Transdisciplinary Design

Recursive Internets

Posted on November 30, 2017

Independence

“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us.”

— John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996¹

In 1996, the United States Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. The CDA declared it illegal to transmit “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent” content over the internet.² Obviously, this would not stand.

In reaction to the CDA, John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It’s an exuberant and fascinating document, one that now reads like an artifact from another world. Barlow (interestingly, a one-time lyricist for the Grateful Dead³) asked the governments of the world to butt out of the internet: “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”¹ Meatspace meddlers were not welcome in the “new home of Mind.”¹

The majority of the CDA was overturned after barely a year via the Supreme Court case Reno v. ACLU.⁴ Surely this was a victory for free speech and the EFF, but where is the independent cyberspace Barlow envisioned? Why do we have trolls and gamergate and Russian Twitter bots instead of “enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal”?¹ Obviously that’s a question with a complex answer, but I would like to address just one piece: the consolidation of internet services and the creation of recursive internets.

Webification

I’m old enough to remember when email was accessed in a program entirely separate from the web browser. Indeed, this was true of most of the internet’s various protocols: email had an email client, newsgroups had a newsgroup reader, IM happened in an IM program, and most of our files were stored locally on our hard drives. In many ways, this situation was inconvenient — pulling up one’s email on another person’s computer was an ordeal to be attempted only in emergencies. In the early 1990s, a fair number of services were self-hosted or provided by small ISPs. It was not uncommon for someone’s email or web server to go down for a day or two.

Probably the most visible and emblematic site of the webification of the internet, Hotmail, launched in 1996.⁵ Deja’s Usenet reader (later Google Groups) dates from 1995⁶, and while webchat had existed in some form for years, AIM Express and Google Chat (later Talk) brought modern IM to the browser. In a supreme meta-act, early blogging and site-making tools even webified the process of making websites. And now, in the age of ubiquitous broadband, tools like Dropbox and Google Drive are one of the last pieces of moving the entire personal computer into the browser. Google’s Chromebooks are perhaps the most audacious expression of this vision — laptops that boot directly and exclusively into a web browser.

Centralization

The ability to access all one’s digital services from any computer is convenient, and these tools became extremely popular. Where there’s a hit product, there’s money, and in the tech world that means acquisitions and clones. Microsoft purchased Hotmail and made a web version of its MSN chat program; Google bought Deja and created Gmail; Facebook rolled its own messaging platform. Perhaps this collective land grab was initially reactionary, but the result is a concentration of most webified services in the hands of only a few corporations.

The internet as a whole is too big and distributed to fall into the hands of any one entity. But a few websites are not. So, by webifying the most useful pieces and bringing them under a few corporate umbrellas, we effectively have internets within the internet: recursive internets. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter all have their own internet nation-states, each including its own proprietary messaging and file storage and contacts list and so on.

Consequences

Put yourself in Facebook’s position. You have acquired millions of users, most of whom are fairly loyal due to the network effect. Your revenue is largely based on data extracted from your users’ actions. However, there is a gap: there are a few things that your users do that you cannot see and thus cannot capitalize upon. What is happening in their emails or text messages, for instance? Well, you have plenty of engineering talent — why not find out? Why not make those new features of the Facebook website?

In 2010, Facebook tried to do exactly that with Facebook Messages.⁸ The product sought to unify SMS, Facebook IMs, and email into one system (with all the new data feeding back into the advertising data stream, of course). Luckily, the product was a relative failure. There were complaints about it being confusing, frustrating, or just creepy.⁹ Similar issues plagued Google Wave, a comparable offering from Mountain View.

With their audience and control, massive corporations can remake the original, distributed protocols of the internet in a way that is more suitable to their profit margins. Thus far users have largely seen through these efforts, but the network effect is a powerful form of peer pressure. As Facebook and Google become increasingly compulsory, we need to remain vigilant to ensure our rights.

Aside from economic and privacy exploitation, the centralization of the web has many implications for the dissemination of discourse. If a Google search doesn’t turn up a piece of content, it may as well not exist. When national TV starts reading tweets on-air, what does it mean that Twitter gives a bot or an extremist the same treatment as a trusted public figure? When millions of people get their news from Facebook, suddenly a minor tweak of their algorithms can sway a presidential election.

It is a scary time.

Future & Questions

So, what is to be done?

Though it became a niche hobby in the 90s, it’s still possible to host your own email, website, and other services. The redecentralization movement provides tools and leads conferences and meetings to promote decentralized technologies.¹⁰

The Tor network provides a safe haven for the so-called deep web, sites hosting material that would be censored on the web at large. But, Tor is somewhat difficult to access and still susceptible to the censorship efforts of nations with sufficient resources. Could a more friendly but more secure alternative be created, or are those goals at odds with one another? What is the future of anonymity on the web?

But most importantly, can we salvage the real human connection that thrived in the early internet? Can we transcend the popularity contest that so much of today’s social media has become? What would a truly social medium look like, and will there still be room for cute cat pictures?

— Tim Clem

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References

1. Barlow, John Perry. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
2. Telecommunications Act of 1996.https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
3. John Perry Barlow. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
4. Communications Decency Act. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
5. Outlook.com. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
6. Google Groups. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
7. Google Chat takes on AIM Express. United Press International, via Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2006-02-google-chat-aim.html. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
8. Dachis, Adam. Facebook Unveils a New Messaging System with One Inbox to Rule Them All. Lifehacker. https://lifehacker.com/5690497/facebook-unveils-a-new-messaging-system-with-one-inbox-to-rule-them-all. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
9. See for instance http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/12/facebook_s_other_messages_mail_you_are_probably_missing.html or https://www.theguardian.com/technology/us-news-blog/2012/sep/24/facebook-leaking-private-messages.
10. See http://redecentralize.org/.