We Should See Other Blogs

In this new RSA Animate, author and journalist Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative take on ‘cyber-utopianism’ – the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely empancipatory role in global politics.

It wasn’t too long ago that people got together to form groups based on geography alone. We call these communities villages. Eventually towns and cities sprung up in which there could be multiple communities, but cities and towns were as much geographic creations as villages.

It also wasn’t long ago that two villages not fifty kilometres apart could have distinct ways of speaking, dressing, even acting. I like to call this the communal vernacular. Today we see this regionally, the communal vernacular of different countries or states. For instance, Australia and Canada are very similar, but have different accents, different cultural norms, different modes of expression (the Canadian brand Roots, for instance, makes for a bit of a laugh there, but not here), and even different modes of problem-solving. We have a regionally distinct communal vernacular while sharing a cultural vernacular thanks to the British Empire.

In the modern era geography became less important. Not unimportant, but less important. Telegraphs and telephones perhaps didn’t allow long distance community making, but they did help standardise the communal vernacular a bit. Radio and television did that in an even greater way, but geography was still important. We may have been watching the same programs, produced in far-off California, but we discussed that broadcast programming around a water cooler. That is to say, why the cultural product may not have been bound by distance any longer, the communal aspect of the product very much was.

We’re into a different era now. Geography is less important, and broadcasting is less important. The internet allows us to fragment into small communities based on whatever we want. Some call this the death of mass media culture, though I think mass media and the culture that goes with it won’t fade terribly soon. But considering that mass media culture is essentially an era created by cheap broadcasting and expensive long-distance interaction, it’s not really a bad thing. It’s just another revolution in a series of slow revolutions that have been going on for a long time.

We now have communal vernaculars based on shared interests, shared goals, shared experiences, shared religion, shared whatever. Geography isn’t the defining boundary any long. Language might be, but distance has essentially been erased. There are groups on the web who, if you pop into them, speak English but seem almost completely unintelligible. I find groups of programmers making jokes online that I can’t even begin to understand. This is good.

So where do we go next?

In the beginning there was Eternal September, when n00bs flooded the internet (back in 1993, if you can remember that far back). They brought with themselves something the mostly academic and lucid member of the internet had not then seen: Exclamation points. In fact, the n00bs brought them by the truckload.

You could tell who was and was not a n00b by the number of points they used. Chances were someone was fresh meat if someone made a sentence like this!!!!!!!!!!!

This absurd level of excitement led to many a user accidentally letting go of the shift key while expressing themselves. So you would see sentences like this!!!!!!!!!!!!111

Eventually this became its own meme, usually highly sarcastic, and often used to mock those internet denizens whose excitement had grown too unwieldy.

And as with most memes, !!!!!11111one eventually took on a life of its own. Variants began to pop up. After all, it can be hard to tell if a luser is !!!!!11111ing on purpose as a cunning riposte, or if they are indeed massive idiot.

So net-savvy n00b-mockers began adding a “one” to the end of their exclamatory mockery, bringing the absurdity level of the meme to almost Monty-Python-ish levels.

Still more variants exist on the internet, include my all-time favourite. It’s a snowclone of !!!!!1111one, transposed to question marks, so it looks like this?????111 This question mark snowclone transposes the meme (in a similar if somewhat more clever form to adding a “one”) from the original “mistake” to a highly non-ambiguous form of mockery.

If there’s one thing I love about living in 2010, it’s the internet. Specifically, I love the number of experts that you can find on any conceivable subject. If you want to find a new site devoted to some obscure technological artefact, it’s probably out there. If it isn’t, you can start it.

Of course, when you’re on the internet, your bullshit detector is set to full. You don’t believe everything you read. It’s just a bunch of people talking. You don’t believe everything a random collection of people say, and that’s true of the web.

Plus, when someone you recognise is constantly wrong, you can correct them in the comments–the internet likes to pretend to be interactive in at least the most perfunctory manner–or just ignore them completely.

This is one area traditional media can’t compete. In fact when you’re used to the internet way, the traditional media model seems not just obsolete but downright silly. These people positioned as guards at the gateway of information: Who are they? Who appointed them? Why do they get to be there? (Sidebar: The further inside the media establishment you look, the less you’ll respect it. There are few institutions that deserve the position of gatekeeper.)

For instance, you know something about technology. Yet you read an article in the newspaper about some technological artefact and you realise neither the reporter nor the editor understands it. They don’t get the most basic stuff about it. So you dismiss the article and turn the page and read someone going on about politics and never think that if they can’t understand something as simple as technology, how in the world could they understand something so complex as politics?

We all have this sort of blindness, a kind of amnesia. When you read Wikipedia, the editors are ruthless. If a statement is unsourced, they delete it or add a [citation needed] tag. Either way you know that the phrase is suspect. There’s also a strict rule against weasel words and things like that. Yet reading a newspaper is an exercise in find a phrase with a citation, or finding an article without weasel words. Traditional journalism is pathetic. You practically have to read between the lines to get an accurate idea of what’s actually happening.

Internet news sites get down to business. Items can’t be long, for both attention deficit and bandwidth reasons. If something is complete bullshit, someone will say something. Probably lots of people. Some are saying? Well… who? Links help build context. If you really need context–if you’ve come out of a coma recently–you can follow the links or quickly google the subject at hand.

So why do we treat internet news sources as inferior to traditional new sources? Why do we assume a higher standard of truth–after all, journalistic convention is about better truth, right? I can’t see many downsides here. And I think traditional news media are scared of the internet not simply because it’s a different medium. The news media adjusted well enough to radio and television, after all. It’s because it’s a totally different way of interacting with news. I don’t need a 500 word article that contains context, quotes, and supposedly neutral blather. I need a basic summary, some links, and a well-thought-out commenting forum.

That’s going to be a shock for most short and long form journalists, and their editors. There will always be a place for investigative journalism and long human interest stories. But news? Nah.

If there’s one thing I dislike, it’s solicitors coming to my door and telling me things I already know and don’t care about.

Consider Yak. They knocked today, at 8:00pm of all times, to tell me that they’ve leased the lines off Bell! (Like so many, many other companies have!) That they were offering great internet service! (Using Bell lines? Pffft.) At a low price! ($8 a month more than I pay with Acanac.) With unlimited downloads! (Using Bell lines? Unlimited in the sense that you can download as much as you like at 30kbps.)

When they asked how much I paid, I lowballed and said about $200 a year. They were like, “That’s a lot!” And I was like, “You can’t do math! Not even simple math!”

Then I decided I no longer wanted to talk to them, so I asked them if they allow an SSH tunnel into a remote virtual desktop with 100gb online storage like Acanac does. Their eyes glazed over. I asked if they supported DDNS (a red herring, it’s your router that supports DDNS) and they stammered an I-don’t-know.

I’m completely satisfied with the internet service I have. Acanac’s a pretty good company to deal with, and I like them. It’s hard for me to find things that I like, so I’ll keep them for now.

Really. I thought they were cool because they used an open source toolchain, contributed back to the open source community occasionally, and seemed to care about my privacy. Facebook wasn’t particularly useful; I never found a friend there who I really wanted to communicate with, nor did it seem a revolution in service. My friends were my real-life friends. The Facebook experience was the same old social web, rehashed, and in a lot of ways pleasantly limited.

I wasn’t one of those snobby first-wave college users. I wasn’t even a second- or third-waver. I was just one of those people that joined because a lot of people seemed to be using it.

I never sunk a lot of time into Facebook. The most, maybe, was playing Scrabulous on the site. I don’t have a real attachment to the site. Frankly, I would prefer a distributed network, like, um, the internet, rather than a site with one point of control and failure.

That said, Facebook was nice enough. It showcased all the best things integrated applications do best: It was seamless, it was networked, and it was, well, integrated. You didn’t have to think about anything too much.

Then, it began to show the worst things about integrated applications: It became sprawling, unfocussed, and ultimately lost any credibility it had had in my eyes.

How did it lose this creditability? Well, as soon as it started depending overly on ad revenue, glaring, bothersome ad revenue. As soon as started seeing its customer base as a cash-cow to be milked, especially when it does so at the expense of privacy, as with the recent Beacon debacle. If a company is willing to track what I buy and then publish those results to my friends unless I opt out every time, I consider that evil.

I don’t care what they’ve done to fix it now. That Zuckerberg and company would stoop this low is just a hint of what sort of morals they have as a company. It makes the allegation that Zuckerberg stole the original implementation of Facebook from colleagues at Harvard that much more believable. It makes the whole thing seem slimy, slightly dirty.

Why am I talking about Facebook in the past tense, you wonder?

I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’m opting out. Closing down shop. Kicking the bucket out from underneath my Facebook account.

I feel a bit cleaner already.

Attribution and License for the above photo.

Finally, we have internet at home. So feel free to email away and do all those internet-enabled things you always wanted to. We’ll probably be out anyways.