The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen

  For the last quarter of a century, we’ve been told ad nauseam by tenured professors of journalism like New York University’s Jay Rosen that the Internet’s destruction of old media is a good thing because it democratizes the information economy. Making a lucrative career from peddling the idea of the online information consumer as “the People Formerly Known as the Audience,” Rosen has become a cheerleader for the decimation of the curated twentieth-century news industry. But Rosen—who was Arianna Huffington’s partner at a failed citizen journalism initiative called “OffTheBus” and who is now an “advisor” to Omidyar’s First Look Media—is wrong about the Internet’s democratization of media. “The people formerly known as the audience” are still the audience—only now they are angrier and mostly more ill-informed than ever. And “the people who used to be the media owners” remain the media owners. Only now they are called Bezos or Omidyar rather than Sulzberger, Graham, or Hearst. And rather than millionaires, they are now billionaires.

  The People Formerly Known as the Audience

  The people formerly known as the audience—the online commentators, tweeters, and posters, the lurkers and that quintessential inhabitant of the Internet, the “troll” (a purposeful sower of discord)—are angry. Very angry. According to a 2013 study of the Chinese social media site Weibo made by Beihang University in Beijing, the emotion that spreads most quickly on social media is anger, with joy coming in a very distant second. According to one academic psychologist, professor Ryan Martin from the University of Wisconsin, the reason anger is so viral online is that we are more prone to share our rage with strangers than our happiness.30 “They want to hear that others share it,” Martin says about social neediness of people’s individual anger. “Because they feel they’re vindicated and a little less lonely and isolated in their belief.”

  Just as the business of online content is returning to a premodern patronage system, its culture is going backward, too. “You do wonder sometimes whether you’re in 2014 or 1814. People telling me they’re going to turn up on my doorstep and murder me, photos of lynchings, racist abuse, anti-Semitism, homophobic abuse,” the English sports broadcaster Stan Collymore, who had been blitzed with angry insults on Twitter after expressing a mildly controversial opinion about the Uruguayan soccer star Luis Suarez, told the BBC.31 This online hatred isn’t just an English disease. In Spain, eighteen thousand people used Twitter in May 2014 to post tweets with a hateful anti-Semitic hashtag after a Madrid team was beaten by Maccabi Tel Aviv in the final of the European basketball tournament.32

  It wasn’t, of course, supposed to turn out this way. According to Internet evangelists like Jay Rosen, Tim O’Reilly, and the FOO Camp unestablishment, the Internet’s so-called disintermediation of media gatekeepers would inspire a democratic enlightenment in which anyone could voice their opinion online through free networks like Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook. The old media, they said, was parochial, self-interested, and sexist; new media, in contrast, would reflect a broad diversity of opinion outside the stuffy old elites at the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN. Old media represented power and privilege, they claimed; new media would empower the weak, the unfortunate, those traditionally without a voice.

  But just as the Internet has added to economic inequality, so it has also compounded hatred toward the very defenseless people it was supposed to empower. Today’s network, of course, didn’t invent hatred. And much of the rage articulated on the Internet would have existed whether or not Tim Berners-Lee had invented the Web. But the Internet has nonetheless become a platform for amplifying the views of what media critic Jeff Jarvis calls the “plague of trolls, abusers, harassers, lunatics, imposters, and assholes online.”.33 And things are only getting worse. “The Internet,” the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo warns, “may be losing the war against trolls” because the speed and chaos of social media provides these anonymous hooligans with the cover to distribute their poisonous messages.34 “The faster that the whole media system goes, the more trolls have a foothold to stand on,” explains Whitney Phillips, an academic expert on online bad behavior. “They are perfectly calibrated to exploit the way media is disseminated these days.”35

  According to the feminist writer and journalist Amanda Hess, women are no longer welcome on the Internet.36 As evidence, she points to the rageful tweets she has recieved, like “Happy to say we live in the same state. I’m looking you up, and when I find you, I’m going to rape you and remove your head,” from men who’ve disagreed with her writing. Hess is far from alone in being stalked online by male psychopaths. When the political campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez petitioned the Bank of England to add Jane Austen’s face to its banknotes, she received an avalanche of rape and death threats on Twitter, including such messages as “All aboard the rape train” and “I will rape you tomorrow at 9 p.m. . . . Shall we meet near your house?”37 When the technology blogger Kathy Sierra received death threats in 2007, she shut down her blog and withdrew from public life.38 While the Hess, Criado-Perez, and Sierra stories have been well publicized, many thousands of other women are victims of a less well-known misogyny on blogs and other online forums.

  Indeed, a 2005 Pew Research report found that the proportion of Internet users who participated in online chat groups “dropped from 28% in 2000 to as low as 17% in 2005, entirely because of women’s fall off in participation. The drop-off that occurred during the last few years coincided with increased awareness of and sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms.”39 This “pervasive misogyny” has led some former Internet evangelists, such as the British author Charles Leadbeater, to believe that the Internet is failing to realize its potential.40 “It’s outrageous we’ve got an Internet where women are regularly abused simply for appearing on television or appearing on Twitter,” Leadbeater said. “If that were to happen in a public space, it would cause outrage.”41

  Hatred is ubiquitous on the Internet. “Big hatred meets big data,” writes the Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz about the growth of online Nazi and racist forums that attract up to four hundred thousand Americans per month.42 Then there are the haters of the haters—the digital vigilantes, such as the group OpAntiBully, who track down Internet bullies and bully them.43 Worst of all are the anonymous online bullies themselves. In August 2013, a fourteen-year-old girl from Leicestershire in England named Hannah Smith hanged herself after she had been savagely bullied on the anonymous teen network Ask.fm. Comments left on Smith’s Ask.fm profile include “go die, evry1 wuld be happy,” “do us all a favour n kill ur self,” and “no1 would care if ya died u cretin.”44 Tragically, there have been a rash of other child suicides on Ask.fm. In late 2012, two Irish girls, fifteen-year-old Ciara Pugsley and thirteen-year-old Erin Gallagher, and Florida teenager Jessica Laney, sixteen, all killed themselves after being anonymously bullied on the site. And in the first half of 2013, two English boys from Lancashire, fifteen-year old Josh Unsworth and sixteen-year-old Anthony Stubbs, both committed suicide after being subjected to hideous abuse on Ask.fm. Unfortunately, Ask.fm—which was acquired in August 2014 by media mogul Barry Diller’s IAC family of websites—is far from the only source of cyberbullying. In September 2013, Rebecca Ann Sedwick, a twelve-year-old Florida girl, jumped to her death from an abandoned cement factory after experiencing a year of bullying45 on Facebook. Then there’s the January 2013 suicide of a fourteen-year-old Italian girl, Carolina Picchio, after she was bullied on Facebook and on WhatsApp, where she received 2,600 abusive messages before her death.46

  Most troubling of all, anonymous networks and apps are now among the hottest investments in Silicon Valley, with venture capitalists pouring tens of millions of dollars into startups like Secret, Whisper, Wut, Confide, Yik Yak, and Sneeky. While Michael Moritz’s Sequoia Capital and John Doerr’s KPCB are investors in Secret and Whisper, Andreessen Horowitz—to its great credit—has stayed out of the frenzy to profit from online anonymity. “As designers, investors, commentators, we need to seriously ask
ourselves whether some of these systems are legitimate and worthy,” Marc Andresseen tweeted in March 2014. “. . . not from an investment return point of view, but from an ethical and moral point of view.”47

  Anonymous or not, the people formerly known as the audience are not only angry; some of them are also propagandists of terror and genocide. After the 2010–11 Arab Spring, many Internet evangelists—such as the Google executive and author of Revolution 2.0 Wael Ghonim—argued that social media networks like Facebook and Twitter were undermining the old autocracies in the Middle East and empowering the people. But as the Arab Spring has degenerated into brutal religious and ethnic civil wars in Syria and Iraq, and the reestablishment of military dictatorship in Ghonim’s own Egypt, social media has been leveraged in a much more corrosive way. “By a geopolitical fluke,” notes the Financial Times’ David Gardner, “the cold war ended just as technology developed unique power to encourage global tribes.”48 Twitter and Facebook are thus being used by both Sunni and Shiite radicals to spread their doctrinal message and find recruits in what the Financial Times calls “Jihad by social media.”49 In June 2014, for example, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) hijacked the soccer World Cup hashtags, used its Facebook accounts as “a death-threat generator,” and broadcast its atrocities on YouTube and Twitter, where it posted a video of a beheading with the message: “This is our ball. It’s made of skin #WorldCup.”50 Researchers at King’s College London have also shown how two Sunni preachers are using Facebook to recruit foreign fighters in the war against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. One of the radical preachers, Musa Cerantonio, this 2014 study shows, has received twelve thousand “likes” on his Facebook page.51

  ISIS’s effective use of social media highlights the core problem with the Internet. When the gatekeeper is removed and anyone can publish anything online, much of that “content” will be either propaganda or plain lies. In the July 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, for example, both sides deployed large teams on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to distribute their own deeply subjective versions of the struggle. Israel deployed four hundred students to run five Facebook pages in five different languages to present its version of the war. Meanwhile, Hamas’s military wing, al-Qassam, was posting tweets in Arabic, English, and Hebrew to its nearly twelve thousand Twitter followers about what it described as Israeli “genocidal aggression” and Palestinian “martyrs.”52 The complex truth about the war, on the other hand, to quote Winston Churchill, hasn’t had time to put on its pants. Indeed, given the power and popularity of social media, particularly among digital natives, one of the most serious consequences of digital age wars like the 2014 Israel-Hamas conflict is the truth itself, which is lost amid the Facebook photos of beheadings and mass executions.

  The people formerly known as the audience are being tricked and misled by much of the content on the Internet, which is about as accurate as an Instagram photo. We were promised that user-generated-content review sites like Yelp and Amazon would create a more honest media. But information without gatekeepers is almost always either inaccurate or corrupt or both. On Amazon, for example, top reviewers get sent a ton of free merchandise, which inevitably affects their reviews.53 In September 2013, New York regulators cracked down on deceptive Internet reviews on nineteen Internet companies including Yelp, Google, CitySearch, and Yahoo, and fined them $350,000.54 Then there are the “click farms” outsourced in low-wage countries like Bangladesh, which are used to produce hundreds of thousands of fake Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers.55 “Individually none of these little lies are ruinous,” notes Tim Wu about what he calls the “little lies the Internet told me” on consumer review sites, “but they add up, and they take both an economic and cultural toll.”56

  Trust is the greatest casualty here. It’s no wonder that the Internet generation is suffering such a scarcity of trust in an age when traditional authority and institutions are in crisis. Even the world’s sixth most popular website, Wikipedia—the most noble and promising of all the user-generated content networks—isn’t really trustworthy. Yes, some of the entries are really very good and it’s hard not to be impressed and not a little bemused by the altruism of its unpaid contributors. But as US scientists found in a 2014 study published by the American Osteopathic Association, 9 out of 10 of Wikipedia’s health entries contain mistakes, with most of these entries containing “many errors.”57 But the main problem with Wikipedia is its cultural biases. Given that it is essentially authored and edited by the Internet, it reflects the libertarian values and interests of its digital natives. And so, as Tom Simonite notes in a comprehensive 2013 article ominously titled “The Decline of Wikipedia,” in the MIT Technology Review, Wikipedia is undermined by its “skewed coverage.” There are too many entries about Pokémon and female porn stars, Simonite argues, and “sketchy” coverage of women novelists and places in sub-Saharan Africa.58

  “The main source of those problems is not mysterious,” Simonite writes of the problems with the lacunae of editorial authority on Wikipedia. “The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90% males, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.”59 Writing about Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco–based organization that runs Wikipedia, the Guardian’s Anne Perkins concurs with Simonite. “The fact remains that what you get in Wikimedia,” Perkins notes, “is the world according to the young white western male with a slight personality defect.”60

  Simonite and Perkins might have been describing the Internet itself, where there are too many abrasive young men with personality defects and not enough accountable experts. It’s Robert Merton’s Law of Unintended Consequences once again. Web 2.0’s cult of transparency and openness, its faith in the wisdom of the crowd, has ironically spawned opaque bureaucracies controlled by anonymous elites. Without paid curators fully accountable for their work, the Internet is degenerating into propaganda, lies, and a surfeit of information about Pokémon and porn.

  Fashion 3.0

  Back in 1989, not only had I been wrong in my optimism about the future of the music industry, but I got the future of the fabric business wrong, too. Twenty-five years ago, the maker economy appeared as dead as my family’s fashion fabric store on Oxford Street. But the Internet has even changed this. Today, in 2014, this maker movement is a much smarter investment than the music business. Indeed, the networked fabric business is one of the newest new things in today’s digital economy.

  Every decade there’s a major revolution in Silicon Valley. In the mid-1990s, it was the original Web 1.0 revolution of free websites like Netscape, Yahoo, and Craigslist. In 2005, it was Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 user-generated-content revolution of Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube. And today, in 2014, it’s the “Internet of Things” revolution of 3-D printing, wearable computing, driverless cars, and intelligent drones.

  To learn more about today’s revolution, I had returned to the scene of my original disenchantment with the Internet. I’d once again come to the O’Reilly Media offices in Sebastopol, the little town up in Sonoma County, California, some fifty miles north of San Francisco. But rather than spending another annoying weekend at FOO Camp, I had come to meet with Dale Dougherty, the guy who first came up with the “Web 2.0” term. And Dougherty’s current venture is Maker Media, a company that he spun out of O’Reilly Media in 2013 but that’s still based at the O’Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol.

  Dougherty is once again pioneering the future with Maker Media. The “maker movement,” which brings a do-it-yourself mentality to technology, is becoming all the rage in Silicon Valley. This frenzy is being fueled by the commercial development of 3-D printers—desktop-sized devices that automate the manufacture of everything from intricate industrial parts such as airplane wings61 to the replacement parts of human bodies. These 3-D printers are like portable factories. By automating the transformation of bytes into atoms, they enable any
Internet user to become a manufacturer. It’s a revolution being pioneered by companies like MakerBot, the manufacturer of the popular Replicator 2 3-D printer. Although we are still in the early, hobbyist stages of this revolution, there is already a small army of do-it-yourself tech enthusiasts using printers like the Replicator 2 to reproduce 3-D images of unborn babies in the womb, 3-D representations of selfies, and the world’s first ready-to-wear, completely 3-D-printed article of clothing—a bikini snapped together with plastic pieces.62

  It might be 1995 all over again. Back then, you’ll remember, it was believed that networked technology could enable anyone to become the owner of a vast record store. Now, with 3-D printers, we can supposedly set up factories in our own homes and, with the appropriate software, create anything we like. Technology is once again the great liberator. And, inevitably, Chris Anderson has written a book hyping a revolution that supposedly “empowers” us to “disintermediate” the industrial factory and manufacture our own products. In his 2012 manifesto, Makers, Anderson, spouting an unholy mashup of libertarianism and Marxism, argues that this “new industrial revolution” democratizes the tools of invention and production. Now that the digital revolution has “reached the workshop, the lair of Real Stuff,” Anderson breathlessly promises us, it will have “its greatest impact yet.”63