Thread by @PulpLibrarian

It's #SaferInternetDay , a time for old codgers like me go on about how good the Web used to be back in the day. But was the internet ever safe? What went wrong? And what does the future hold?

Let me start up Netscape Navigator and give you a few thoughts *dialing tone*...

The internet began as a revolutionary thought: what if we had a place with no rules and no authority, where communication could be global, instantaneous and free?

We know what happened next. Money arrived. Wearing a polo shirt and preaching freedom. Yeah baby!

The internet is huge, and ever since its creation people have been trying to control it. Initially we worried about online security: the web is not very secure, a lot of its infrastructure is old and we're all pretty careless on security: fertile ground for mischief, or worse.

In 1967 RAND computer scientist Willis Ware had predicted that information sent via the ARPANET (which the internet grew from) would be vulnerable to compromise. Anyone could potentially steal data on a distributed network, from any connected location.

And even though Ware wrote a (now declassified) paper on online security the ARPANET development team didn't take heed: it was hard enough to make packet switching work on 1960s technology without overloading it with 'security.'

Although the World Wide web evolved on an unsecure platform it evolved BECAUSE it was an unsecure platform. Anyone (with enough motivation) could hack it, crack it and start to develop it into something rather special: a fun place to go.

We tend to forget that the internet was meant to be fun: you could create things, contact people, show off. And what turbocharged this was a range of simple ways for anyone to get online and create pages and pages of spinning gifs and web rings.

Geocities did more than anything else to growth hack the internet. With no skill, no tech background and no clue as to what you were doing you could create your own web presence for free. The Net was not a read-only experience: you could be part of it.

Of course chaos ensued: unfiltered information with no real provenance, unstructured and often unfindable filled the void of cyberspace. As a result people would spend hours surfing, bumping into information, like a digital wanderlust. That was half the attraction.

Eventually a number of start-up companies began trying to bring order to the chaos: not by demanding that the internet be redesigned, but by thinking carefully about how we should search it. Chaos was making us think differently about information.

By the late 1990s the internet had settled on what it was going to be: a lifestyle! Being online wasn't about 'doing' anything in particular, it was about participating. The web was starting to break down silos between different media, putting the user more in charge.

And big business, sensing an opportunity to monetize our new digital culture, decided to move in. But it couldn't work out if the web was an opportunity or a threat. The digital world meant playing by new rules; how could you make money in an environment you don't control?

The answer, as we now know, is data. Big companies give us lots of free online stuff in return for unparalleled access into our daily lives, which they sell on to companies who want to influence us. Who are the hackers now eh?

But how do you monopolise this data? The answer is by mediating it: you give people well worn paths through the online chaos until those paths become the default. Then people stop surfing the web, they stop tending and growing its content.

Instead they consume. Everything.

Build a platform, call it 'social media', make it apparently free and give people the tools to effortlessly create things on it. But then so something rather clever and ultimately pernicious.

Make them fight for influence on it.

Influence is the commodity of Social Media: likes, shares and followers turn a medium of free communication into a spectacle of influence.

And if the algorithms promote the influential above all others then you have a problem.

Influence can be bought. Your voice, plus money, can dominate. Pay the money, scrape the data, own the conversation.

But influence can also be earnt. You too can be a big beast, for free, if you can force people to interact with you against their better judgement.

On Social Media content is no longer king. Opinion has overthrown it. Opinion is the virulent commodity, rewarded in the currency of likes and shares, that shapes the social world. Opinion wants your attention, all day, every day.

A world of pure opinion, where outrage and anger are promoted by hungry algorithms, soon becomes a vitriolic zero-sum dog-eat-dog world. There is no commonwealth of ideas, there is only the hegemony of opinion.

And the worst part? We fell for it! News, propaganda, advertising, outrage, shame, denouncement; one we had to pay to read it. Now we are chained to its means of production.

It is a never-ending monologue that makes online companies rich and communities of interest poorer.

To be blunt you're not going to fix this problem by reinventing the web. If the only viable business model is weaponising outrage and harvesting personal data in return for free digital services there can never really be online trust - not unless you change the business model.

If you really want a safer internet you need to go back to the web's roots: net neutrality, surfing for pleasure, and communities of interest. Kill off the search algorithms that prioritise outrage and influence: make the web human-centic again.

The difference between a utopia and a dystopia is often one of perception. We once hoped the web would set information free and bring people together: instead we now flame each other in a world of diminished privacy. This Hobbesian online world can't last...

At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, social media and the internet will go the way of Ceefax, chat rooms, and the CB radio - newer technology will replace it. Hopefully the tech of tomorrow will stay human-centic for longer.

More stories another day...