What kind of an internet do you want?

The future of the internet has new cases for it becoming a dystopia rather than a utopia

Michael K. Spencer

YouTube has a pedophile problem, TikTok has a predator problem and Facebook has so many problems. We didn’t say it was going to be easy.

Social media was supposed to connect us, but people are more lonely than ever.

To say that consumers and end users have any control over how products online are evolving is a lie.

As Facial recognition and state surveillance comes online in China, Silicon Valley is copying. Do you think they asked us for our permission?

This isn’t 2007, this is 2019.

The Four Horsemen of the Western Internet

The four internets of the Western internet are closing in on themselves into walled gardens. Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Coincidentally we call them FAANG.

But they aren’t able to innovate anymore at the rate of China’s dynamic ecosystem of apps, online to offline experiences and niche markets — simply because China has more digitally native users.

While Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook pivot and aspire to become relevant in things like healthcare, payments, blockchain, the smart home and other avenues, consumers are losing control of everything. Walled gardens, privacy, more centralization, tighter controls.

Centralization Means Powerful Monopolies Becoming More Powerful

Just the exact opposite of the decentralized values young people trust more. The unregulated relationships of Governments working with Big Corporations means if you don’t trust politicians, you might not want to trust Big Tech companies either.

Huawei working with the Chinese Government is not an existential threat. All Tech companies working with their governments is. Because that’s not an open or free internet, that’s a game where all global citizens lose.

Disruption Isn’t Just a Business Term

As the BBC points out, as our species grapples with the unprecedented disruption, life-improving possibilities and terrifying potential harms of digital technology, a battle is raging to shape the future of the internet.

The battle for our future however isn’t necessarily the one you read on the Tech media cycle of Silicon Valley or New York. The Libra Association shows you just how tech companies work together in the real world. They don’t care about regulations, safeguards or laws — they don’t mind if they move fast and break things.

Because in technological capitalism, that’s how you get ahead.

Time Spent Online is Increasing

The land where the internet ends, isn’t an ethical place. It’s not a future that offers you real convenience. It’s about a future that hacks you.

An addicted planet that makes a few companies rich. Sound much like your reality? According to the best estimates, last year was the moment that — for the first time — more people were online than offline.

The off-grid places are disappearing. But the on-boarding to surveillance capitalism is pretty nefarious when it comes to human rights online. America doesn’t even regulate its duopolies of advertising, the cloud or services that have replaced the Media.

What kind of internet is that?

The Chinese Government can create and pour money into technology companies that will one day challenge the Four Horseman in the west. Why wouldn’t they do that if they wanted to compete?

What will they do to get ahead?

Facebook knows regulation is coming. It has noticed that most of the smart thinking on regulation is coming from Europe. It wants to shape that regulation before that regulation shapes Facebook. But the EU is not what it once was. Divided and approaching economic disaster is more like it.

Facebook is a greater nation than the entire Europe, thanks to the internet. America would have it no other way.

So if Silicon Valley is allowed to eat capitalism, what will the world let Chinese companies do to us decades from now?

This is the story of the internet, and I’m a futurist who covers it.

The Internet as a Data Prism/Prison

GDPR, the name for the new European data rules, is generally thought to have shifted power back to consumers (albeit at the price of constantly clicking on pop-up boxes on various websites).

Ironically, walled gardens imprison consumers better, as we will see in the 2020s. They monetize and squeeze their data and get hold of ever more invasive kinds of personal and private data like healthcare and real-time speech data in the smart home. This has already begun.

China’s tech giants are becoming more successful, of course, at this. Alibaba and JD.com know how to lock merchants into Big Data deals, and that’s only the beginning.

The future of freedom and privacy is actually bleak on the internet.

As the algorithms get smarter, human beings don’t.

You could argue that the more time we spend online, the dumber we get.

This is because digital dopamine isn’t real, it isn’t relating all that much to the real world of people.

Those mobile games, app feeds, stupid videos, angsty blogs, cat videos, video stories, or “getting lost on Instagram” aren’t making you a better person.

However as Silicon Valley workers well know, it’s all by design.

The Internet wasn’t really invented to empower, educate and foster in you a burning curiosity. It was invented to profit from you.

How technology companies are being mobilized by the American and Chinese governments as part of this war is not fully clear, but we know it’s happening. We know by the trade war that the tech cold war is a real thing now as of 2019.

We know there’s an arms race to AI between countries that weaponize their tech companies against each other.

We know the future probably isn’t Facebook and Google.

The uncertainy of what comes after is partly the scary part. American duopolies created an architecture that’s pervasive. Whether in advertising or the cloud, the pillars of the internet and its future are set.

The data harvesting will continue, you don’t really have a vote on this.

You don’t choose on an internet of duopolies and monopolies. That’s counter-intuitive, you aren’t free to opt out of Google’s or Facebook’s empires. Not having their apps or not using their services doesn’t mean they won’t continue to track you in multiple ways.

What the internet is becoming is not something we’d wish for our children to experience. But they will experience even more immersive, addictive, profitable and speedy versions of it.

Our children might not even end up caring about things like global warming or wealth inequality, they will be so addicted to it. That’s the kind of control we have built. One that silences the masses, entertains them, distracts them, and weaponizes their data for profit.

This has been an op-ed by the futurist Michael Spencer. What's your take on the evolution of the internet?

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