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Freedom House reports that Internet freedom declined for the sixth consecutive year, driven by dismal trends like reprisals for social media likes, censorship of images (in addition to text), and new restrictions on web-based calls.
Turkey and Brazil were downgraded, while China was the year's worst offender.
Which is to say, it's a place where creativity flourishes amidst disorder. But pessimistically, it's a failed state, where no central government means crime goes unpunished and key services (trash, spam) aren't attended to.
Here are five futures for the web. The most likely are Balkanisation and the status quo, but range all the way to "cybergeddon," where hacking methods permanently outstrip security protocols.
Dec 1, 2016They believed that we needed to create a kind of media that would promote democratic personalities. And if we did that, we could prevent racist nationalism. They dreamed of media that would surround you, that would require you to make your own choices and use your individual perception to define the images that mattered most to you.
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If you go to a major tech show, like Europe's Web Summit, you're likely to see nearly every booth occupied by startups either inane or downright sinister. But that's unlikely to change until the web economy is radically reorganized, an enormous but necessary project.
Where to start? We may not get to pick our battles: Defending net neutrality. Trump is hiring advisors who support the kind of data cap exemptions that would allow web providers to choose favorites and nuke net neutrality. Indeed, just in from the front: "AT&T’s zero rating model is pretty much the nightmare scenario that internet advocates and pro-competition observers have been warning us about."
Dec 1, 2016That misinformation plagues our politics is a symptom of a larger, more existential problem: The tech industry has disrupted the public sphere and has shown neither the interest nor the ability to reconstruct it. No matter what Facebook might believe, there is no turnkey algorithmic solution that will ensure a perfect civic network.
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Bringing this full circle to forms of mass address: Starting in January Donald Trump will be able to send unblockable text messages through FEMA to all Americans.
The Internet Archive, home of the beloved Wayback Machine, isn't taking any chances with the pro-censorship proclivities of our incoming president: they're establishing an archive in Canada.
