Internet Dystopia

Someone left behind a copy of Wired magazine at the Post Office, so I picked it up.  It's a big thick issue with a story headlined on the cover that sounded interesting.  I paged through it, while searching for the table of contents or at least the article, and I was amazed.  Ad after glossy ad, mostly for men's luxury products.  There were half a dozen ads just for high-end wristwatches.  So much advertising, and I never did find the table of contents or the article.  (This isn't the issue, but the cover says alot, especially in contrast to the cover below.)

I remember Wired when it was thin and new, publishing articles by Kevin Kelley about how the Internet was going to create an automatic egalitarian Utopia.  Now it resembles nothing so much as an issue of GQ in the 1980s.  Granted that this particular issue was an old one in the holiday gift-giving season.  But even so.

With the maturation of internet-related corporations, and all the money involved, comes the same sort of excesses as previous rich businesses, like the Google executive who took and overdose (or maybe poisoned) heroin provided by an unhappy hooker on his party boat.   Kind of doesn't fit the revolutionary image.

The most conspicuous difference on the net is the nature and amount of increasingly intrusive advertising.  I've been reading Josh Marshall's site since it was a one-person blog called Talking Point Memo at least a decade ago.  Since then he's been building it as a political news and opinion site, employing a number of others.  Recently he's been pumping up a membership model with extra access while the public site is so clotted with ads in the form of video, banners, and (clearly marked) faux news that the site takes forever to load on both the browsers I use.  Extra incentive to buy the membership I guess.  But the content has itself moved to the most politically sensational, finding every right wing outrage that's easy to describe in a paragraph.  It seems to be all about the eyeballs, but this particular combination of  predictable content and intrusive advertising is losing mine.  It's not a site I check every day anymore.

The struggle for viable economic models, mostly so far involving a geometric increase in advertising, is probably one reason nobody I know of talks about the internet Utopia anymore.  Even universal access to the internet is threatened by proposed new rules that will allow different tiers of service (though in fact, providers are already doing this.) The move from desktops to new devices with very pricey service fees is creating an internet for the well-to-do and nobody else. But it's worse than that--the internet threatens to become a dystopia.

It is already a dictatorship, when users have the choice of "agreeing" to various forms of spying if they want access and services at all.  There was a kerfuffle over a "study" done at Facebook that did more than study--it changed information on individual sites.  Today there's a story based on another study that uses Google accumulated data on searches to determine what Republicans and Democrats search for during extreme weather.  If that's not an actual First Amendment violation, it should be.  But it's business as usual on the internet, where information is what these companies have to sell.