attention industry

Utopianism will ruin the Internet.

It’s easy to see why utopianism has always hovered around the online world.

I’m firm in my belief that the internet is the most disruptive thing that has ever been created. If the written word hacked the essence of humanity irreversibly by allowing an idea or narrative to be expressed and shared without direct human to human contact, the internet scaled that up a level, removing distance, time, and background information from the equation by letting people share, publish, remix, interact and distribute with the same level of ease as writing.

But the internet isn’t a utopia, because it’s layered on top of old structures, old corporations. Access is provided by telecommunications companies, ‘essential’ services like online storage are created and maintained by start-ups that could be purchased at a moments notice to add a technological sheen to an again media conglomerate. If the internet is a utopia, it’s a false one, in the manner of Wells’ The Time Machine - it seems perfect at the user level, but at night the morlocks rise and eat the pretty girl you were dancing with that afternoon.

Utopianism isn’t a problem because it’s incorrect. It’s a problem because the idea that the internet naturally trends towards a shiny happy state keeps people from doing the important work of keeping the internet meaningful.

Cloud computing is an insane pipe dream when we can’t even control what applications or ringtones get added to our phones, where we can play music we purchase, whether or not Flickr or a similar service will delete the visual representation of our memories, whether Facebook will decide your name sounds to weird to belong to a real person, etc. Living online, right now, is a mix of trust and necessity, buoyed by a mixture of optimism and offline backups.

Don’t see a utopia. See a system of tools. Tools to be evolved, protected, and learned from / about. Utopian thinking inherently discourages meaningful action.