The Bad Guy on the Internet

Nicholas Carr (he of the “Is Google making us stupid?” article fame) just released his new book, The Big Switch. In his blog, he wrote an essay adapted from one of the chapters of the book. He starts with what he seeks to question, the notion that the Internet is the great emancipator:

“The Net is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” declare Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their new book, The New Digital Age. “Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips.”… Seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the Web was routinely portrayed as a new frontier.”

Then Carr gets down to business, calling the above notion “at best a half-truth and at worst a delusion”:

“The Internet in particular put enormous power into the hands of individuals, but they put even greater power into the hands of companies, governments, and other institutions.”

He may be partly right about that; but he gets his history all wrong: contrary to what he claims, neither the (personal) computer nor the Internet were invented as “technologies of control”. But yes, they have evolved over time to “influence how we think and what we do, to funnel our attention and actions toward their own ends”: just think of those Google ads when you search or the Facebook ads on your page. Though I would still call those nudges, not outright control. You have the choice to ignore the recommendations and ads, don’t you?

Carr also points out that all the datafication that’s going on (see my earlier blog on datafication) which finds patterns that are then used by corporations to decide their next steps. True, but again, that’s not control. At worst, that’s just giving the people bread and circuses.

Carr also says the current form of control is less invasive and hence less visible:

“What’s different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control, even as they grow much larger in scale, become harder to detect and the wielders of control become more difficult to discern.”

Again, there are nudges and attempts to influence, but control is a pipedream.

Some would point to the recent news that the US government has been accessing phone records and possibly Internet access data via companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft as proof of Carr’s argument. But here’s the problem with that argument: the very same Internet companies refused to give data to the British government. So why the difference? It’s rooted in the fact that all the big Internet companies are American and hence can be arm twisted by the US government (but not the British).

In other words, it’s the government that is the bad guy here. Big surprise.