What an introduction to a documentary covering the origin of the Web, “We humans we have been pretty busy these past millennia since we stopped dragging our knuckles on the ground.” “Downloaded the True Story of the Internet” gives a theatrical telling of an intricate tale. The tale is a small piece in the puzzle that will hopefully form the mosaic of our apotheosis to a type one civilization. Today, I would like to try and do something new. I want to think on an individual level about how the Web became what it is today, or at lest think on what the effects the Web has on the individual. There effects of the Web have changed both those that made it and those that use it.
The question of power comes into play heavily throughout this series. Many times it states that we the people have unlimited power at lest over content in the Web. The populist nature of Web 2.0 makes this the case to be sure. On the other hand I wonder if the individual really has most of the power without holding the means of distribution? One could possibly think of the internet in a Marxist sense. The means of production is held by the people and the means of distribution is held by the collective. Since we all use the cables that are under the ocean and the ground. The problem with this view is these physical connections were not built by the collective or owned by all of us. Then there is the problem of the software that distributes everything. Control of both the hardware and software remains in the hands of the very few. This means the populism or quasi Marxist nature of web 2.0 is an illusion.
I know we are supposed to be talking on a individual level. All this means is the individual has new power over content but still has restricted power over distribution. The documentary “Downloaded” seems to show this with out explicitly saying it. It also talks heavily about the power of a person to make and do what they want on the web. We are certainly in a new age of informational populism. There are key differences to the old age of communication, which the Guardian Australia’s Editor Katherine Viner outlines, and now with the internet. We don’t have the freedom of distribution we did in the days when Homer would tell his tales around a brazier at the Acropolis in Athens. We are in a brave new world of a two way Gutenberg printing press. We can now fine tune our viewing habits so profoundly, and engage with the content makers so rapidly that it can feel like how it did when we told the fireside myths of old now on a wider scale.
So what about the people with the power of distribution? They have been and still are in a fast changing dynastic struggle to make sure the hardware we use stays the same and the software we use is their newest incarnation. Through this struggle the individual content maker distributes his or her content. The people at the top of the Googles and FaceBooks were interestingly the content creators of yesterday and now the vehicles of content distribution today. They made a world where we all can be content makers. Their laudable goals of creating a connected world, an encyclopedic of all human knowledge, and on and on meant their struggles to “make it” became very personal struggles to control what they made. They struggled with the large financial institutions which they used to help their rise to power as a distributor.
Out of these struggles we got the calamity of the dot com bubble and blessing of Web 2.0. I wondered as I watched the Dot Com Bubble episode if we could have gotten Web 2.0 as quickly without the crash? For the people investing and regulating the investment there seems to have been some level of delusion in the face of all that money to be made. They thought the normal rules of a market economy no longer applied for the internet forgetting it would that the internet was being traded and invested in by the market and therefore still must follow the rules of booms and busts.
To me it would be like a physicist saying “I have found a way to break the strong atomic force and still be in this universe.” Sure the internet turned some old ideas on its head in the market economy but it did not create a new economic universe just a new system that still existed in our area of trading time and selling space. I think of the internet changing the economy the way quantum mechanics changed physics. It is still the same universe with the same basic rules, just new structures to understand. Maybe that is the part we can’t avoid both as individuals and as a civilization. We fall. What matters is how we learn to pick ourselves back up again.