As humans, can we make way more ethical and utilitarian use of technology and internet than is currently happening?
Rewind yourself back by about two decades from now when the Berners Lee basic protocols like HTTP and HTML were just being formed and the internet as we know it was just being prepared (those who weren't born can also visualize it as enough documentation and information exists).
What a world of opportunities it was and what a promising future. It felt you could do almost anything with the help of this new technology, irrespective of your race, gender, caste, creed, religion and even social status.
The promise of the information superhighway was that an ordinary pleb will have as many opportunities as those at the top, isn't it? Do you think that promise has been fulfilled today? Do you think we have made at least decent use (if not the best possible use) of this technology?
Now, I'm not saying everything is in doom and gloom, far from it as computing power has enabled the masses to do lot's of things they could only dream of in the 1990s! Opening your smartphone in the middle of a street and having a video call with a friend was like a fantasy dream in those days (at least for the ordinary pleb).
There are many other great achievements too like cheap hardware which is light years ahead (relatively speaking), apps that let you control all aspects of your lives from finances to health to work in a matter of a few taps.
But on the other hand, we have let a few large entities thrive and create massive monopolies on these very technologies we happen to use. Efforts at open source and digital rights and freedoms took on until about late 2000s but then started fading. Today, we have those very entities which are trying to curb user's freedoms heading and/or controlling organizations like OSI, Linux Foundation, Mozilla Corp., Red Hat, etc. which are supposed to act like stewards of our digital freedoms. The situation today is very gloomy in the sense that many of the digital freedoms that our predecessors fought for are on the verge of getting lost today at the hands of surveillance capitalism and we (as collective society of humans) are responsible for it.
Can we take an oath today to make as much ethical use of technologies like internet as possible? To act in as much a manner as possible that preserves the digital rights and freedoms of the common individual or pleb in the society like you and me?
I believe that's the only progressive and better path for humanity.
I feel that promise has been mostly fulfilled. The internet has been monopolized and its users are sold to the highest bidder wanting to run a marketing scheme on them - but it still is fairly inclusive, especially in allowing users access to information and communication (it can be far less inclusive in allowing all users access to communities they want to be part of, but that's the fault of the people in those communities and not the internet itself).
And of course there are counter examples (the Great Firewall of China is very effective in also limiting information and communication), but even in the global south, access to mobile internet is cheap and widely available. Poor farmers suffering periodically under food uncertainty have access to phones with internet access, and use it to plan their harvest and where to sell their crops.
I see some danger things changing again with LLM producing content displacing real information, and with almost all news sites attempting to charge for their articles, but so far the internet has quickly responded with ways to circumvent the monetization (e.g. archive removing paywalls for news, sci-hub for journal articles, libgen for e-books, ect.).
Is this really happening? The only real change I've seen since the inception of web 2.0 some 20 years ago is that recently, everybody always wants you to have an account and log in. They want to track you even better than they already can, and sell your data. What social media company actually wants money from their users now?
I agree, but really, it was inevitable. Real journalism is expensive, and people have stopped buying the printed results of that journalism, so now they need to charge for its digital form. I only hope that quality of content goes up because of that. The only other option for quality journalism is the state sponsored version. I especially like the model Great Britain and Germany are running (there's a mandatory monthly fee - not a tax! - placed on all residents, which funds certain medial outlets like the BBC, and laws are in place that try to limit political control over those media outlets), but stuff like that is extremely unpopular, both in those countries and abroad.
Come on, you can access an almost unlimited number of new and amazing games on 10 year old hardware. You can access any game of your choosing on 5 year old hardware, if you lower the graphics settings a little. The internet always had great promise for humanity, but affordable gaming on 4K monitors at 144Hz was not one of them.
This one is interesting. I'm really curious to see how open source LLMs turn out in comparison to what the big players are doing. Once the weights of METAs LLM were leaked and available via BitTorrent, the community practically exploded over night and they have been catching up quickly (llama, alpaca, and all their quantizations for home use and their LoRA specializations).
But yeah, the information landscape on the internet as it is today really is doomed. I think we're going back to curated information hubs, because you can't really trust things you find in the wild.
A big part of the problem is that lots of people need to behave differently in the same way in order to effect large change. Most people don't want to move away from the familiar and popular to explore new things that few people are doing, let alone any one particular new thing. Like you say, human nature.
Personally, I'm content with small change, finding and making niches for myself and introducing folks that I think are receptive to those niches. It's not my responsibility to change most people when they're not listening. Individual values and actions resonate more with me than sweeping movements.
Very cool to see some folks trying to lower the barrier to entry to everyone for alternatives, e.g. all the tildes apps being developed. If you want to get lots of people to behave in the same way, the way to go is to give them something they'll want. Circumvention options like BitTorrent, Sci-hub are popular for this reason.
On a related tangent: I rescue food and look for second-hand items. One of my sources is an app called OLIO. You can offer items, and you can see items that other people near you are offering and chat with offerers to request and coordinate pickups.
Used to be these offers had to be free, but recently an option to sell was introduced. OLIO hasn't been doing well financially, this is probably why they introduced this.
I don't know or work for them. I just use and like what they're trying to do with their app a lot, and I'm guessing a good number of folks on tildes could be interested in this.
It is "fairly inclusive" to the extent that mainstream politics has allowed it to be inclusive. It's a good thing that democratic countries with constitutional rights enshrined for all citizens have enabled those rights translated into the digital freedom on Internet that exists today. But even then, there are efforts by all kinds of lobbyists every now and then to bring laws against right to repair, sabotage net neutrality, etc. as we have seen in recent years.
And as you said, countries where no such constitutional rights were enshrined to begin with (such as China) are controlled with great firewalls to keep the plebs in check.
I don't have any quick fix to solve this problem but applying the general principle of "sunlight be the best disinfectant", we can keep supporting openness and transparency in all public spaces and institutions whilst also keep educating the average pleb to understand their rights and responsibilities to keep the internet free and open. Simple and basic things like GPL, LetsEncrypt, Decentralized systems and open standards/protocols should push the way forward and help with this. On the other hand, things counter to user freedoms like walled gardens, paywalls on the articles, non-standard/proprietary software and technologies must be discouraged and called out as much as possible.
This, I believe, is the entire crux of the matter with posts like this: If the only thing limiting your use of a certain technology is your unwillingness to use it, how do you deal with the ones that do use it?
Appealing to pure ideology may be nice and all, but in the end we need to deal with the world around us.
Yes, the internet and accompanying technologies enabled previously unknown informational freedom and exchange. But any technology will always be used to the full extent of its (known) capability. Alfred Nobel intended dynamite to be used for mining and such, and was so horrified by its use as a weapon that he used his gained wealth to create the Nobel Price (simplified, but basically correct).
A sharpened stone can be used as tool to open up fruit. Or a skull. If you refuse to use sharpened stones for "unpleasant" things, how do you defend your society against those that are willing to use sharpened stones against you? Simply saying "wouldn't it be better if we all only used stones to open fruits?" won't help you much in that scenario.
What I'm trying to say with this, is that any technology will have beneficial and detrimental effects. And you can't get one without the other. You can try to limit the detrimental effects, but you won't be able to eliminate them. You have to learn to deal with them.
Given the ability to disseminate wast amounts of information freely will inevitably cause some people to use that for their own gain to the detriment of others. You can't have Wikipedia without political disinformation. You can't have dynamite in quarries without someone building a bomb from it. You can't have sharpened stones for coconuts without the thread of bashed in skulls.
All in all I think the technology surrounding the internet today did way more good than harm. We just need to constantly try to keep the detrimental effects in check. But just saying "Wouldn't it be better if we just did X?" is not the way to do that.
Monopolies and oligopolies are a historical proccess that happens and are inevitable in capitalism and the internet is no exception.
Firefox exists because it's existence is benefical for Google.
There is no escape from this in our current system. There are some bandages we can put here and there, but it will happen no matter what.
Having been on the internet back in the days of telnetting around, gopher, lynx for DOS, etc and having seen BBS communities make the switch online, I can say that everyone thought it would be a great meritocracy of ideas that would solve a myriad of problems. "Information wants to be free!" after all.
No one thought these giant monopolies would appear and lock up whole swaths of the internet.
While most tech people railed against AOL's walled garden approach but there were still options. I think it was expected as a given at the time that the open source philosophy would control the internet. If you don't like something, fork it and make your own. Early on, that is how it worked, too. Until money got involved and then patents started getting filed with "...but on a computer" and the like. I remember the furor over patent trolls nearly killing the internet trying to patent the humble shopping cart
With the amounts of money being made it was only a matter of time before it attracted leeches and parasites and sociopaths that lead to monopolies. Now the barrier of entry is so high that I sincerely doubt there will be another "garage" startup like Apple, Microsoft or Google.
That's just the technological side.
On the societal standpoint, what we didn't think about was just how ignorant the masses were.
We thought that the creme would rise to the top and never considered that racist Uncle Bob's voice was just as loud as Dr. Expert, PHD of x,y and z.
No one gave much thought to how that information might be weaponized a la Cambridge Analytica and used against us.
In the real world, maybe your town had 1 crazy who thought the world was flat or that vaccines were bad. On the internet, each village idiot found whole villages of other idiots. Now, in 2023 people are exasperatedly saying "FFS, the earth is ROUND!" And that's just a low-stakes issue. People found out just how well outrage sells so headlines got more outrageous and more out there. Algorithm's push engagement and the uneducated masses are easily swindled into radicalization on topics. I mean, "articles on the earth being flat is EVERYWHERE, why is this so hard to undertand?!" from their perspective so they're right on one thing, anyhow.
Replace "flat earth" with whatever viewpoint you want: vaccines, political views, BLM, antifa, etc.
Can we do better? Yes, with better education and a focus on critical thinking I think we could do better.
Will we? No, there is too much money involved.
You may find some of the ideas expressed by jaron lanier of interest. E.G. this video of his I linked a while ago (howbeit not to much discussion). I don't entirely agree with much of what he says, but I think he sees things clearly and expresses interesting ideas.
I was there twenty years ago. Even before actually. My father bought a used computer (486) for me and my brother and enrolled us in some classes. I’ve just realized how amazing that was. He wouldn’t benefit from a home computer until several years later and only through us.
I’m telling this to illustrate that the world of opportunities was and still is mostly an ideal. I had the means, access and the knowledge. I had a head start that benefits me till this day. I wasn’t limited to clicks, or worst, taps to make things work. There is more than one computer at home, besides phones. I myself had a laptop and a desktop when it was convenient. I do a lot with the technology at hand and there’s much more to do. That’s not the reality for most.
For those not at the middle to the top, things are very different. Smartphones were the real revolution to the masses. Cheap ones still offer a world of information and are easy to use. That’s the start point to lift the barrier of the privilege and might as well be the end point if nothing else changes.
I think of the internet as this amazing library that’s in the middle of the desert and with no librarian to help you make sense of the organization. I have a car, I know hot to drive and can spare the money for gas. The surprise fee to enter the building and the exclusive sections are not a problem. I’m also lucky I don’t have to use one of the guides or be followed by a chaperone all the time.
One more thing I want to add is that status quo is the enemy of progress. Things were going well until the grasp economical and societal powers had over the population started to loose. In a more individual level, people not always play nice with others and will find ways to limit you, specially if they can control whatever is between you and the space you want to access. People will even poison the space they are if it means the undesirables won’t stay around.
To answer your question: Yes. We've advanced a lot with the help of technology and the internet, but the ethical issues you talk about are not primarily tech issues, or I just don’t see it that way.
I found my search results got much worse a couple years ago, both on DuckDuckGo and Google. Nearly every search is contaminated with machine-written nonsense. This makes it harder to browse, but luckily I am old enough to remember a time before internet search worked well. I still get lots of my internet through RSS, and I still know how to check news sites one-by-one rather than relying on an aggregator.
I wonder if there is ground to be gained by returning to the old ways. Start a webring. Host your own blog. Did you know Yahoo started out as one person's personally-curated long list of good websites? With so much of what we see mediated by some corporation's recommendation engine, it's easy to forget that the internet was designed from the ground up to eschew centralization. Some of the best sites on the web don't even run any Javascript. Some times you just can't beat texts and hyperlinks.
Your diagnosis is right but IMO your prognosis is somewhat missing the mark. Surveillance capitalism has indeed ruined the "world of opportunities" and "promising future" future that the early internet promised but that's on us consumers and that's the part we have the most ability to change. We as consumers flocked to all the free, commercially-backed services from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al. In order to take back the web we need to stop using those services, and we need to our friends and family with us. Sure it's a lot of work, but important things usually are. There are many, excellent self-hosted options, and there are many privacy-centric paid services we can use instead. And we're going to have to choose how important our smartphones really are to us. I'm puzzling over that exact question myself. Maybe it's time to return to dumb phones, dedicated cameras and MP3 players, until there's a real privacy-first market alternative.
The real problem is the one we have even less control over and that's government action. We need to be much, much more civically engaged if we're going to preserve our internet freedoms. Here's three from recent months: Kids Online Safety Act , STOP CSAM Act, and the EARN IT Bill Is Back. Part of the whole Reddit blow-up over the last four weeks is Reddit responding to KOSA in advance of it becoming wide-spread law. That's where we need to spend the majority of our attention.