Internet 2.0 is simple but censored. By Daniel Greenfield.
A sizable percentage of the population now experiences the internet by flicking through platform apps like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Amazon.
People flocked to frictionless experiences that simplified the internet from a bewildering jungle to a few apps whose algorithms offered customized push content to provide a distraction for a few minutes or hours. And those platforms ended up in charge of our society and our culture.
Simple but false
Free speech was the first casualty of the simplified internet. Most people give it away for convenience. And they never missed it until suddenly they realized that they wanted to say or hear things that the new platforms no longer allowed. Big Tech wanted people to keep on clicking, but not in a way that disrupted their business model, their politics or culture.
The problem wasn’t just censorship. The nature of how people experienced the internet had been fundamentally altered from open to closed, from pull to push and from independent distribution to a few centralized hubs. …
Web 2.0 wasn’t empowering, it was profoundly disempowering. Moving from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ content turned netizens into passive feed consumers who were being distracted from their lack of agency with a bombardment of fake controversies and social media spawned nonsense. The two defining modes of Web 2.0, narcissism and trolling, were responses to the medium that also defined our society and our culture which is now one long battle between narcissists and trolls. …
Early algorithms like Google’s PageRank that were bottom-up instead became top-down. The only true way to simplify everything was to rig it. And as the internet became everyday life, the difference between rigging the feed and rigging political systems became meaningless. …
“We are the ones we have been waiting for” was the embodiment of Web 2.0. Much like the “You” in YouTube, Obama and Big Tech were seizing power, not turning it over. …
Public frustration with the glass ceiling of the technocratic betrayal led to cultural backlashes on the internet and everything from Trump to Brexit.
Politics is meant to be ugly and messy by design. A too tidy politics has been rigged. Frictionless politics eliminated debate and dissent. …
In a frictionless democracy, captive conservatives can offer “free market solutions” to global warming or racial inequality, but they can’t question whether these should be on the agenda.
The manufactured consensus in which people are allowed to differ on tactics not agenda items is the simplification of electoral politics that has taken hold in many first world countries. It is what leads people to think of different parties as flavors or variations on a theme. The illusion of choice fools many, but not all, especially as real problems take hold and cannot be addressed because they do not fall within the ideological premise of the artificial consensus. …
Everything should be as simple as possible, but not more so — Albert Einstein.
Simplification suggests that life is simple. And that technology simplifies problems rather than complicates them. Thinking this way makes it all too easy to believe in preposterous abstractions like Modern Monetary Theory or Zero COVID. To simplify is to believe that following experts and relying on simple answers will create a natural unity like Obama’s right side of history. When political philosophies replaced religion, they outsourced Divinity to experts and to the invisible hands of whatever guiding force they believed governed all human affairs.
To deny it is political heresy or misinformation. The categorization of classes of speech as “misinformation” or “disinformation” merges politics and technocracy, reducing political dissent to a computer problem. Ideas become binary, either true or false, sorted based on expert opinion.
There is no alternative but to think for yourself and be responsible for informing yourself.
