A response to Walter Isaacson’s “How To Fix The Internet” (The Atlantic.)

In an article published in The Atlantic this week, Walter Isaacson laid out his vision for “how to fix the internet.” The problem, he says, is Trolls. Bugs. Lack of tracking. He believes anonymity has “poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying and made email a risk.” His solution is to do away with anonymity, thereby offering himself as the mouthpiece for every Silicon Valley titan with deep pockets and a hunger for data.

I’ve written on how we civilize technology before, on the challenges we face with each shift forward in technology, whether it’s ships, trains, radio transmitters or nuclear energy. The trajectory involves a series of near-misses while we get the hang of our shiny new toy. When cars were first invented there were no laws to govern driving. As cars proliferated, accidents increased. Now we legislate everything about car and road safety, down to the driver’s decision to wear a seatbelt. There are fines for not wearing one. If the trouble with internet technology is bad behavior why not address the behavior?

What Isaacson skims over in his trolling lament is that the worst trolls on the internet are the very people he thinks should solve the trolling problem. Huge media companies like Facebook shamelessly collect their users’ data and sell it. Anonymity is not permitted on Facebook because the company can’t use you, can’t parse your information into demographics and ad bins, if they don’t know who you are. Similarly, the “trust” relationship built into place by search engines like Google is merely a handshake agreement that the company won’t “be evil.” That doesn’t mean Google deletes your search history. As we saw in the 2016 election, “evil” is a word that’s up for interpretation in our society. We, as users of Google, don’t know who is deciding what’s evil at any given time. Isaacson wants users to lose anonymity but notably makes no mention of tech companies and their addiction to opacity. In Isaacson’s future world, users are the biggest losers.

Isaacson offers logical suggestions for what a safe internet might include but how he gets there is the sales pitch of the century. Certainly, it’s important to institute payment for work. We don’t need a new internet for that. I’ve been pitching companies like Medium on this concept for years. “Find a way to pay your writers, even one cent per read, and you will revolutionize the publishing industry.” “A pay model is the only way forward to maintain the integrity of what is published and read.” Medium could institute a pay-model today. What Isaacson misses is that companies and sites most users rely on for information offer their services for free so that they can take whatever consumer data they want in return. The internet hasn’t evolved naturally into a pay model because the people currently making big bucks off of internet technology are also in charge of its design. There are no checks and balances built into the governing of the internet. This does not mean we do away with internet privacy. It means we legislate it.

To revolutionize the internet, the Googles and Facebooks would have to become industry-leading pay-model services. In a pay-model service, user-consumers would lose anonymity to the company offering the service (via their credit card), but maintain privacy in whatever further capacity they wished while using the service. It would be no different than walking into a Starbucks and ordering a latte. Give the barrista your own name or someone else’s, pay with cash or credit, hide your face behind sunglasses or don’t…at the end of the day, you’re physically standing in the store and someone can deal with you if you cause a disturbance. As long as you’re a peaceful coffee drinker you still have agency to determine your level of privacy. The same is true of a paying customer online.

Finally, and this is perhaps the most important omission in Isaacson’s piece, there is presently a massive power struggle underway between government and technology elites — specific, powerful individuals within broader industries. Both groups are greedy for data. One group wants to retard technology in order to maintain control over its electorate. The other group wants to advance technology so fast it will maintain control over its creations and, by extension, its users. The electorate and users are one in the same. The bad seeds among us exist whether anonymity is built into the internet or not. They exist in government, they exist in boardrooms and they exist in chatrooms. It is persistant abuses of power which promote toxicity. Unless government and technology elites find a way to work together for the betterment of society as a whole, that toxicity will continue no matter what internet protocols are put in place.