I've been on the Internet for a long time. Long enough to remember when Mr. Michael Wesch published this video aeons ago. I had just left Bible College and my faith when it came out. I was still under the impression that I was male.
Are We Using The Machine, Or Is the Machine Using Us?
Too often these days, I find myself asking the same question. Social media and blogging have gotten to a point where only a few big players truly dominate the space. Facebook and Twitter are the big players with a few smaller players here and there. With most social media services, we aren't the consumer - we're the product. We're a bunch of metadata and analytics that are being used to sell ad space. This is not only unacceptable, it's creepy.
We can try. We can degoogle our lives as much as possible. Switch to Brave. Switch to DuckDuckGo. Block all the creepy trackery things that now infest the web... even to the point where some websites break without them (seriously, fuck Google Tag Manager). But, how much good does it do when we continue to feed the machine by using sites like Facebook which continue to aggregate information about us and sell us to advertisers as a product? As long as you're using traditional social media, you can't win.
Whether you want to think of "the machine" as artificial intelligence or come a bit more down to earth and say it's the big corporations that play on our need to be connected to the people in our lives, the truth is inescapable. The machine is using us.
Clearly, we need to rethink a few things.
Have We Rethought Things?
At the end of the video, Mr. Wesch says that we need to rethink a few things, including big, lofty concepts such as copyright, identity, authorship, aesthetics, ethics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce... and even ourselves.
I will say that the fact that I was able to start my transition at the age of 20 was a blessing that I think would not have been possible in the pre-Internet days. However, I am deeply concerned about a disturbing trend: the over-reliance on cloud computing and the centrality of it all. Amazon Web Services, Alibaba, Google, and a few other players have a disturbing amount of control over our digital media and our digital lives.
Our digital heritage is under constant threat. I can only wonder what would happen if some cloud services operator decided that the content I needed to see at that time was "not appropriate" for me. It is critical to the continued operation and utility of the Internet that we be not only allowed but empowered to express ourselves freely here.
After all, we are the web.
We Are The Web
Recently, I participated in Archive Team's heroic efforts to try to archive the data from Yahoo! Answers while it was being shut down. Unfortunately, we couldn't save all of it. But the fact that an online service can just go kaput like that is incredibly disturbing.
We take it for granted, but the web is a part of our heritage and our culture. It shows us who we are and allows us to express ourselves freely. As much as I don't like certain people, I have to uphold their right to speak as vehemently as I uphold my right to point out why they're factually incorrect. And the fact that the plug could be pulled on any one of us at any moment could severely curtail our freedom of speech.
Truly, we are the web. However, if this phrase is to have any meaning, we must be able to make our own choices, be able to write and speak freely, and be able to curate the content as we see fit. Social media must be democratized. Platforms like Diaspora and Mastodon have made some strides and provided a proof of concept, but they are still a bit too central.
Clearly, blockchain is the next chapter.
Blockchain is the Next Chapter
If we want this to continue, we must recognize that blockchain is the next chapter in this story. The next step of progression. This is why I am now encouraging people, average, everyday people, to join all of us here on PeakD and on Steem and other such platforms. Because if we want freedom, we must recognize that blockchain is the next chapter of this story and a fundamental part of the equation if we are to resist the creeping centralization of the web.
If you're here for the first time, welcome. Please consider joining us.