The original vision for the public Internet that some may assume still applies was that of an open commons of free information exchange on the World Wide Web. As personal expression became further possible through popular hosting services, that expression became a reality for increasing numbers of people who at the time didn’t have and didn’t need vast disposable wealth to stand up a personal website or blog. The gatekeepers of the publishing industry no longer had a stifling lock on whose published material was available to the public—the new concept was refreshing, until it wasn’t.
Almost as if in another example of “this is why we can’t have nice things,” the public information infrastructure became polluted with commercialization (of platform users, beyond legitimate promotion of a business or cause), search engine optimization trickery, stealth monetization, bots and trolls, online bullying and stalking, malware and phishing, and disinformation that goes beyond just stating the case for a position and attempts undue influence through deceptive bait and switch logic riding on clever emotional hooks. The digital arms race between criminals and law enforcement, adversarial nation states, and gray area private entities leaves innocent users caught in the crossfire. Four books (of several good ones) that capture the depth, breadth, and destructiveness of these activities in the public information space are as follows: @War by Shane Harris; The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake; and Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari (which addresses the dangers of mis-managed Artificial Intelligence). These authors’ well researched analyses may boil your blood while simultaneously leaving a sense of doubt that any of these tech-enabled amplifiers of human evil can be countered.
The solution to this dilemma might look something like the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that is being openly discussed among several different countries. The annual Global DPI Summit is an ongoing effort to provide an alternative to the untenable choice between dominant commercial behemoths who profit from the mining of our private data and authoritarian government disinformation. The DPI initiative has participants from international organizations, national governments, nonprofits, and other private organizations that are working together to develop a framework and infrastructure that incorporates safety and privacy protections within public information services—in systems that are not captured by either profit motive or authoritarian control. This would involve international implementation of a government stack, similar to the EuroStack being developed in the EU. This is a project worth the support of all nations and all levels of society worldwide—one that enables genuine human interaction absent the deliberately amplified outrage and algorithm driven clickbait that feeds illicit platform owner profit and conspiracy theory manipulation. It could be a place instead where well resourced logic and empathy join together for the good of all humanity—let’s make it happen.