The building of digital dystopia

In July 1993 a magazine printed a cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer, explaining to another dog: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Last October the original drawing sold at auction for $175,000.¹

That is what we do with things once they stop being true. We frame them.

I met the internet as a teenager, when that caption was still a plain description. You picked a name, any name, and walked in. Nobody asked for a passport. You could be whoever you wanted⁠, and everything anyone had ever written down seemed to be lying around for free. That is exactly what a teenager needs, and a lot of who I am was assembled there.

It was a small place, and it did not stay small.²

One of the most visited addresses on it was a town of hand-made homepages. It sold for $3.57 billion in 1999 and was switched off ten years later.³

I have tried to work out when that internet ended, and I don’t think it has a date. It was not knocked down. Something else was built on top of it, one sensible decision at a time. Three parts of the building bother me most.

Papers, please

The first is the door.

Every step has a decent reason behind it. A real name, to stop the trolls. A phone number, to stop the bots. And now a document, to protect the children: since last year American states have been passing laws, one after another, that make websites check the age of their visitors,⁴ and you cannot check an age without checking a person.

I can’t argue with any of these reasons one at a time. I can only look at what they add up to. A place where you used to try on different selves now wants to see the one in your passport before it lets you look around.

The people this costs most are the youngest. A teenager does not need to be verified. A teenager needs somewhere to be wrong, under a silly name, a few hundred times. I watch people younger than me and they are online all day, more than we ever were. But they are not out in the open the way we were. They don’t live on the public internet. They pass through it.

Losing the plot

The second is the feed.

The early social networks showed you what the people you had chosen were saying, newest first. It was dull and it was yours. Then somebody needed a number to go up.

By this April the head of the biggest social network was telling investors that about 30% of what people see in its main feed, and more than half of what they see in its photo app, comes from accounts they never followed, picked for them by a recommendation system.⁵ And from 2017 the same company’s ranking counted every emoji reaction, the angry face included, as five likes⁠.⁶

Nobody sat in a meeting and voted to make people furious. They voted for engagement, and fury turned out to be very engaging. Try it.

What I mind most is what got replaced. The internet I grew up on helped you find your people, and through them some idea of who you were. A feed sorted by time whatever keeps you here does not wait for an opinion to grow in you. It plants one, fully formed, and then measures whether it took.

There is a word for platforms that go this way. A writer coined it in 2022, and this January a society of American linguists made it their word of the year: enshittification.⁷ I respect a profession that can be that precise.

Nobody home

The third is who is actually in the building.

A company that sells protection against bots, so allow for some salt, measures every year how much of the traffic it sees comes from software and not from people. Last month it published the figure for 2023.⁸

There is a theory, born in a forum post in 2021, that the internet has already died and what we scroll through is bots performing for other bots.⁹ I don’t believe it. I am here, and so are you. But I notice it has stopped sounding like a joke. More and more of what I read has the feeling of a room nobody was in when it was written.

Still standing

None of this means the internet is dead. I want to be careful here, because the next paragraph is very easy to write as a funeral.

Nobody set out to build a dystopia. It got built the way most things get built, by reasonable people shipping reasonable features toward a target. I build products for a living. I have shipped my share of recommendation blocks and chased my share of retention numbers, and every one of them made sense on the day.

That is also the hopeful part, because anything that was built can be rebuilt. The browser and the feed were designed for an internet made of people talking to people. If half of the traffic is now something else, then the old doors are the wrong shape, and somebody gets to design new ones.

I don’t know yet what the new way in looks like. I would like it to let you be a dog again.