Geert Lovink’s narrow office on Wibautstraat in Amsterdam is filled with professional literature from top to bottom. Philosophers, political scientists, historians and also shelves full of internet criticism. Evgeny Morozov, for example. His book The Net Delusion (2011) dates from a time when it was all hosanna around the internet, but warned (back then) about the dark sides of social media, tech companies and apps. Morozov set a counterpoint formulated in sharp terms against the then prevailing cyber-optimism.
Since then, the problems have only gotten worse. The tech companies have become even more powerful and wealthy, resulting in a wide range of problems; from disinformation, data-grabbing tech companies, perverse revenue models to addictive apps. Lovink now adds a new copy to that pile of books with internet criticism: Stuck on the Platform, Reclaiming the Internet. Reclaiming the internet, that’s quite a promise. Especially because Lovink (lecturer of media studies at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) himself notes in this book that all those critical books have had little effect so far. “The message isn’t getting through,” he repeats. “And that’s humbling.”
Rudy van Belkom, director of the Future Picture of Technology Foundation, also does in his book Alive and Clicking an attempt to redesign the internet, especially to improve democracy: ‘A democratic internet is the basic condition for democracy.’
A new internet!
Both authors tap into the high expectations that have been buzzing around the web for some time now. It is not for nothing that the American tech magazine devotes wiredthe body paper of the techoptimists since its inception in 1993, in June its cover to the web rebirth: A New Internet! 100% less Evil! And in the same month the tech festival TNW will be held in Zaandam under the blistering sun. Here too it is buzzing with things such as wired professed optimism about ‘the new internet’, or Web3.
Everyone seems to agree: once upon a time you had the first version of the web, devised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, where everyone had access to all information. Things went wrong with Web 2.0, Van Belkom and Lovink also noted: then the large companies took over, giving consumers a platform to self-publish, but meanwhile ran off with all their data. In the words of the world’s most famous whistleblower Edward Snowden (available on TNW via a video link): ‘The internet has evolved in a direction that no one has wanted. Click to continue.’ We blankly and thoughtlessly click on all kinds of buttons, with which we voluntarily hand over our data to the big tech companies. Lovink puts it this way in his book: ‘The days of innocently surfing the web are over.’
Berners-Lee himself is also the first to admit that things went wrong. ‘Once, forty years ago, my idea was: we create an environment where we can work together with many people from all over the world,’ says the inventor of the web on the podium of Applied Sciences. To add gloomily: “All got lost.’ Berners-Lee, in his own words, “definitely did not see coming” in which direction the web would evaluate after the first hopeful steps. ‘Large sites were set up, each with their own rules and secluded gardens.’ But the 67-year-old Briton remains hopeful and is now looking for a solution with a new company where consumers can store their personal data in their own digital safe.
It is one of the ideas to put power back to the consumer, something that web3 also promises. The blockchain (with the cryptos in its wake) is regarded as the lubricant that makes everything possible, because it allows central authorities to be sidelined. Data (such as a bitcoin transaction) is stored in a decentralized digital log.
But neither web3 nor data safe is a miracle pill for all problems, according to both Van Belkom and Lovink. Both are looking for it in a broad arsenal of solutions, which should jointly contribute to a different, better internet. Four solutions.
1. A media wise citizen (and politician)
The idea seems so simple: let the citizen stop using all those data-guzzling apps from Big Tech and everything is solved. But it doesn’t work that way: we’re stuck with our apps because they’re easy to use and addictive, but also because our friends are on them. Lovink therefore does not believe in bringing about major changes through the consumer. ‘Not anymore, I regret to say. It’s hard to accept, but the painful conclusion is that all attempts to get something started through changes in individual behavior have come to nothing.’
Then what? Turning off notifications can help, says Lovink. Van Belkom is also looking for education. Not necessarily media literacy, by the way, but human wisdom: ‘Take disinformation, which spreads faster than other news. Algorithms are to blame, we hear. But it is above all human nature that means that we are always looking for news that confirms our existing prejudices.’
Where, according to Van Belkom, young people deal with technology better than adults often think, politics is failing. Not only did the last Kieswijzer not contain a single statement about technology, the subject is also virtually absent from the party programmes. ‘It is not alive’, the researcher concludes. As a result, it could happen that on the day the report on the allowance affair was presented, the House of Representatives passed the Data Collection by Partnerships Act, which gives government organizations and private parties very broad powers to share personal data of citizens with each other. Perhaps it is even worse, Van Belkom wonders, and it is not so much disinterest as the lack of a moral compass.
2. Make regulations (and keep an eye on China)
‘Because the power of the tech companies is so great, you also need strong regulations,’ believes Van Belkom. What Van Belkom finds particularly interesting is the interoperability requirement formulated in the new European tech law DMA (effective from 2023). “It’s absurd that a WhatsApp user cannot send a message to a Signal user. If companies are forced to arrange this, the threshold to use Signal will be lower.’ In this way, regulation can lead to innovation, thinks Van Belkom.
Lovink adds: ‘All new legislation is a response to web 2.0, to the developments that started in 2003.’ In the meantime, the danger mainly comes from China, he warns. ‘The drones we use, the smart cameras that are hanging outside: largely Chinese-made. So the images go to China.’
3. Don’t let tech companies design the public space
Fundamental innovation will not come from today’s big tech companies, both think. Lovink even fears that innovation will stop altogether: ‘If Google or Facebook no longer have any competition, why would they still innovate?’ Apart from that, it is not in their interest to make themselves redundant or vulnerable, says Van Belkom. He compares the current situation with public space: ‘It’s fine if Facebook has a store, but not the entire street.’
We move on social media as if it were the public space, but it’s not. That ‘public’ space is owned by the tech companies, which (with their own rules) act as gatekeepers and are anything but a neutral conduit. That is a problem, says Van Belkom: ‘The infrastructure of the internet should be neutral.’ Lovink is also looking in that direction, in which all layers of the internet (from submarine cables to services and apps) play a role. Lovink calls this a ‘techno-social exodus movement’ in his book: from dismantling large Big Tech data centers to creating and stimulating alternative platforms to building the internet as a public infrastructure. It won’t be easy, both admit. The motto is: try and experiment as much as possible.
The future internet highway may be paved with good intentions, but according to Lovink external changes ultimately play the biggest role. ‘Internet critic Morozov was the first to say: the internet adapts to the world, not the other way around. That was a new sound. And still many people think that the internet will change everything.’ Two examples: Covid has caused the use of meeting software to increase enormously, while countries such as Russia and China are putting thick walls around the internet.
The challenges are huge, but Van Belkom is hopeful. ‘Not optimistic, because then I would think that everything would work itself out. That is not true.’ And Lovink, is he also hopeful? A long pause, and then he says, “I prefer to speak of urgency rather than hope. Without urgency there is no hope anyway.’
Geert Lovink : Stuck on the Platform – Reclaiming the Internet
Rudy van Belkom: Alive and Clicking – there is hope for democracy
