The world wide web is not the result of inevitable technological trends. It is the outcome of a deeply ideological and now almost forgotten struggle for a common information infrastructure to enable new forms of collaboration vital for the urgent, complex problems facing humanity. The decentralized, participatory architecture would set it apart from the downstream model of traditional mass media.
Due to it’s amorphous nature, many early adopters believed the internet was immune to censorship. The idea of cyberspace posed a line of separation between the internet and the real world. Geopolitically, it would be like the sea once was - an unregulated and fluid space where ordinary rules need not apply. In 1996 John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation published his very influential “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, making the case that all attempts to govern the web were futile:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
This was during a time when the web was a jungle of static webpages. There were no web platforms - the web itself was the platform, and if users wanted to publish something on the web they had to create their own website and host it themselves. Eventually the web matured into what is commonly called the “Web 2.0”, in which non-technical users would be able to join the conversation via dynamic websites that allowed for user interaction (i.e. social media). Over just a few years we saw att massive shift in the favor of centralized, commercial platforms. Today, closed proprietary ecosystems are the norm. The race is on to become one of a few “suppliers” of digital culture, commerce and communication. Barlow’s sea analogy is now less accurate - the Internet is today largely an assortment of privately owned swimming pools.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the American intelligence community were under a lot of pressure. How could a major attack like this not have been intercepted and prevented? In an effort to prevent further attacks the NSA initiated the PRISM surveillence program, acquiring total, unsupervised access to user data from some of Americas largest Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple. Many of these companies were already building extensive data sets on their users’ activities in order to enable new forms of personalised marketing. The infrastructure of surveillance was already largely in place. We now know that almost everything we type into a web browser is collected and backed up in data centers by intelligence agencies to track our purchases, movements, associations, allegiances, desires, et cetera. This archive is immense and can be accessed at anytime in the future. An NSA analyst today could go look up my record and trace my digital footprints back through time to some of my earliest connections. Although disciplinary consequences are not yet attached to this surveillance for most people, there is no reason that these huge data sets could not be used to target dissent. Nor any obvious way for us to know if/when they are.
In recent years we've started to see the contours of a digital counter-culture emerging. Organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (in charge of designing HTTP 2.0) are proposing we encrypt the entire Internet. There are also a range of private attempts at building secure, parallel internets. Onion routing (TOR) has enabled a paradigm shift in the drug trade, which has spurred a surge of public interest in what is often referred to as “The Deep Web”. Bitcoin and distributed consensus systems (Blockchains) are challenging the financial system. People are rediscovering the disruptive and subversive potential of decentralized networks.
John Perry Barlow ends his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” with a call to decentralize:
We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
Perhaps there is still time to change the current trajectory of the Internet towards something closer to what was envisioned from the beginning: that we build distributed systems that have no center, where the interdependence and mutual interests of users is what guaranties uptime and access. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the architecture of digital platforms.