The Web is Not a Public Good
On 21 August 2023, in the wake of a glitch that destroyed all images uploaded to X (the site formerly known as Twitter) prior to 2014, Elon Musk made the alarming announcement that the site “may fail”.
Even five years ago, this seemed almost impossible. Twitter is, or was, one of the most recognisable brands in the world. Almost everyone in the world links the blue bird, the @ symbol and the # symbol with the concept of microblogging first made popular by Twitter.
There has been a paradigm shift in recent years. What once was unthinkable has now become possible. The dreams of science fiction are now daily reality. We live in an increasingly networked world, one which increasingly acts as a collective temporal lobe.
We humans are a cyborg species. Our digestive tracts are shorter than those of our close mammal relatives, because the kitchen does part of the work of breaking down our food for us. For all the debate about ultra-processed food, we are the only species that must process its food before it is eaten. Such processing is only possible through the use of technology.
To quote Marshall McLuhan:
The wheel…is an extension of the foot
The book…is an extension of the eye
Clothing, an extension of the skin
Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.
Our biology is augmented by the devices we use to extend our bodies in space and time. Yet our brains are, in a relative sense, Stone Age. Our language is sophisticated, of course, and our capacity for reason. But we still think and feel in the same way we did in the Paleolithic. We are, ultimately, a species of ultradomesticated great apes.
The Internet is the latest innovation in a series of technological leaps, an extension of various capacities and faculties of the brain into something that verges on telepathy. The ability to instantaneously share information between any two networked devices has been a great boon.
On the other hand, the advent of the World Wide Web, that utopian 90s post-Cold War project, sailing in on the tide of the digital revolution, has since shown itself to be less of a coming together in the brotherhood of all humankind, and more of a profit-driven hellscape of algorithmic infoslurry, providing simplistic Skinner-box dopamine rewards for every minute spent doomscrolling.
This is exemplified perhaps no better than the sudden and drastic collapse of Twitter’s usability and functionality since its purchase by Elon Musk. Twitter, which has long been used as a means of receiving news, and as a source of news and gossip for almost two decades, is now deleting whole swathes of content from its servers.
It is important to remember that the Web, as it currently exists, is not a public good.
The Web is almost entirely owned and controlled by private, for-profit organisations with private, for-profit concerns. It is concerning that so much of the information on the Web is taken as an indelible record, forever archived.
Twitter is not an archive. It is a for-profit social media platform. It exists to make money. It does this mainly through advertising, and, recently, in selling blue badges to the world’s most horrible people.
It isn’t just Twitter, either.
YouTube LLC, a private organisation owned by Google LLC, is often held to be an archive of videos. It isn’t. If Twitter’s recent collapse has shown us anything, it’s that YouTube – a site that is only one year older than Twitter – is more than capable of going away.
YouTube has, by some estimates, millennia of videos stored within its database. There are no backups for all that information. If it is destroyed – and we should assume that it could be – that data is gone for good.
YouTube is not an archive. It is a for-profit social media platform. It exists to make money. It does this mainly through advertising, and selling a “premium” service that removes advertising and other inconveniences.
It is frighteningly common to treat the Web as though it is still that utopian dream, a place of limitless freedom, connection and human solidarity. But it isn’t. It is a profit engine. And while Tim Berners-Lee may not have intended such a thing, he made the fatal mistake of creating the Web within the bounds of capitalism, a system fuelled solely by generating profit through the private ownership of the means of production.
A Web that was truly collectively owned, and run in the public interest, a meta-archive (the archive of all archives, including itself) would not be invulnerable. But it would be a Web that served the original function of the Web: To enable the free exchange of information between networked devices using hypertext documents accessible on servers via TCP/IP.
Imagine, if you will, a website like Twitter, or YouTube, or Instagram, or LinkedIn, that is owned not by a private organisation, but is instead owned by its users, and maintained by a select few of those users. Perhaps it would not be as efficient, it may even be slower, but decisions about the handling of information uploaded to the database would not be vested in the hands of a billionaire with an ideological axe to grind, but rather by the creators, distributors and end-users of that information. Would that not be worth a reduction in efficiency?
In short, what if the Web was a public good?
Sadly, this idea seems to be less popular in the time of Web 3.0, cryptocurrency, NFTs and so on. The dream seems to be less about collectivising the Web, and more about atomising it, individualising it to the point that every individual user has a controlling stake in the Web. The problem with this, of course, is that it requires costly and inefficient cryptographic hashing to be feasible, not to mention being ideologically repugnant; turning information into a fetichised commodity for the purpose of extracting monetary value, rather than altruistically sharing information in common, as a public good.
We are at a turning point in the history of the Internet. The old guard is beginning to die off. Twitter was always volatile, but it looks to be going the way of MySpace. YouTube has survived, but as many a YouTuber has warned, it will not last forever. It is not sustainable. There will come a time when YouTube disappears, taking with it many thousands of years of videos that likely exist nowhere else.
We have a duty, as social beings, to use the collective knowledge we have gained to better the lives of every being on this planet. Yet, we are driven too often by the false promise of “creature comforts”.
The Web is now at a fork in the road. It can become a nigh-unusable tangle of misinformation, blockchains, and privatised conversation. Or it can become a genuine public good.
As with many things, I am not optimistic we will make the right call.
This essay is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Illustration by JJ Ying on Unsplash.