Cycles of optimism and pessimism

My overall attitude toward the online world has tended to go through

long cycles of alternating optimism and pessimism.

I started using unix, learning to program and learning about

networking around 2000. During the early naughties, I was generally

feeling pretty good about the whole scene. Mozilla were doing a great

job championing the cause of a web based on open standards, and

Firefox helped to break the IE browser monopoly. OpenOffice offered

the prospect of doing the same for word processing. The idea that

proprietary file formats were evil had a lot of traction and wide

awareness, and big-profile free software projects were addressing

these major problems. The One Laptop Per Child project came along and

for the first time exposed me to the idea that computers could be not

just fun and interesting and useful in a practical sense, but that

they could actually be a force for genuine good. During this time I

bought myself a domain name, setup my own web and email server, and

poured a lot of energy into being part of what I felt was a community

with a strong moral compass that I believed in, and which was going

to make the world a progressively better place.

But the OLPC project failed, and Facebook came along, and Twitter came

along, and smartphones became a thing, and it kind of seemed like

everybody stopped caring about the things we previously had (this was

actually more or less what my second ever phlog post[1] was about).

By the time the...teens? twenty-teens? whatevers...rolled around I

was starting to feel disenchanted. The Snowden leaks, and the

general lack of serious response to them, were a bit of a turning

point. I started to get seriously pissed at how the people who I felt

• should* have been leading the way out of the mess didn't seem to have

the guts to actually do it. I read a transcript of a speech by Jacob

Appelbaum about how he believed the US government had compromised his

iPhone and were using it to spy on him, and I just wanted to scream at

him "why the fuck do you still have the thing, then?!". I read an

interview with Bruce Schneier where he talked about his iPhone, and

said that expecting people to live without iPhones wasn't a reasonable

response to privacy problems with them and instead we should ask our

governments to pass laws to protect us. I was so frustrated! I

thought "Bruce, you're older than I am, you lived a long time without

an iPhone and your life, while less convenient because of it, was in

no sense miserable because of it. Of course we can give them up!".

I wondered why so many people and organisations who espoused

principles in favour of a decentralised internet were nevertheless

on Twitter and/or YouTube. By actively refusing to use a lot of these

things, I started to feel like I was somehow in the most radical

0.0001% percent of the planet, and that nobody else cared, really

cared, about any of "our" old principles anymore. I largely withdrew

from any and all online communities and became a bit of a hermit.

A little more than two years ago I rejoined SDF and got involved in

gopher, and also re-engaged with the fediverse, first through GNU

Social and then Mastodon. I found myself engaging, for the first

time, with people who took all my extreme ideas for granted, and it

really helped. Although I have huge misgivings about the precise

manner in which Mastodon explosively took off, the fact is that it

happened, and now "federation" is a household term for anybody who

pays even vague attention to the online world. Conversations about

internet decentralisation are happening more and more, and - years

later than they should, but better late than never - people are

starting to openly and boldly criticise Google. I started to feel a

lot better about things during this time. It seemed like maybe the

tide of popular opinion amongst the most technically informed people

was perhaps starting to turn. At the same time, lots of really cool

things have been happened in gopherspace and pubnixspace, and the

internet lately has at times felt for me as much fun as it did 15

years ago.

But just in the past week or two I've started to feel like maybe the

next change in the cycle is coming. A few observations clustered in a

relatively short time have triggered this. Somebody in gopherspace (I

really can't remember who, and I can't find the post now - if it was

you, or you think you know who it was, please let me know so I can add

a link) wrote about how they had been observing the internet use of

people around them for a while and had noticed that they almost never

saw anybody looking at anything other than a feed/timeline from one of

the big social media sites; nobody seemed to access "the actual web",

except by following links posted to one of those sites. And then,

Alex Schroeder shared on Mastodon a link to a long series of toots[2]

about Google, Chrome and ad-blocking. It was a very blunt, and quite

depressing discussion of just the kind of things you might imagine,

summarised quite well by one response: "Google’s business model is to

display ads on web. Google developing a market dominating web browser

was just to get control of their business-critical platform. Now that

Chrome is practically ubiquitous they can start to leverage the

control they’ve gained". But maybe the thing that had the biggest

impact on me was Finland winning the ice hockey world champsionships.

(this is going to seem like a huge digression, but I promise it's

relevant and in the end not actually about hockey at all)

I'm not really into ice hockey, or sport in general, but it's pretty

huge in Finland. In the national psyche, beating arch-rival Sweden on

their home turf for the 1995 world championships ranks second only

behind valiantly holding off Soviet invasion during WWII and

preserving the new country's fragile independence. That's only a

slight exaggeration for comedic effect; "95, never forget" is a thing

people actually say here. Anyway, last weekend Finland won the world

championships for the third time ever, so this Monday was more or less

a day of national celebration. There was a huge party in a park in

Helsinki, with local celebrities singing and dancing for hours while

the crowd waited for the winning team to arrive. The president of the

country turned up and gave a speech. It was Serious Business.

A small part of the celebration was focussed on the younger ice hockey

teams, including the Finnish under-18 women's team, who came third in

their world champsionship this year. Each player's name and number

was called out, and one by one the girls walked out onto the stage, to

applause from the audience.

I kid you not, more than half, and maybe as many as three quarters, of

the girls were on their phones as they walked on stage, and stayed

on them for the entire duration of their presenation. Not actively

talking on them, but holding them in front of themselves at arm's

length. I'm not actually sure what they were doing. Taking photos or

videos of the crowd? Video chatting with friends or family? I'm not

sure it matters. My point is: holy hell, to anybody my age or older

it is just incredibly, deeply, unquestionably obvious that it is

totally inappropriate to be, in any sense, on your phone while you are

being presented in front of your country as an elite athlete.

Obviously, today's teenagers feel otherwise, and can't or won't stop

sharing their lives via their phone even when traditional standards of

decorum would demand it. This got me thinking about the importance of

young people's attitudes toward technology.

(I don't mean to single out the Finnish under-18 women's hockey team

in this, by the way. I presume their behaviour is actually totally

representative of similarly aged girls and boys across many developed

nations)

When I was in high school, there was one girl in my class whose

parents didn't let her watch television. Today, I very rarely watch

any television at all, and I bet if that girl's parents explained to me

now their reasons for making that decision way back then, I'd agree

with a lot of them. But at the time, I and every single one of my

classmates thought this was total madness. Way, way worse than the

kid whose family didn't have a microwave oven because his mother

thought they were bad for you. The girl who never watched television

didn't seem to think that this restriction on her life was all that

bad, but I'm sure everybody else felt terribly sorry for her, and was

sure she didn't understand what she was missing. When you're thirteen,

and you've spent just about every day in your entire life using and

enjoying a particular piece of technology, and every other thirteen

year old kid you know has done the same, then there's just no amount

of rational argument any adult can present which will convince you

that that technology is actually bad. It's just not how young minds

work. I think about how much time today's young kids spend

entertaining themselves watching YouTube videos on tablets, and I

realise that it won't be long at all until the world is full of young

adults for whom all the companies and devices and services that I think

are ruining the internet will be associated with happy childhood

memories. There's nothing I can say or do which will stop this. When

the minds of the young are lost, what hope can there be for the future?

I'm not any kind of expert on the topic, but I'm moderately interested

in the history of radio and television, and one thing I've learned

from reading up on these things is that a lot of people who were

closely involved in these fields in their early days are, today,

tremendously bitter and jaded about how things turned out, with regard

to commercialisation, the public interest, democractic access to the

medium, and all that jazz. In the early days there was so much

excitement and idealism and promise in these technologies, but

eventually huge corporate monopolies and bland, undifferentiated,

lowest common denominator programming came to dominate both kinds of

airwaves. Maybe it was silly to ever expect the internet to turn out

any differently. Maybe the "real internet" that I know and love

will prove to have been some weird temporal blip from the very early

days of the technology, before the "weary giants of flesh and

steel"[3] woke up and did what they always do. Maybe it's too late

and the apparent groundswell of opposition is just a case of people

not realising what they had until it was gone.

I suppose, really, that I never actually seriously thought that the

reinvigorated small internet[4] that has been my happy online home for

the past few years was ever going to change the overall direction of,

well, anything. Maybe it doesn't really even need to. As long as

there is a small part of the internet where I can be myself and say

what I think and do things the way I think they ought to be done and,

in doing those things, feel like I'm part of a community of

like-minded people doing the same kind of things, and not like a

solitary crazy person, that's enough. I'm not happy here because I

think we're blazing the trails of the future and we're going to change

the world. I'm happy here because I don't feel alone. If we do

change the world, well, that'd be great, but I'm not holding my breath.

I think odds are good that the independent, non-commercial,

decentralised, open-standards, do-it-yourself part of the internet will

be increasingly marginalised, without ever actually disappearing. It

will be like CW in the amateur radio community, or film in the

photography community, or non-indexed gear shifting in the cycling

community. If anything, we're slightly better off than all those

little communities, because we can build and maintain our own small

internet without being dependent upon big companies continuing to

manufacture increasingly unprofitable physical products. As long as

an internet based on TCP/IP is up and running, no matter what 99.99%

of the world is using it for, we'll be here. Recalcitrant digital

cockroaches.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/weve-lost-our-way.txt

[2] https://x0r.be/@szbalint/102184830526516885

[3] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

[4] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt