s a conversation that needs to take place in Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, and the other centers of digital power in our networked world. The time is now ripe for this. Some of the more responsible entrepreneurs, academics, and investors are finally recognizing that the Internet—the technological revolution they believed would make the world a radically better place—hasn’t been an unmitigated success. Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz warns about the increasing inequality of our digital age. Union Square Ventures’s Fred Wilson worries about the dangerous new monopolies of our digital economy. New York University’s Clay Shirky is troubled by the tragic fate of journalists in a world without print newspapers. Charles Leadbeater says the Web has lost its way. Emily Bell frets about our new media one percent economy. Marc Andreessen is concerned with the impact of anonymous networks on civic life. MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman worries that the Internet’s “Original Sin,” its reliance on free advertising’s supporting content, has transformed the network into a fiasco. Distinguished bloggers, writers, and journalists like Dave Winer, Astra Taylor, John Naughton, Dan Gillmor, Om Malik, and Mathew Ingram all fear the power of large Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Jeff Jarvis is disgusted by the plague of trolls, abusers, harassers, lunatics, imposters, and assholes on the Internet.

“What society are we building here?” Jarvis asks.
⁶⁸
And that question should be the beginning of every conversation about the Internet. Like it or not, the digital world is reshaping our society with a bewildering speed. The fate of employment, identity, privacy, prosperity, justice, and civility are all being transformed by networked society. The Internet may not (yet) be the answer, but it nonetheless remains the central question of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

On my way out of the club, I passed by some words inscribed on a black marble slab.
WE SHAPE OUR BUILDINGS; THEREAFTER THEY SHAPE US
, they said. Outside, a cold fog had drifted in from the Bay. It felt good to be back in the anonymous city—that reassuring place of self-erasure and self-invention. I shivered and, dodging a couple of networked Uber limousines, hailed a licensed yellow cab.

“So what’s that new club like?” the driver asked me as we sped off down Battery Street toward San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) district, where the new offices of Internet companies like Twitter, Yelp, and Instagram are destroying local businesses.

“It’s a failure,” I replied. “An epic fucking failure.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sometimes one gets lucky. In March 2013, at Julia Hobsbawm’s Names Not Numbers conference in the delightful little town of Adeburgh on the Suffolk coast, I had the great fortune to meet the Atlantic Books CEO Toby Munday. Over copious cups of tea at a little café on the seafront, Toby convinced me to write a book synthesizing all my ideas about the Internet. The book was originally entitled
Epic Fail.
But having sold the American rights to Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove Atlantic in New York, Morgan wisely convinced us to change its name to
The Internet Is Not the Answer.

Toby is a great salesman. “It’ll be easy,” he promised me in Aldeburgh. “Just summarize evrything you know about the Internet.” But books, of course, are anything but easy and
The Internet Is Not the Answer
is as much Toby and Morgan’s book (at least its good bits) as mine. Morgan was a particularly insightful editor, encouraging me to concentrate on the book’s historical dimension and its structure. Thanks also to the teams at both Grove Atlantic in New York City and Atlantic Books in London. especially the excellent Peter Blackstock who has worked tirelessly with me throughout the editorial process. Many thanks also to my agent, George Lucas; to my researchers, Sophia Dominguez, Brittany Sholes, Quan Nguyen, and Nico Appel; and to Dodi Axelson for kindly setting up my visit to the Ericsson offices in Stockholm.

I also got lucky in early 2010 when I recieved a call from my friend Keith Teare, Mike Arrington’s cofounder at TechCrunch, who was setting up the TechCrunchTV network. Keith recommended me to Paul Carr and Jon Orlin at TechCrunchTV, and my show
Keen On
. . . was the first program on the network, running for four years and including over two hundred interviews with leading Internet thinkers and critics. In particular, I’d like to thank Kurt Andersen, John Borthwick, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Carr, Clayton Christensen, Ron Conway, Tyler Cowen, Kenneth Cukier, Larry Downes, Tim Draper, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Walter Isaacson, Tim Ferriss, Michael Fertik, Ze Frank, David Frigstad, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Peter Hirshberg, Reid Hoffman, Ryan Holiday, Brad Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly, David Kirkpatrick, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Robert Levine, Steven Levy, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew McAfee, Gavin Newsom, George Packer, Eli Pariser, Andrew Rasiej, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Schroeder, Tiffany Shlain, Robert Scoble, Dov Seidman, Gary Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Micah Sifry, Martin Sorrell, Tom Standage, Bruce Sterling, Brad Stone, Clive Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, Yossi Vardi, Hans Vestberg, Vivek Wadhwa, and Steve Wozniak for appearing on
Keen On
. . . and sharing their valuable ideas with me.

NOTES

Preface

1
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture
(New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2007), and
Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us
(New York: St. Martin, 2012).

Introduction

1 Carolyne Zinko, “New Private S.F. Club the Battery,”
SFGate
, October 4, 2013.

2 Renée Frojo, “High-Society Tech Club Reborn in San Francisco,”
San Francisco Business Times,
April 5, 2013.

3 The Battery describes itself on its website: “Indeed, here is where they came to refill their cups. To tell stories. To swap ideas. To eschew status but enjoy the company of those they respected. Here is where they came to feel at home on an evening out.” For more, see:
thebatterysf.com/club
.

4 Liz Gannes, “Bebo Founders Go Analog with Exclusive Battery Club in San Francisco,” AllThingsD, May 21, 2013.

5 Zinko, “New Private S.F. Club the Battery.”

6 Ibid.

7 “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Twain originally said. See Alex Ayres,
Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations
(New York: Dover, 1999), p. 35.

8 Julie Zeveloff, “A Tech Entrepreneur Supposedly Spent $35 Million on San Francisco’s Priciest House,”
Business Insider
, April 16, 2013,
businessinsider.com/trevor
-traina-buys-san-francisco-mansion-2013-4?op=1.

9 Anisse Gross, “A New Private Club in San Francisco, and an Old Diversity Challenge,”
New Yorker
, October 9, 2013.

10 Timothy Egan, “Dystopia by the Bay,”
New York Times
, December 5, 2013.

11 David Runciman, “Politics or Technology—Which Will Save the World?,”
Guardian
, May 23, 2014.

12 John Lanchester, “The Snowden Files: Why the British Public Should Be Worried About GCHQ,”
Guardian
, October 3, 2013.

13 Thomas L. Friedman, “A Theory of Everything (Sort Of),”
New York Times,
August 13, 2011.

14 Saul Klein, “Memo to boards: the internet is staying,”
Financial Times
, August 5, 2014.

15 Mark Lilla, “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age,”
New Republic
, June 17, 2014.

16 Craig Smith, “By the Numbers: 30 Amazing Reddit Statistics,”
expandedramblings.com
, February 26, 2014.

17 Alexis Ohanian,
Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
(New York: Grand Central, 2013).

18 Alexis C. Madrigal, “It Wasn’t Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster,”
Atlantic
, April 2013.

19 Lilla, “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age.”

20 Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook and Engineering the Public,”
Medium
, June 29, 2014.

21 Pew Research Center, “The Web at 25 in the U.S.: The Overall Verdict: The Internet Has Been a Plus for Society and an Especially Good Thing for Individual Users.”

22 Esha Chhabra, “Ubiquitous Across Globe, Cellphones Have Become Tool for Doing Good,”
New York Times
, November 8, 2013.

23 Julia Angwin, “Has Privacy Become a Luxury Good?,”
New York Times,
March 3, 2014.

24 Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. xi.

25 Ibid.

Chapter One

1 “Ericsson Mobility Report,” 2013.

2 Mat Honan, “Don’t Diss Cheap Smartphones. They’re About to Change Everything,”
Wired
, May 16, 2014.

3 Tim Worstall, “More People Have Mobile Phones Than Toilets,”
Forbes
, March 23, 2013.

4 “More Than 50 Billion Connected Devices,” Ericsson white paper.

5 Michael Chui, Markus Loffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,”
McKinsey Quarterly
, March 2010.

6 Matthieu Pelissie du Rausas, James Manyika, Eric Hazan, Jacques Burghin, Michael Chui, and Remi Said, “Internet Matters: The Net’s Sweeping Impact on Growth, Jobs, and Prosperity,”
McKinsey
, May 2011.

7 See: “Data Never Sleeps 2.0,” infographic from the data company Domo,
domo.com/learn/data
-never-sleeps-2.

8 Clive Thompson, “Dark Hero of the Information Age: The Original Computer Geek,”
New York Times
, March 20, 2005.

9 James Harkin,
Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are
(London: Little, Brown, 2009), p. 19.