This summer marked 30 years of me and the Internet. It started all with a 2400 bps modem and an account at the University of British Columbia; my very first email (and a password issued to me, which I still remember). Those were exciting times when the public Information Superhighway was in its infancy, and the future was bright. We have come a long way since then! (Well, at least in terms of modem speeds, but in others we have actually moved backwards.)

The 2400 bps modem got fairly quickly replaced with a blazingly fast 14.4k one, then came my first web pages, on Freeserve, and later at UKLinux (the days when the ~ character in URLs was common); vanity domains, necessarily, followed. The Internet also introduced me to the AbiWorld project, and through it to the wider FOSS community, and then the awesome team at OpenedHand, at what was a significant turning point in my personal life.

But looking back to those days in mid ’90s my overwhelming feeling is that those lofty ideals of the Information Superhighway failed to materialise, and I think the primary cause of this failure is the arrival of Social Media.

The SM is, of course, not the only thing wrong with the present day Internet, but it is, I think, the biggest problem, for SM fundamentally changed the overall direction of the ecosystem. The pre-SM Internet wasn’t without flaws, far from it, but (even allowing for some misplaced nostalgia) it was a broader, richer, more egalitarian place with loftier aspirations.

Contemporary criticism of Social Media focuses largely on its toxicity. But while toxicity is a serious issue, it is not the biggest problem with SM, nor something SM created, toxicity has always been a part of the Internet. What has happened with Social Media is mostly that their modus operandi has made the toxicity much harder to avoid. That is, this rabid toxicity is secondary to some of the more fundamental issues that plague SM, and our failure to grasp this means we end up tilting at windmills.

It is my view that the three principal problems with social media are (a) the creation of huge content silos, what for simplicity (and out of outright obtuseness) I will call siloisation, (b) the eradication of mutual discourse, what I will call decommunication, and, (c) the amassing personal data and metadata, aka surveillance.

Siloisation

Prior to SM the Web was a broad place of diverse content: web pages (some good and some terrible), Usenet, mailing lists, forums, IRC, blogs, interconnected by the humble hyperlink, and somewhat discoverable by one of the numerous search engines. Not everything was at our fingertips, but there was interesting stuff out there to find, which is why surfing the web to see what was out there was a thing.

When Social Media arrived, they pursued a counter-cultural (with regard to the existing culture of the Internet) move of herding us into their respective silos and hoarding our content.

Perhaps in the very early days the motivation for creating these silos was not all bad in every case, for centralisation has some benefits, not least improved discoverability. But the price for that is a two tier ecosystem: the inside and the outside. And this ecosystem not only sidelines the outside for the sake of the inside, but does so without any regard for its value. Silos, by their very nature, demand quantity, and quantity of content always comes at the expense of its quality.

Silos necessarily mean access barriers, for the inside/outside split means silos are, again by their very nature, gatekeepers. And so while the web page and blog was there for all to see, suddenly if I want to follow my pal’s summer adventures I have to setup an Instagram account, and to get the necessary instructions for a running race (that I have paid not an inconsiderable mount of money to enter), I need to ‘be on Facebook’, etc.

And as the silos grew in side, the outside became increasingly hard to find, and hence irrelevant. And so personal, as well as organisational, web pages started disappearing, instead replaced by Facebook pages; emails got swapped for Twitter handles and WhatsApp contacts. Email lists and forums morphed into Facebook groups.

And then one day the links to content outside of the silos stoped working altogether.

If you told us back in the ’90s that would be the reality of the Internet a quarter of a century later, even the most cynical of us would have laughed in your face. But like the frogs in a pot slowly brought up to boil, here we are.

Furthermore, silos create an extremely competitive environment — if nothing can meaningfully exist outside of a silo, then the ownership of the content inside the Silo is everything.

It is one of the central tenets of our time, which for some reason is widely accepted at face value, that competition drives innovation. Yet, this assertion is patently untrue; genuine innovation arises out of cooperation, collaboration, and cross-pollination of ideas through open discourse. Instead competition fosters NIH attitudes, and invariably leads to anti-competitive practices, for that’s the only guaranteed way of winning, whether in sport or in technology.

And that is precisely what the silos have done for the Internet. Its 21st century history is paved by acquisitions intended to eliminate alternative technologies and burying good ideas while at the same time pushing broken technologies at all costs to keep the silos intact.

While SM are not the only silos of the Internet, siloisation is fundamental to the nature of the Social Media beast. It’s not something that can be fixed, there are no two horned unicorns. I realise saying this will be unwelcome in some quarters, but the fact that the nodes in the network topology have their distinct names, doesn’t make the fundamental nature of the species go away; silos are not about the centralisation of machines, but about the herding of people.

(That is, Mastodon, for all its valiant, and fairly successful, efforts to detoxify Social Media, is yet another silo, with all that entails, not least the fact that silos naturally progress from plurality to hegemony. And given leaders keen to federate with (or at least reluctant to defederate from) the old players in the SM arena, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that Mastodon is already living on a borrowed time, for centralisation is a pure numbers game, and pure numbers games are won solely on numbers.)

Decommunication

Human capacity for forming relationships is limited. Functional relationships are based on trust, and establishing trust is time-consuming. So at the end of the day there are only so many people I can know (as opposed to ‘know of’), so many friends I know well enough to have a reasonable level of trust in, and only a handful of close friends, whom I might trust implicitly.

These numbers are not large (I suspect somewhere in the order of tens at the outer skin of the relational onion), and the inescapable consequence of this limited capacity to meaningfully relate to each other is that human communities do not scale much (and certainly not infinitely) before they start functionally breaking down.

We try to work around this, and so clubs have committees and mega churches operate home groups, etc. Yet, how successful these workarounds are largely depends on what hides beneath ‘functioning’: low level functionality, such as paying membership dues to support a cause, is easy, but complex functionality is not, which is why armies and similar complex human machines tend to gravitate toward rigid hierarchical structures that allow for adequate segmentation while maintaining unity by pretty much brute force … but at this point we have stretched the concept of ‘community’ ad absurdum.

If our ability to relate meaningfully is quantitatively limited, our ability to communicate with each other is even more so. Most of us are simply unable to critically process more than a single conversation at a time, and individual conversations stop being manageable when they involve more than a handful of participants.

But, and more importantly, meaningful discourse too requires mutual trust, because such discourse must allow for disagreement, disagreement being the departure point for overcoming an unsatisfactory status quo. But disagreement in the absence of trust becomes an unsurmountable and destructive barrier, and the discourse nothing more than a pointless argument. (Which is why out there in the real world smalltalk is a thing.)

The early Internet, having grown fairly organically out of the real world, fitted well with our relational and communicative limitations. It created the potential to meet and engage with lot of new people who we would never have encountered without it, and some of whom had profound influence of us, and some even became good friends.

(This represents one of the more radical shifts in human history, because up until this point our ability to reach outside of our real world communities was limited and greatly controlled by others. In some ways it was a natural progression of a wider trend spanning the 20th century.)

But what the early Internet didn’t do was to demand of us that we relate to more people than we want to.

Social Media changed that. Siloisation ultimately means globalisation and so what SM dangled in front of me was being able to reach the whole world, and in turn have the whole world relate to me; it promised to make my voice heard by innumerable multitudes, to make me matter in a way I hand’t before.

This, of course, is nothing more than a classic pyramid scheme, for in order for my voice to be heard by everyone I’d have to listen to everyone. But as with any pyramid scheme, we could not see this in the early days, and by the time we got an inkling we were too invested to admit to ourselves we have been conned.

And so we carry on. But the environment is such that meaningful discourse is simply not possible, because we are talking to too many people at the same time, people who we don’t even know are there, and hence we cannot trust, and who don’t trust us back either: Social Media is akin to a huge noisy party where we all shout at the top of our voices in a blind hope of being heard, and where we can make a choice between smalltalk and an argument. There is no middle option, because of the necessary absence of mutual trust.

And so in the final analysis, Social Media not merely doesn’t facilitate meaningful discourse, but prevents us meaningfully communicating with each other. Rather than moving us closer it drives us further apart, because when we strip away the smalltalk, all that is left is an argument or syncopism, and neither of those gets us anywhere new. And we pay for this both in time, which we will never get back, and, of course, mental wellbeing.

And yet again, this is not something that can be fixed, for it is the fundamental nature of the SM beast and the nature of ourselves.

Surveillance

Metadata gathering at scale is not a problem limited to Social Media, but it is one that all silos lend themselves particularly well to (that includes search engines, email providers, and, not least, browser vendors). And there are tangible historical reasons why we find ourselves in a place where massive metadata gathering has become acceptable, and the early Internet is to blame.

To start with the Internet run to a large extent on the back of a spare institutional capacity, so it appeared that the primary cost was the cost of creating content, and much of the early content was simply ‘donated’. This created the impression that, beyond the dial up, the Information Superhighway was free. This, of course, wasn’t the case, but this impression took root and became impossible to overcome.

Advertising made its appearance very early on, but was ineffective because individual websites didn’t have the necessary volumes of traffic to make it pay. What was needed was a traffic pinch point, and in the pre-SM Internet that was the search engine. And so the big, nasty battle of the early internet was between the search engines, and the dominant search engine then became the dominant advertising house, that was pretty much untouchable, until another huge self contained silo emerged to challenge that dominance.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that advertising is way more effective when it is appropriately targeted, and the internet lends itself to targeting rather well, since the content delivery is per individual connection, and so the advertising houses started gathering anything and everything about us they could.

And many of us were (and many still are) OK with that, because, well, it meant we didn’t have to pay for content.

As someone who grew up at the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, this has always struck me as incredibly naive. For the basic problem with metadata gathering is that it reduces actual human beings into data objects that can then be leveraged to implement discriminatory behaviour by organisations, corporations, states, and really anyone willing to pay. In this regards, targeted advertising is the least of our problems, that’s just a fairly innocent tip of the iceberg.

And the really scary part: the metadata gathered on you in your 20s will follow you like a shadow till the day you die; and it will follow your children; and it will follow your grandchildren. The cost of doing that is tiny, and the potential for exploiting it endless.

In conclusion

For all the bluster and billions in stocks, Social Media have made no useful contribution to the Internet as such (for, and this is the crucible that separates the precious from the crap: we were able to do everything we can now without it). But we have lost a great deal, not least the time we could be doing something better, for ourselves, for others, but also our autonomy and personhood, and, of course, our privacy.

As I have argued above, Social Media cannot be fixed, the main problems are innate to what it is and to who we are. And so I think there is a strong case for recovering something of the positive potential of the Internet by moving out of the silos: so we can again function like autonomous human beings, so we can engage meaningfully with those we want to, and to shatter the pinch points that make it possible to spy on us 24/7.

Some of that old Internet is still out there, just impossible to find thanks to the silo gatekeeping. But there is also some new Internet in a similar vein emerging, small communities like 32-Bit Cafe, IndieWeb, and others, trying to make it happen (32-Bit Cafe has a useful sellection of outward links). Loads of blogs, best found through other people’s blogrolls (e.g., Manu Moreale’s).

Go on, give it a try. 🙂