In this series of essays, I argue that the web is fundamentally broken, and many of the terrible phenomenon we've witnessed recently such as cyberbullying, "fake news", information diabetes, and the like are all symptoms of deep and fundamental flaws in the construction of the Internet. By identifying those root problems, we can also begin to approach ideas for new information architectures which do not suffer from these problems.
One of my fundamental contentions is that we cannot simply "hook up people" the way we network computers. All of our existing online communities are engineered around software that is built on a centralized, client-server architecture that lacks strong identity management and data security. This is the heart of the issue.
Rather than simply looking at how to patch specific failings of some existing website or platform, I believe we need to invert the problem statement. We must start by looking at what people and societies need from a communications medium, and on that basis, we must architect and engineer a new Distributed Information System which provides for those needs.
Throughout time, human communications has served many goals, including the building of trust, the establishment of family and tribal values, and establishing a person's sense of identity in the face of an ever-changing (and oftentimes threatening) world. But fundamentally, humanity as a species relies on solid social communications in order for groups of people to live together.
The accelerating mindless, heartless conversion of all human communications into digitized channels threatens every aspect of our persons as well as our overall civilization.
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It is accelerating because technology is enabling greater bandwidth into more locations, and that bandwidth is increasingly connecting high-fidelity audio/video sensors with AI on one end, to vast server farms with infinite storage on the other end, but managed exclusively by corporations whose only business demonstrated model has been to take advantage of human attention by selling advertising.
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It is mindless because all of the organizations involved in building, maintaining, and innovating in this technical area are for-profit entities whose management and boards have consistently taken the standard excuse of Growth Capitalism, namely, increasing profits for a shrinking and decreasingly happy pool of shareholders.
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It is heartless because despite all the obsession over "UI/UX", only the tiniest sliver of people in the technology sector focus on their users' overall well-being as their central, greatest concern. Nearly the entirety of the Techno-tainment-Complex exists at this point to find more ways to make people more dependent on more centralized products and services. With the digital revolution successfully hijacking nearly all human communications, we are able to manufacture desire and bend taste, and get very close to perfecting consumerism. It has been said that virtually all types of markets are moving into a "Winner Take All" dynamic. If this is true, it is in large part due to the fact that consumer communications technology is aggregating every aspect of our lives an "All" which can be "Taken".
I strongly believe this is an active threat to civilization, because if we do not do anything about it, we will continue down a path to a very dark, very unhappy place. We will have boundless technology, incredible technical talent to apply to any problem, and yet we will only seem to create more problems than we solve. We will sit by and watch children starve and die, needlessly, as we twiddle our thumbs pointlessly over so many millions of smartphone screens. We will see ancient grudges and feuds grow in strength, fueled by ignorance and restless resentment at "the whole system".
I contend that these massive geopolitical and socioeconomic problems are tied to the brokenness of the web, because we need revolutionary change in our modes of thought about economics, society, and how to live a meaningful life in a connected world where human labor is of decreasing value.
Our technology is good enough, but unless we have a resilient Communications and Information System, we will not be able to bring about needed changes. Much of what must be done will threaten existing business and political interests, and they will abuse the control inherently available within the Internet and current social media apps to fight the change agents.
As a species, we are at a point in our technological advancement where we must start to be intentional as a global civilization. And that has to start with how we architect digital communications systems for homo sapiens, which are rapidly evolving into homo sapiens digitalus.
My interest in this topic emerged not from a single subject, but rather from a series of realizations and events. I have been acquainted with topics in the general area of "Internet techno-utopianism" for over 20 years now. More recently, I have been aware of blockchain concepts, and web-of-trust concepts. But only in the last 18 months have these all synthesized in my mind as technologies that are desperately needed to solve a global crisis for human civilization.
Obviously, the level of mass psychological manipulation in the American 2016 election marks a significant breaking point. While many dwell on the manipulation itself, for me, the more interesting thing was watching the response in the population. Existing social narrative technologies from the 20th century utterly failed to stop or even slow down the direct manipulation of the world's most wealthy, most technologically advanced country. Every TV, radio, web site was just more water on a chemical fire: more hydrogen and oxygen for the burning.
I actually started writing down my thoughts into a notebook called "The Web We Lost" starting in January 2016, well before a lot of the electoral shenanigans, and before Russians, the alt-right, and Team Trump were visibly weaponizing social media. Since that time, I have been both dismayed and embolded by a string of continuing failures in the internet and the web. Dismayed, because the world is obviously hurting and broken by bad technology. Emboldened, because with each failure, I could see my ideas validated and refined. I've also had the good fortune of finding many fellow technologists and humanists who are thinking much along the same lines.
I have appreciated their dialogue and feedback. But I have also not seen anyone quite articulate a holistic picture of the overall system failure, and therefore many partial solutions are posed. I feel that on this topic, I take a view that is both broader and more theoretical in scope, but also reaches deeper into the lower levels of both technology and human behavior.
So, while I will link to many other writings and narratives that line up or overlap with parts of virtually every aspect of what I have to say, I believe that my unique contribution into this space is to provide a more holistic narrative of the many dimensions of our current problems, and to encourage technologists to consider the human factors of social interaction as a core part of the problem they are attempting to solve. It absolutely permeates almost every single engineering design question that comes up.