Whatever happened to our dream of an empowering Internet (and how to get it back)
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
Thank you very much, whatever happened to our dream of an empowering internet and how to get it back?
00:24
I am, as you have heard, a senior lecturer in intellectual property. Last year I gave a talk on copyright and artificial intelligence, the video is somewhere. I'm using too much my hands, I realized at some point.
00:43
So I always start with an apology, and the apology that I'm going to have today is that the second part of the title is a bit of a clickbait lie. I have no idea how to fix the internet, obviously, but I was inspired a lot by the theme of the Republica this year.
01:12
So much so that I decided to jump into a topic that is outside of my comfort zone.
01:22
It's outside of copyright, it's outside of internet regulation, and I felt very strongly that there is something that has been lost with the internet, and I wanted to explore this. So I'm going to go into topics that are, I'm going to be informed a lot in my expertise in internet regulation in some ways, but
01:49
I'm going to talk to you mostly as an internet user, as an avid internet user, as a blogger of many years, as one of you.
02:02
So, it's going to be divided in three parts. First, the explanation of what is this dream, the dream of the empowering internet. The first thing that I felt was that when I entered the internet for the first time, and I won't tell you exactly how long ago that was,
02:26
but there is this dream that I used to have, and I can tell you very clearly that this was a very, very powerful dream. The dream that the internet can educate people, that can communicate people, that can empower people, that can bring people
02:42
together, that can reduce inequality, reduce discrimination, decentralize, and of course, be the source of unlimited amount of cat pictures. Now, this dream is a dream that I think is shared by many, many people online.
03:01
Many of you will be familiar with this, which is perhaps one of the founding texts of what later became known as cyber-utoponism. John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, which tells us that the internet is a special place, is a space that is going to be free of government action.
03:26
Actually, John Perry Barlow tells us very, very strongly that governments should actually get out of the internet, that they don't have any power on the internet, that they don't have any control over what happens on the internet, that they don't understand the internet.
03:41
And it was a very powerful message that I think convinced quite a lot of people at the time. Now, in internet regulation circles, this founding text has now mostly been used as a joke. Some people cite it as, oh, look how naive people were back in 1996.
04:04
They thought that the internet was actually going to be a new place, a powerful tool, a new space that was going to be free of governmental action. Of course, I still have met lots of people that find this text as an inspiration, but
04:24
I think that the idea that the internet is itself an unregulated space has not aged quite well. Another text that I found quite interesting was that in 2006, Time magazine actually declared us the person of the year.
04:46
Because of the rise of social media, because of the rise of interaction to a level that was never seen before, Lev Grossman, who was actually, some of you may know as the author of the Magicians series of books,
05:04
now it's a series highly recommended, he wrote this actually, a quite interesting text, on declaring us, the people of the internet, the person of the year. Saying that pretty much that all of this was interaction was going to change the world as we know it.
05:23
This came to what is known as cyber-utopianism. The internet is unique, technology can save the world, the internet empowers people, and an educated, informed, democratic, egalitarian, globalist societies will rise out of the internet.
05:45
So all of these ideas, what is considered to be cyber-utopianism, were prevalent in many texts around that time. Up to the point that about 2010, 2011, is what I would call peak cyber-utopianism.
06:08
I'm not going to tell you who wrote this, but it's a text of someone that is proposing that Twitter should have been nominated to the Peace Nobel Prize.
06:22
Without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy. Things like the Arab Spring in 2010, WikiLeaks, the collateral murder video was released around
06:40
that same time, Bitcoin was created slightly earlier, but it started becoming prevalent around 2011. All of this gave people the idea that governments were on the retreat from the internet, that transparency was on
07:00
the rise, that whistleblowers were going to win the transparency wars, that governments had to be afraid of the internet, and that the internet was going to empower and make this dream that I was describing a possibility, a decentralized, almost, where governments would be mostly administrators.
07:25
Now, this, of course, was shattered at some point. I think that right after 2011, we start seeing several things that affect our dream.
07:42
Now, back in 2007, before all of this, Cass Sustain, in a very interesting, prescient book called Republic.com, now there is a Republic.com 2.0, which has been updated, but even back then, he was describing something that he called the Daily Me, that is
08:05
almost to a letter describing the filter bubbles that have become so prevalent in recent years. And he was describing this internet, where we could do whatever we wanted, but we also could filter out every type of information that we didn't like.
08:25
So we would only read and watch things that we liked, and never have to come in contact with an opinion that we didn't share. In 2011, Evgeny Morozov, which wrote a very, very interesting book called The
08:44
Net Delusion, is probably the text that single-handedly burst the cybertopianism bubble. He comments in very, very scathing criticism of the dark side of the internet. The
09:09
internet can be a force for good, but also it can be misused by governments, specifically, to target people, to target activists, and this is part of some of the things that we don't like about the internet.
09:29
Then there are what I call the force horsemen of the infocalips, the surveillance state that has been unearthed by the whistleblowers,
09:44
Ed Snowden, we owe him quite a lot, of showing us the dark side, that the internet is actually being used and misused by governments to spy on all of us. Previously threats from private enterprises that were being harvested, our data is
10:02
being harvested, all the ways of abuse and hate have always existed, but somehow the internet tends to make it sometimes even worse. And of course security breaches and all the attacks and security attacks that we have witnessed in recent years.
10:23
Other things that have shattered our dream of the internet, things like filter bubbles that were already, as I was saying, described before, the post-factual society that has been enforced almost by the internet because of the same filter bubble, sometimes people that share a wrong idea
10:47
sometimes get together and they reinforce each other. The rise of the anti-vaccination, I don't want to get into controversies like that, but the rise of the flat earth, more people believe that the earth is
11:06
flat now because they get into groups and then they start reinforcing those ideas. Growing centralization, actually the internet is supposed to be decentralized and we should never have seen things like the blackouts that we have seen in the last few years
11:24
because of our over-reliance in cloud computing that is actually putting all of our eggs in one basket. And this is not supposed to happen, it was never supposed to happen. Things like, it's reinforcing inequality in many instances.
11:40
Just to mention one of my topics, copyright enforcement. So this is the second part, the negative part. I'm going to try to revive the dream. Some suggestions have been made, for example, an attempt to use legislation and case law to fix some of the problems.
12:08
All of the problems are extremely complex that I have told you there is no solution. So, for example, things like anti-abuse legislation, revamping, creating content filtering obligations, website blocking has been used considerably in copyright infringement, for example,
12:27
reinforce defamation law, make people who defame online more liable, criminalize things like revenge porn, and right to be forgotten, which is a right that we have in Europe.
12:43
However, these tend to, these legislative solutions, and I am a lawyer, I should have included that in my apology, actually. These legislative solutions often miss the mark. For example, in January 2010, someone
13:06
called Paul Chambers, and apologies because the picture is a little bit blurry, wrote a tweet saying, crap, Robin Hood Airport is closed, you've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport scary high.
13:21
He was prosecuted by the UK government for this because it was a threatening joke. It was considered a threat under the Communications Act 2003. He was convicted, and it took three appeals for this conviction to be
13:41
quashed, eventually. So, the often governments and legislation and courts miss the joke. This was obviously a joke. Everyone who read it thought it was a joke. But it took three appeals and millions of pounds to have this injustice reversed.
14:01
Things like regulatory efforts often miss the mark. Sometimes they want to pass a legislation or a regulation that completely misses the point of what the internet is actually doing, or how the internet works. Or they try to fix something and actually create something that is actually worse. Also, we have very complex interaction between rights.
14:26
For example, if we like something like the right to be forgotten, I personally think it's a good thing. We have a very strong conflict between privacy, the person's right to privacy, and freedom of speech.
14:43
We always have all of this very complex interaction of rights, so the law cannot solve everything. Social corporate responsibility, can we rely on the companies to save us? Can we rely on people like Facebook and Google and Twitter to actually try to fix all of those solutions?
15:08
They can do it through moderation, content blocking, clear removal policies, and most importantly, transparency. However, often we have very lack of transparency from the companies. They're conflicting commercial interests. Sometimes
15:28
it's in the best commercial interest of a company not to remove something or not to tackle a problem because it's actually not in their best interest of their advertisers or whatever. There is also often a lack of consistency between platforms. One platform handles
15:44
abuse in one way and another platform handles it in a different way. And there's always the underlying Western bias. A lot of these companies operate in a very American-centric environment, and I'm from Costa Rica, often miss many of us.
16:05
Another solution that has been provided by some people is to try to de-anonymize the internet, because a lot of times anonymity is blamed as the cause of a lot of abuse, particularly.
16:21
The idea is that people behave, normal people behave in one way, and if they are anonymous or you cannot know their identity, they're going to behave completely different. This is John Gero's greatest internet blipwad theory. Normal person plus anonymity plus audience is a total blipwad. However, there
16:49
is no evidence whatsoever that this works, that the real name policies that are being pushed by some people actually work. Anonymity can be a good thing. In some circumstances, we may need some anonymity. Anonymity can be a right, can be
17:07
an important tool if you're a whistleblower or if you're in a regime that actually criminalizes your very existence, for example. Most importantly, there is now evidence, and I'm citing a paper here, very interesting, that tells us
17:24
that sometimes real name policies and de-anonymization can actually lead to an increase in discrimination and harassment. So, should we bring in the robots? Use artificial intelligence and machine learning to try to solve the problems.
17:48
There are lots of, this is actually increasingly quite a growing field, to which, for example, has now started using machine learning in their moderation of chat services.
18:02
Google has just opened up their machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, just I think in February of this year, for troll fighting and abuse fighting. The idea is that machines can help us. However, of course, often the machines are
18:25
trying to use a machine to solve a complex issue, it won't solve the problem. This is one of my favorite text cases, it is very recent, that sometimes just adding an artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm is not going to solve the problem.
18:44
Often, actually, the algorithms are going to reflect the biases of the people that created them, the people that operate them, and the people from whom they are learning. So, that may not be a solution. Now, maybe a combination of all of the four solutions can
19:06
help, and I think that in their own way, perhaps, we can start chipping away and recreating the dream. Now, I want to keep the dream alive. The first way in which you have to recognize this is to say that the internet is a force for good.
19:28
To recognize that for all the problems, all the faults that we have identified, that the internet can bring us together, can help us communicate, and all of the things that I described as a dream that we used to have.
19:41
We have to recognize, first, that the internet reflects society and the individuals in that society, so if we are abusive, if we are, as a collective, as a society, showing discrimination and doing all sorts of things, the internet is not going to solve this.
20:06
The internet is actually just going to reflect this. So, we have to recognize this first. Do not feel the trolls. Do manage expectations. The internet is not going to help all of the problems that we have. The internet is not going to end poverty. Blockchains are not going to end poverty. Technology is
20:30
not going to help us. Technology might help us alleviate some problems, but the problems are there. So, please, one of the things that we have to do is recognize the limits of
20:41
technology, recognize the limits of the internet, and not expect that they are going to help us. And most importantly, please, the internet is not Silicon Valley. We have to stop thinking that all of the solutions that work in San Francisco are going to work everywhere else.
21:01
So, I wanted to finish with two things. First, to keep the dream alive, I love the topic of this Republica. I think this is a step in the right direction. Make things like love against hate. Yesterday Jeremy Zimmerman said use love against hate against the machine.
21:32
Make civility great again. Things like I love, there is a wholesome memes Twitter account that I highly recommend for people to look at.
21:41
Make things nice. Sometimes you have to fight, but sometimes just keep consuming wholesome memes and be courteous to each other online. Sometimes say nice things to someone on Twitter, it doesn't hurt. And also, the second thing, I want to make snowflakes great again. For too long
22:08
have we been falling for the insult that calling someone a snowflake is an insult. Particularly the alt-right and some right-wing groups have been using this
22:24
to tarnish people. I actually think that snowflakes have a lot going for them. Lots of snowflakes together can bring things to a standstill. Remember when we brought down something called SOPA and PIPA together with the internet, we can have a lot of power.
22:43
And most importantly, remember this, lots of snowflakes can create an avalanche. Thank you very much.
23:02
I don't know, we were sort of, had a little bit of time for questions, but I would be extremely surprised if there is any question. Are there any questions? Let's surprise others.
23:24
After saying that, I just dissuaded everyone, I realized. You shouldn't say that. I shouldn't say that. People shouldn't ask me questions because I completely dissuade. We should wrap it up then. Thank you. Thank you. A warm applause.