As the United States witnessed firsthand in the 2016 election, technology is now as good as the prime mover in US politics. From the flap over Clinton’s emails to Trump’s impulsive Twitter rants in the wee hours of the night, and from the Facebook ecology of political posts in the months leading up to November 8th, 2016, to the self-organizing flash mobs of protesters and rioters that emerged after the fact, that election was shaped by electronic communication more than any election before it.
We’ve become more aware of that in the past four years, but it was creeping up on us then.
Which raises a very pertinent question: Just how much is high-tech media going to shape the world? Will we become a race of hyper-sentient empaths? Are we all merging into a hivemind?
When anybody in the world can transmit any amount of information to anybody else in the world in a split second, all barriers have been lifted. There’s really no practical difference between the average person now and an omniscient being, at least as far as an ancient Biblical author would have conceived it. Each of us carries in our pocket a device granting us powers that, one hundred years ago, would have been seen as nigh on godly.
But that’s the trouble with a planet full of omniscient gods: They become a royal pain to boss around. Yet we need to regulate this space now, right now!
Decades ago, I was pointing this out and you were all not ready to listen. Bigger, more important people than me were pointing out similar ideas, which we’ll revisit below. Nobody is listening to any of us, but that’s the prophet business for you.
Social Media As a Weapon
DefenseOne.com recently states that “War Goes Viral.“ They talk about how terrorist organization ISIS has used social media to chilling effectiveness, from recruiting to demonstrating to coordinating efforts to orchestrating attacks on every continent. Their military invasion of Iraq in 2014 became the first such action to create and use its own smartphone app.
However, ISIS is far from the only example of militarized social media. Arab Spring in 2010 became the first historic example of revolutions and protests organized over social media. While the shock wave of protests and attempts at reform in other Arab states was held back, it did result in a successful overthrow of Tunisian government.
About the same time back in the States, Anonymous, the loosely collected online protest group, led a small protest campaign against the Church of Scientology in 2008, and in 2015 attempted to fight back against ISIS by taking over 38K Twitter accounts formerly held by ISIS. So yes, we used to invade countries with tanks, and now we just hack each others’ social media accounts.
Remember where I say that the 1993 film Sneakers was the most prophetic hacker movie?
> “There’s a war out there, a world war. And it’s not about who has the most bullets, it’s about who controls the information.”
That’s the stuff I’m talking about.
So pervasive has digital activism become that the name of any movement or operation looks naked without the mandatory hashtag. Hence we can’t conceive of the Occupy movement of the early 2010’s without referring to it as #OccupyWallStreet. Anonymous and the Occupy movements are still very much with us today; they have spoken up several times in recent events.
Social Media Under Arrest
The various power structures of the world have not laid dormant during the rise of social media and its impact on the global scene. After all, two-thirds of the world’s Internet users are censored. Growing concerns over how much power we should give governments and corporations to control the pipelines of communication has fueled debates over everything from policing fake news to Twitter finding itself in a position to flag Trump’s tweets.
The United States’ own FBI even has a section concerning social media, and its impact in day-to-day law enforcement. On the one hand, stalkers and domestic abusers can use the Internet to find their targets.
On the other hand, today’s criminal is prone to leave a trail of digital footprints, leading law enforcement to more easily make a case against an apprehended suspect, if not even curtail them before they act. Internet patrons joke that they could be added to a watchlist for mentioning several hot-button keywords in a Facebook post, but those watchlists are becoming all too real.
If it isn’t online activists tracking a suspect before they’re even caught, like in the recent case of the Kenosha shooter, police are daily using social media to flag potential trouble before it happens. It doesn’t quite look like this:
…but it might as well. The details are different only in that the cops are scrolling through Facebook rather than conducting data symphonies on a wraparound transparent screen.
Can we see this working for an abusive government as well? We certainly can. Allegedly, a Lao man has just been arrested for the crime of doing nothing but criticizing his government on social media.
Social Media Cuts Both Ways
Aside from its entanglement with politics, is the question of how much social media can hurt the people instead of empowering them. Left to our own devices, we tend to indulge in “homophily,” the tendency to associate only with those who confirm and validate our own beliefs.
No where has homophily been more strongly demonstrated than in the US social media scene. Within the various forums for each political party, each group of supporters is convinced that they and they alone can not possibly be wrong. Facebook friendships are terminated over differences of political opinion. It is all too easy to find a tight circle of cranks like yourself to support any crazy hypothesis you could believe. Why be skeptical when you have this little support circle telling you that you’re right?
Once again, we see that social media mirrors our faults as well as our weaknesses. The Internet makes a great library, but a lousy school. Beware of homophily. It can make you think you’re ahead when you’re actually in last place.
Is this all sounding familiar? For all the information we have access to, we are starved for wisdom and understanding in time to predict what’s going to happen next. Two thirds of Americans just feel worn out by the pace of news now. It all goes by in a blur. It feels like a carousel out of control all the time.
There is a very good reason for things to feel out of control. We spend most of our time living in the anarchy of the Internet. Social media is out of control. We never thought it would be this important, and so we never thought to set up rules and regulations for how it is to be conducted.
The Internet is an Invisible Nation
Here’s the deal: We think in terms of nations and parties. We still act as if only meatspace, physical plots of land need to be governed. We have a gap between where we are now and where we think we are.
We, all of us all over the world, need to acknowledge that the Internet has become more important to our daily lives than most any government. We need a Constitution for the Internet. We need human rights for the Internet. We need an international body of law to enforce order on the Internet.
It needs to do three jobs: Protect people from governments, protect people from corporations, and protect us from each other. This is one reason why I don’t jump on the silly “Net Neutrality” bandwagon. That’s chicken feed. It’s a bunch of hotheaded Incels who don’t like this guy because he has a cool mug:
That’s too bad. We could have had a real conversation about the Internet regulation we actually need, but the Net Neutrality war has smeared poop all over that conference room before we got a chance to book it. Forget Ajit Pai, forget the FCC. They’re not big enough for the job!
The Internet needs it own president, or a cabinet of prime ministers, or a Congress, or something. Right now it’s mostly controlled by corporations. But you can’t vote for a CEO unless you hold stock. Stop and ask yourself: Who really impacts your day-to-day life? Your government probably feels like a peripheral matter, barely on your radar. Wave your American flag all you want to, but if Canada just hauled off and bought your city today, the worst it would affect you is that you would have to convert your currency (five seconds on PayPal), and then you could go “Cool, I can get pot in the mail and free health care!”
But if you were to get randomly kicked off the Internet today, what would that do to you? Chances are it would ruin your life. You’d be cut off from communication, your family, your work, your bank account, your utilities, and your recreation.
Well? Important, isn’t it? Anything that important should be civilized. I mean “civilized” as in “changing it from a wild anarchy to a civilization, with laws and rights and an organized system of society.”
Many have said before what I say now
There used to be a site called “cybersociety.org,” and the Wayback Machine verifies that I’m not crazy. In the 2015 report on “How Countries Are Regulating Internet Content,” they detail the many ways in which governments around the world have increasing concern about Internet threats and their attempts to regulate it. You’ll notice nearly every developed nation has a response to the issue more thought-out that the US, where the cowboys just shrug that job off on the FCC.
Let me make this clear: The Internet is TOO BIG to be policed by any nation. It’s simply a scale of sheer population numbers. The only way for it to be effectively governed is for its citizens – the citizens of the Internet – to come together and arrange a government for themselves. I’ll be the first to admit, I have no idea what the hell that would look like, but we worked out currency and stock markets and NATO, I’m sure we could figure this out if we cared to.
In its absence, the governments of the world are trying to regulate the Internet on their own. They are dwarfed by this behemoth, but they try anyway. Their clumsy efforts provoke their respective citizens to howl in outrage at one measure not being enough and another being too much. We’re not used to scaling Democracy up this large.
Lawrence Lessing, an accomplished author and Scientific American editor, illuminated exactly this issue in his 2000 lecture “Cyberspace’s Constitution.” He talks about the unwritten, imaginative constitution that we all think of when we think about the rules of a civilization. Refer back to what I’m saying about how central the Internet is to our lives, and read this quote of Lessing’s lecture:
> “Cyberspace is a place. People live there. They experience all the sorts of things that they experience in real space, there. For some, they experience more. They experience this not as isolated individuals, playing some high tech computer game; they experience it in groups, in communities, among strangers, among people they come to know, and sometimes like.”
Further down, Lessing describes how regulation of the Internet is imposed by corporations – but only to benefit themselves, for their own business. It’s weird to hear somebody talk about AOL as if it ruled the world, but he does there. In the next breath, he talks about Amazon and eBay. Guess who’s still around now? Anyway, while his speech is a jolt of enlightenment from the year 2000, he didn’t quite bullseye the shot of the issue. He was warning the Internet would become less “free.”
That hasn’t been the case. If you’re worried about corporations being able to stifle your precious First Amendment, you haven’t paid attention to 20 years of the Streisand effect and you’re furthermore barking up the wrong tree. Commerce abhors censorship too. “How” is another essay, but look around you, observe. Go on 4chan and ask them how their free speech is doing these days.
Along with “free speech” comes the old principle of “imminent lawless action.” Laws to limit speech fall within the parameters of inciting the latter. When we see modern domestic terrorist groups organizing online, we can arrest them for provoking imminent lawless action. Our troubles begin when a government like that in Lao gets hold of this idea.
In any case, corporations as they stand relative to Internet regulation are a kind of invisible nation themselves, once they brook international borders to go multinational. Again, I’d wager that Google changing its page-ranking algorithms has more impact on our daily lives than anything happening in a physical local legislature. We sure as hell don’t want corporations to be the Internet’s government. But again, we see that just as with nations being too small to rule the web, corporations don’t have the clout and power to bend the Internet to their will either. In theory they might; in practice they’re usually stalemated by other corporations.
In reading all of the above, please don’t miss the critical detail that the Internet cannot be effectively governed from outside itself. Nations and corporations, with the occasional religion or 501(c) non-profit, are all trying to do it, and they’re all producing this hodgepodge of duct tape and bandaids. ISIS and domestic militia, scammers and spammers, oppressive dictatorships and shadowy private interests, can all walk right through it. It’s full of holes and leaks.
One more example, of how the calls for civilizing cyberspace go even farther back:
Way back in 1996, I was one of the few following the Electronic Frontier Foundation when it released the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” Everybody laughed at that guy for being too radical. I coined the term “Invisible Nation” on that day and said that it wasn’t radical enough: first you need the Declaration of Independence, then you need the Constitution for your new independent nation.
All of this early talk seems to have died off, or rather, been drowned out. I persist, but I’m damn near one of the few who even believes in trying anymore, apparently. Oh sure, once in awhile some hack like me gets a piece pushed through onto Fortune. It goes “blip” and then it’s gone.
That’s about 24 years of this being a growing problem while I gave up yelling at all of you about it, except in occasional spurts like this one. But that’s the prophet business, I guess.
