This observation seems intuitively obvious in Europe and pearl-clutchingly shocking in America:
What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.
Powerful metaphors in this piece by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on the Waldsterben of the internet:
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.
Ever wondered why you’re always being encouraged to download the app?
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.
Anil says the glass is half full:
Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.
Whether consciously or not, AI manufacturers have decided to prioritise plausibility over accuracy. It means AI systems are impressive, but in a world plagued by conspiracy and disinformation this decision only deepens the problem.
Manufactured inevitability a.k.a bullshit:
There’s a standard trope that tech evangelists deploy when they talk about the latest fad. It goes something like this:
- Technology XYZ is arriving. It will be incredible for everyone. It is basically inevitable.
- The only thing that can stop it is regulators and/or incumbent industries. If they are so foolish as to stand in its way, then we won’t be rewarded with the glorious future that I am promising.
We can think of this rhetorical move as a Reverse Scooby-Doo. It’s as though Silicon Valley has assumed the role of a Scooby-Doo villain — but decided in this case that he’s actually the hero. (“We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling regulators!”)
The critical point is that their faith in the promise of the technology is balanced against a revulsion towards existing institutions. (The future is bright! Unless they make it dim.) If the future doesn’t turn out as predicted, those meddlers are to blame. It builds a safety valve into their model of the future, rendering all predictions unfalsifiable.
Say you’re into the indie web without saying you’re into the indie web…
The internet wasn’t really convenient in 1994 or 1995, but it was a very collaborative space.
There was a moment where we replaced this idea of the internet being a medium that we can all write to and participate in to one that is mediated. That happened at some point after social networks started to arrive and when the smartphone started to arrive. It’s a combination of the nature of those platforms and the prevalence of the technologies, which meant the economic rewards of getting this right rose significantly.
And so there’s a really distinctly different feel in the 2013, or 2014, internet to the one that you might have had in 1997, or 1998. It’s not just that it’s easier and I’m yearning for a world of cars with manual choke and manual transmission and crank-up starter handles, but it’s that the programmability of the internet and its endpoints has turned into something that is increasingly permissioned by major platforms.
The cost of “modern” web development:
We’re dealing with the results of bad defaults, deployed at a terrible scale.
Frankly, it’s hard for me not to see this as a failure of governance. Our industry is, by and large, self-regulated. And right now, producing quality work relies on teams electing to adopt best practices.
Hard agree. Companies are prioritising speed of development over user experience. The tragic part is that those two things needn’t necessarily conflict …but in the most popular of today’s JavaScript frameworks, they very much do.
On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.
An excellent piece by Maciej on the crucial difference between individual privacy and ambient privacy (and what that means for regulation):
Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.
Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.
That is not consent.
For more detail, I highly recommend reading his testimony to the senate hearing on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy.
Ethan ponders what the web might be like if the kind of legal sticks that exist for accessibility in some countries also existed for performance.
A smart look back at historical examples of regulation and what we can learn from them today, by Justine Leblanc:
- Railways in the UK: Public interest as a trigger for regulation
- Engineering in Canada: Accountability as a trigger for regulation
- The automotive industry in the USA: Public outrage as a trigger for regulation
The word “leak” is right. Our sense of control over our own destinies is being challenged by these leaks. Giant internet platforms are poisoning the commons. They’ve automated it.
An absolutely fantastic talk (as always) from Maciej, this time looking at the history of radio and its parallels with the internet (something that Tom Standage touched on his book, Writing On The Wall). It starts as a hobbyist, fun medium. Then it gets regulated. Then it gets used to reinforce existing power structures.
It is hard to accept that good people, working on technology that benefits so many, with nothing but good intentions, could end up building a powerful tool for the wicked.
A series of quick’n’dirty prototypes to illustrate some of the design challenges involved in handling personal data:
If we don’t start exploring what the General Data Protection Regulation means for people, the same thing that happened with the cookie law will happen again.
These new rights have the potential to improve how our digital products and services work.
Google reaffirms its commitment to net neutrality ...except when it comes to wireless broadband, of course, because that's *totally* different, right? This disgusts me.
This bodes well: "President-elect Obama appointed Kevin Werbach, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, and Susan Crawford, who teaches communications and Internet law at the University of Michigan, to co-chair his FC…
Joe has written a rousing call to arms on the state of online captioning. It's a lengthy article but well worth reading.