The web is broken. Completely broken. It has been breaking down over time and for different reasons, too many to enumerate here, but above all because it broke a promise. Because here we are, acting as if this thing we now call the Internet is everything that many of us dreamed it would be, and the truth is nowhere near.
A Promise Broken
More than 26 years ago, Clifford Stoll wrote an article titled Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (in Spanish, "Por qué la web no será el Nirvana"). Since then, in hindsight, many have laughed at the enormous errors in his prediction. And while it's undeniable that reality hasn't materialized as he described it then, I don't believe he was wrong in his central premise: the web never became the promised Nirvana. On the contrary, and this is my own addition, what we have today is its corrupt and dystopian version.
What did Clifford say to become the object of worldwide mockery when (in 2010) his 1995 remarks were republished by the Boing Boing blog? Well, he asserted that...
"Visionaries see a future of telecommuters, interactive bookstores, and online lecture halls. They talk about electronic town meetings and online communities. That shops and businesses will replace their offices and shopping centers with networks and modems. And that the freedom of digital networks will make governments more democratic."
"Nonsense! Do our computer experts lack all common sense? The truth is that no online database will replace paper newspapers, no CD-ROM will take the place of a competent teacher, and no computer network will change the way the government works."
At the time he shared his opinion with the world, Stoll was not just any columnist. Wikipedia defines him as "an American physicist, astronomer, computer expert, and writer." Moreover, Stoll was responsible for catching Markus Hess, a KGB hacker who was stealing passwords and documents to compromise the United States military network (an experience detailed in one of his three books) and for acting "as an expert in the investigation of the first self-replicating malware specimen that affected the Internet, the Morris Worm.".
Therefore, and although he himself has already done so, I find it difficult to dismiss his words simply because part of his prediction didn't come true. It's difficult because, while his conclusions turned out to be wrong, I believe the premises on which they were based remain valid. For example:
"Consider the online world today. Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the entire nation. Your words are published bypassing editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? The cacophony is more like a citizens' band radio, complete with fake names, harassment, and anonymous threats."
Not much has changed since then; you only need to take a look at any social network and be horrified by the madness of social discourse, the dump of human excrement disguised most of the time as opinions, and at worst as information. What Stoll denounced not only amplified but diversified in so many and so dreadful ways that the cacophony is now a roar that completely makes invisible the few sensible voices that dare to participate in such madness. So I don't think Clifford can be blamed for believing that something that lacks all virtue should be incapable of surviving the passage of time. But here we are.
Speaking of failed predictions... those of my generation, those of us who started browsing in the 90s and lived through the 2000s believing Google's "Don't be evil", were much more wrong than good old Clifford. We believed that the root of all human evil lay in the scarce citizen access to information and that, of course, the web came to end all that. Poor dreamers! Not only have we not solved any of those problems, but we have created another great problem, and this one of existential category: the web itself, the one that came to fix everything.
Something that lacks all virtue should be incapable of surviving the passage of time.
Unbridled algorithms, questioned neutrality, broken standards, radicalized bubbles, and pseudosciences in their golden age. Imprisoned activists, non-existent privacy (not that anyone cares), and post-truth, so much post-truth. The SOMA of our own dystopia: immediate gratification, dopamine injection, and to hell with everything else. Is this really the web you dreamed of when you were a kid?
For a confessed misanthrope like yours truly, it is very easy to see where the only slip in Stoll's logic lies, and I'm sure it will be for the attentive reader as well. Look, if not, what was the closing of his much-mocked article.
"What is absent in this Electronic Wonders Land? Human contact. Dismiss the flattering tech-sneer about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A networked chat line is a weak substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia screen comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who would prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet brilliantly attracts, seductively displaying an icon of knowledge as power, this non-place entices us to give up our time on earth. A poor substitute is this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where, in the holy names of Education and Progress, important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued."
Stoll was naive, not wrong. With correct premises, he concluded the most reasonable of all possible scenarios: this web should not exist, and if it were to exist, it clearly would not be nirvana. For all these reasons, I conclude that Stoll's was not a mistake but pure optimism.
