INTERNET ADDICTION?

It is not necessary to have any sympathy for Zuckerberg to recognize how spurious the attempt, by a number of states, to sue Meta for virtually its entire market value is, for allegedly hooking young people on sites like Facebook. Never mind that if you mention it to any young people they will tell you that “Facebook is for old people.” This is a transparent attempt by politicians and lawyers to legally steal someone else’s resources, in a way that will primarily benefit themselves. This is based on the flawed notion that Meta has effectively hooked children on their site. This is wrong, and I’m going to tell you why. 

Assume for a minute that Meta didn’t exist. People, including the young, would still flock to something else, like Tik-Tok,  with the same results. That they may have taken some steps to maintain the attention of their customer  is hardly sinister or illegal. The thing is that getting people to keep scrolling is not restricted to a few companies; it is in fact characteristic of the whole internet. Yet it would be absurd to attribute this to some evil cabal when it is in fact people doing it themselves. 

Every site wants attention from more people and will try to maintain and expand its audience. I’ve yet to watch a Podcast (apart from something on YouTube), but increasing numbers of people are watching them, and the more outrageous and sensational a program is the more likely it is to attract viewers. It is just another conscious method on the part of providers to attract an audience. The reality is that social media, and the entire web, are driven in the same way. Are we now going to assign the government the task of controlling marketing? 

The truth is that the entire Internet is what hooks people of all ages. This is clearly obvious when you see people universally and constantly engaged with their screens. It’s not just social media sites; it’s everything. Take email. What about all the scrolling through that? Yet no one was deliberately compelled to this behavior, and that is true of almost any way the Worldwide Web is utilized. 

We have a problem, but it is hardly restricted to a couple of social media sites, or young people in particular. It is everyone, everywhere all the time, and it has serious consequences for other aspects of life that are more important, based upon the time wasted and deviation from purpose. The only way to mitigate this is for people to wake up to what they are doing and exert some self-control over how their time is being used. 

As far as children go it is primarily the responsibility of parents to address this, not someone else, and certainly not the state, notwithstanding “democratic socialist” impulses. Focusing on children obscures the problem. Of course some of it may be harmful to them, but such things as social pressure would be there regardless, whether handwritten or electronic. Anyone who has gone through high school over the last hundred years can understand this. 

What is warped and missing here is that this is a universal phenomenon, affecting people of all ages. Nor is it the Internet to blame, which after all, is just a neutral conveyor of information. It is us. It is our behavior overall. But it  didn’t have to be this way. I recall in the early days of public use in the 1990s, initially using plain old modems, and then the old Compuserve, where your identity was just a number, and you were charged for your usage by the hour or minute. (If that were still the case you would not see such a widespread waste of time, given the cost). 

Back then the prospects were wonderful. You could research and access information everywhere, saving countless hours of contacting multiple institutions, and I and others still primarily use it that way. It was a living encyclopedia. As a result, universities and research institutes were the first online. That was unfortunately followed by pornography, which seems to attach itself to anything new, going back to videotapes. No one anticipated social media then, until it sprung out of coarser use as the Worldwide Web unfolded and everyone came on board. Once it essentially became free, usage exploded. 

Thus the Internet itself and all the players in it are not to blame for where we are. It is how we have come to be engaged with it, which is to say our behavior. That is the real problem we face, and it is up to us to change.  

HOW THE INTERNET CAUGHT COVID!

Everything went down at our city house for five days: no Internet, no phone, no TV, no anything, due to a broken FIOS box at our house. Our home network was still operational, but not much useful could be done with it. Alexa didn’t work, Ring doorbells were out, thermostats weren’t transmitting, etc. etc. Then it really hit me. Why the hell are we so dependent on the Internet for all this stuff? Why can’t it work locally and give us  control over what is functional in our own homes?

The lame excuse is that using the web enables you to control things outside of the home, but which would you rather have- personal local control or the convenience of turning up your thermostat remotely from your car? I’m not going to speculate about motives as to why things are the way they are, but right now it clearly gives large companies a huge amount of access to your information, how you live, what you do, etc.  and, more disturbingly, they can control things the same way you do. There is no reason why things should be this way. 

Before all these protocols became established I thought of rigging my house up with a character named Max, who spoke like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would have resided in the home and would have taken care of things locally like a sort of virtual valet. Then Alexa came along and I became an early user. But at this pont  I would rather have my Max processing my information than Amazon.  It should be possible for all of these devices to work locally, independent of the Internet. There is absolutely no reason why you at least can’t have both options.

More ominously, suppose that the big boys started sharing the information in concert, or even worse, with the government. As things stand all of them are currently on the same page in sweet harmony (with the potential exception of Apple) and it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the possibilities without getting paranoid. Whatever the case this kind of power concentration ought to be unacceptable, and the time has come to liberate Americans from this electronic yoke. 

*   *   *

Anyway we were still able to do some things via our cell phones by establishing a Hotspot, so we could, to some extent, access the Internet, but none of the other stuff since it is on a different network. Now the fun part arose when we contacted Verizon for service. They responded right away and scheduled a repairman within a reasonable length of time. But at the appointed hour no one showed up, so I called to find out why. The response was that we hadn’t answered a Covid question properly and they wouldn’t send a repairman unless we answered a couple of questions confirming that we weren’t Covid positive and agreed to wear a mask in our own home! 

Now unbeknownst to me my wife had actually spoken to someone at tech support and had answered all the questions appropriately, so that should have sufficed. But somehow they decided to cancel because someone supposedly responded “Yes” instead of “No” to a text message with the same stupid questions. Neither of us ever got it, and although I don’t pay much attention to text since my phone is constantly flooded with Trump messages ever since the NRCC gave it out to everyone. I certainly never answered “Yes” to anything, so it is possible the boys just wanted to goof off. In any case they came two days later after we carefully answered the questions; twice, and yet again just before they would enter the house. So we compliantly masked up when they finally came and quickly replaced some sort of broken doodad. 

Things have really gone completely jabberwocky over Covid. It is the height of absurdity to make an urgent repair dependent on answering a couple of text messages, (and text messages only) confirming that no one in the house has a disease and that everyone is masked. This is just the pinnacle of paranoia in a city where you have to carry a card confirming you’ve been vaccinated just to eat in a restaurant, which is yet another burden on an industry that already has been decimated by government regulations. If all of this isn’t overkill I don’t know what is. Our lives are being run by screwballs and if we don’t revolt soon we are going to be transformed into corporate state run automatons.

EPHEMERAL INFORMATION

 I came into the world with boundless curiosity. When I was a kid I wanted to know everything about everything, and would read vociferously. I wanted to know all there was to know about the world around me, so I would save up my money to buy books that the local Bay Ridge bookstore would order for me, and in my first experience with debt, joined all the book clubs then advertising in the Times Book Review. I would go to Times Square to a store that used to carry newspapers from cities all over the country as well a foreign publications. I knew what the names of the newspapers were in every city and what they were like, and what were the leading European magazines. I would write to companies to get their annual reports, and amassed a huge collection of them in file cabinets. I would also take the subway to the central New York library branch for information I otherwise couldn’t get.  I wanted to know. 

I began to write file cards about news and information, but given how much there was that proved to be unwieldy, and impossible to maintain. That was my first experience with information overload. Given these predispositions over the years I subscribed to a large number of magazines covering a wide range of subjects. But as they were too numerous they inevitably would accumulate in unread piles. First they started to pile up in my parents’ basement, and subsequently in the garage of my summer house. I still maintained the notion that I would go back and read them at some point, and sometimes did so in spurts, when something caught my interest. 

That all began to change somewhat with the arrival of the Internet, as in the early years I could now go to university sites to get information, and more and more publications began to appear on line. At the same time magazines, like newspapers, began to disappear or survived with a fraction of the thickness they once had. So it became easier to cut back on subscriptions, which, coupled with an aversion to the increasingly atrocious and sloppy writing as well as presumably “serious” articles laced with profanity, coupled with a now-rigid uniform ideology in the remaining mainstream general interest publications. On the other hand my mailbox is now filled up with all kinds of information sources, making it tedious to go through email every day, but that is another story. 

But today I had a sort of epiphany as I resolutely decided to dump all the magazines filling shelves in the garage as it finally registered within me that I would never get to read through them all. I found that depressing but at the same time recognized the futility of keeping periodicals going back over decades. Tomorrow being paper recycling day here I began to go through them, and if something grabbed my interest I still set it aside and/or kept a few for archival purposes, but otherwise filled up boxes and garbage cans with hundreds upon hundreds of magazines, or set those of some value aside to give to the church sale.  There was everything from National Geographic,  Natural History, Astronomy and science,  to Wired and news magazines as well as many various specialized and technical publications, disproportionately British, because their magazines are so much better than ours. There were titles I’ve seen selling well on eBay but I didn’t want to bother with the hassle of posting and selling so they simply got tossed. 

In this process I could see the passage of time and how things have changed over the years as events have transpired and people have come and gone, as well as how many things are still the same, human nature being reliably immutable. However, I am keeping my huge collection of science fiction and fantasy magazines going back to the very first issues, but I’ve decided to limit them to the time before and just past my adolescence so that it doesn’t become too big to manage, and in any case I don’t care much for what passes for SF these days and I think it is basically over. There are still over 10,000 books around but unless they are rare, signed, leather-bound, first editions, or aren’t available electronically many of those will be going too. 

For some time  now I  have realized that despite being widely well-read, it is impossible to ever know everything, and for that matter to really know anything, as I have come to realize the truth of what Socrates meant when he said “I know nothing.”

THE FADING PROMISE OF THE INTERNET

The early days of the Internet provided us with a marvelous tool to access libraries around the world, collaborate on projects, and have access to informational previously not easily available. The educational possibilities were endless and sites soon sprang up covering almost any imaginable interest. Email made it possible to communicate instantly with anyone anywhere. The Worldwide Web made it all even more accessible to the average person, and the promise was great. There would be a new birth of freedom and power would become decentralized.

But then came pornography (always an early presence with new technology) and baser subject matter as more and more people gained access, as well as predation, epitomized by hackers who were able to break into and compromise various sites which then required increased security. Internet chat became available and the groundwork was laid for social interaction. AOL provided an easily accessible organized framework, enabling millions of people to communicate and discover others to an extent that still hasn’t been realized by Facebook, which became ubiquitous much later on. At the turn of the century there were several search engines available and no one had yet heard of Google.  As the new century progressed the current incarnation of the Internet emerged, and it is deeply, perhaps irredeemably flawed. 

Today, despite billions of people being online, only a handful of sites get most of the traffic. Only two companies get more than half of all online advertising and that share is increasing as almost 90% of new revenue goes to Google and Facebook, leaving little for everyone else.

As indicated by the chart above this duopoly also gets 25% of all advertising (i.e. including, and at the expense of, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio) and that share is constantly  increasing as well, while the rest shrink. Indeed, for many, if not most people, they are the Internet. As a result the duopoly dominates most of the information on the Internet and have amassed an unprecedented amount of power that the “Robber Barons” of the past could never dream of. 

They are not handling it well. Facebook actively decides what information you get or don’t get, and  Google searches are skewed, yielding paid advertising first, so that you have to scroll down to get to what you are actually looking for. Barring some kind of change or intervention this is only going to get worse. Services are constantly monitoring us yet people have a depressing herd mentality in these things. 

There is even greater peril in other areas. We have a huge amount of personal exposure online. There are constant security threats and your information is simply not safe, and certainly not private. Every other day we read of an organization’s data being compromised, or  even worse, the government’s security being breached. The Internet in its present state is simply not safe. Reliance on the “Cloud” makes this even worse as we become increasingly dependent on being connected. But what happens if it goes down?

A few decades ago there was a vision of a future that had people telecommuting and working from home in the countryside, a small town or anywhere. But it didn’t happen. Instead  companies that allowed this are increasingly reversing themselves and bringing workers back into the office. 

Then there is the social cost, as millions of people have become addicted to social media, and the young are especially vulnerable to predators and character assassination that can have deathly consequences for those who are emotionally overwrought. Indeed some people have become so confused they believe the online world is reality, and if something is on the Internet it must be true, when in fact, it conveys a huge amount of misinformation. Never mind the enormous amount of time wasted online. 

Between emails, chat, and the sites you visit you leave a trail on the Internet that you might one day regret. 

Since people online want everything for free, there is an incalculable amount of theft of intellectual property and creative work, so that many of those that produce these things can no longer make a living. 

Our critical infrastructure is now so wired that we have enabled serious threats like a catastrophic attack on our electric grid, which would cause the collapse of our civilization. 

To fend off many of these perils you are required to maintain ever more complex and varied passwords for the sites you visit.  As things in your home become ever more “smart” via wifi you are that much more exposed. 

Thus, the online world is fraught with peril and must be used with a great deal of caution; hardly the future we expected. There may be a bright future somewhere, but this can't be it.

BAD NEWS

There is a bigger problem with the media today than the bias that often distorts stories. It is not “fake news” either. It is rather, no news. There is a paucity of real news everywhere and far too much goes unreported or is very briefly summarized. Cable news gives us mostly talking heads expressing opinions and not much in the way of real news. Broadcast news isn’t much better these days to the extent that there are too few stories that are selected in a rather arbitrary way, while hiding the fact that they have seriously cut back on correspondents covering various subjects or parts of the world. On cable “news” you see few correspondents reporting actual stories. Newspapers, and news magazines, even the “serious” ones aren’t much better, again with fewer correspondents now covering things regularly. News sites online aren’t all that informative either, especially to the extent that they are simply extensions of the television and publishing companies. 

A recent search I attempted clearly illustrates how shallow all of this is. The other day Vladimir Putin made what seemed to be some important statements, and from the news summaries my curiosity was engaged. But that’s all I could find, anywhere- summaries. I wanted to see more of the substance of what he said but could not find it anywhere from any “news” organization despite fairly extensive Internet searching. But the search engines are part of the problem because if the information was out there they weren’t showing it and what you usually get nowadays is top listings that re mostly paid followed by more that are basically off-topic. I find this happening time after time. Just try this with almost any other story. The idea that we are now able to easily obtain more serious information online is false. What one gets is the usual repetitive nonsense. 

 What we actually have now is mostly a repetitive echo chamber. In other words one source comes up with a story, say, the New York Times or Washington Post, and it is picked up by everyone else and repeated. This creates the illusion that they are actually covering the story from multiple points when in fact they are mostly repeating and uncritically passing on the same story. It is not just a herd mentality, but lazy, superficial reporting, Furthermore things that might really matter are often subsumed by nonsensical, superficial stories. Just think about what stories dominate the news every single day. Barring some sort of natural disaster the news contains a lot of trivia when not devolving into entertainment stories. As a result we are getting dumbed down news provided by dumbed down reporters and commentators. 

It gets worse. What we now get is more “entertainment news” instead of real, hard news. The entertainment news is ubiquitous, with each having its own entertainment program. In the recent past this did not exist at all and there were basically only gossip columns in this area, but now it supersedes everything. We get a huge amount of attention devoted to dopey “celebrities” that in reality are of no consequence in the larger scheme of things, and who are getting far more attention than they deserve. The media that now show unprecedented hostility to Donald Trump are largely themselves responsible for producing his presidency in the first place. Thus for all the information the we are supposedly being overwhelmed with, the truth is that we are less informed than ever. 

KEEP THE INTERNET OPEN AND FREE

If you appreciate the open freedom of the Internet then you must be concerned with something that is about to happen at the end of this month unless it is stopped. The Obama administration intends to give up management of the Internet and turn that function over to an international body, i.e. the United Nations. The American government does not, even now, directly control the Internet. It is managed by a private nonprofit NGO through the US Department of Commerce, which is about to be set loose to fall under “international” control. 

A substantial majority of my readers live outside of the United States and this should concern them as well. Anyone who believes in the free flow of ideas and information should appreciate that under the present system this freedom is absolute. There is no interference and no restrictions at all. Even in countries that attempt and sometimes succeed in censoring the Internet there is no control of information that can still appear elsewhere. This will certainly change if the UN or equivalent body gets ahold of it. There are repressive regimes all over the world that would like nothing better than to be able to censor and control information flows on the Internet. As I wrote two years ago when this noxious proposition first surfaced: 

One could argue that the Internet has long since become an international phenomenon and it therefore ought to be under the purview of an international body. However, there are many other instances of global standards being maintained by a particular country. For example Britain and Greenwich Mean Time, as well as other standards and measure. It is thus, not unprecedented for standards that originated in a particular country to be maintained by that country. Only a basic hostility to the US can account for a wish to change this. 

Furthermore the record of international bodies is less than impressive. There are many countries clamoring for various forms of censorship, and this is the surest path to that end. It will also provide the pretext for exclusion, i.e. of Israel, as has happened in other international bodies. How about Islamic, or any other restrictive standards? How about erasing something because some regime somewhere finds it offensive? This is effectively taking the part of repressive regimes rather than the people on the street. The possibilities for mischief are endless, but what is certain is that it will be the end of the wide open Internet. Some governments may   oppose the US hold on the Internet, but the people don’t because they trust it to be free and open. That will end the minute the US gives up control.

That moment has arrived. It is vital that the independence of the Internet be preserved. Otherwise dark forces will begin to interfere and call for the suppression of information, or worse, the promulgation of disinformation. All those who love liberty must make their voices heard and stop this transfer, or failing that, in the worst case make certain that ironclad safeguards are put in place to assure freedom of expression. The record of international bodies is not good in this respect, and we must be sanguine about the prospects if this transition occurs. The Internet has thrived because the present circumstances have allowed it to. If this “international” oversight materializes you can be certain that it will soon degenerate into control, changing from passive, detached supervision to direct, active management of content, domains, and expression. We cannot trust international safeguards given the atrocious record of hypocrisy at the UN with regard to “human rights,” and the huge discrepancy between the UN charter and the practices of its membership. The safest course is to keep the Internet exactly as it is now, where it originated and developed and has come to serve all of humanity without distinction. 

SOCIALISM......REALLY?

Throughout the last century the US was steadfast in its opposition to socialism. It was an ideology that never gained a foothold in America, even under the most dire economic circumstances like the Great Depression. Moreover sometimes this came at great cost in lives and treasure in the struggle against its most virulent communist form. Yet today we find that at least a plurality if not a majority of that generation referred to as “milennials” has a favorable view of socialism. How is this possible after all we endured to be rid of this noxious notion? University faculties occupied by tenured radicals from the sixties may play a role, but above all else it is a degenerate historical ignorance (not even historical amnesia, as that would imply once knowing something and forgetting it); an abysmal lack of knowledge of history and the human experience that has brought us to where we are today. 

But those of us who lived through it can never forget. Over 100 million people were killed over the course of the last century as a result of attempts to force this idea upon them. It was a titanic struggle for the fate of humanity, and there were times when our prospects seemed bleak and the triumph of freedom was by no means certain. More than one hundred thousand Americans gave their lives resisting the spread of communism, and we must now wonder whether all the sacrifice and struggle has been in vain. What terrible irony that the country that was the bulwark against socialism should now have a generation infatuated with it. 

Some might say that I am confusing communism with socialism, but that is not true. They are the same, with the fundamental operating principle being that the state should control the resources of society, directly or indirectly and manage them accordingly for the benefit of humanity, leaving little to private life.  No matter that the idea has failed miserably wherever it has been tried, from eastern Europe through Asia, while in western Europe what socialist parties there are exist in name only, as they have steadily moved away from any dalliance with socialism. The opposite is threatening the American way of life today as an avowed socialist has gained a considerable amount of support in the Democratic party, leading one to wonder where that party is headed, at least on the national level. Bernie Sanders speaks of “democratic socialism” but this is a man so steeped in ideology that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union at a time when that worker’s paradise was an implacable foe of the United States and the western world, which was little short of treason in sentiment if not practice. 

Ignorance of historical experience allows some younger people to view socialism as something new and appealing, never mind that it is a 19th century idea that has been discarded almost everywhere else in the world. But there is not even a rudimentary ideology in this current incarnation, for it is all about selfishness rather than altruism. They want free stuff. Moreover they feel entitled to it, having been indulged with an abundance of “self-esteem” all their lives, despite lacking any underlying foundation for it. They have grown up with things that are free, i.e. on the Internet via free sites, free information, and corporate models that give away free stuff for other returns, and when that doesn’t do it,  outright piracy. There is thus a sense of entitlement for things that are disconnected from work. 

In childhood many of us have wondered why everything can’t be free, but we usually outgrow such naive notions. Perhaps the provision of free stuff in this economy has delayed the realization of the basic economic facts of life, for it is true that many of these nascent socialists quickly discard these beliefs once they go to work for a living. They come to see that the trouble with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, is that “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

BEING OUT OF IT

I’ve been down with Lyme disease for the past several days and haven’t been up for much of anything as a result. This is the second time I’ve had it, and the seventh year in a row that I’ve been bitten by the ticks that cause it. This is due in large measure to the pathway that tick-bearing deer have made for themselves across my property. They start out at a preserve east of here, cross the beach, and then somehow manage to scale a two hundred foot sandy cliff from the shore in front of my house.  From there they linger in a patches of brush and copse, while helping themselves to plants in the garden. Then they continue on, past a dune to the west and probably somehow make it to the next woodland preserve. The nuisance is still superseded by the wonder of it, and in any case other creatures, like raccoons can also carry the ticks,  which are thus hard to eliminate.

If recognized soon enough antibiotics will get rid of the disease, but this is the sort of malady with which you don’t feel up to doing much of anything, at least until drugs  kick in. It isn’t so serious as long as it’s being treated, but a kind of ennui sets in and things you usually spend time become onerous, such as being constantly online, so I’ve been unplugged over this period, not just from computers, but most television as well. It is amazing how much time you suddenly have to do things you thought you’d never find time for, even while not being well. Other things that previously seemed urgent are less compelling. You become much more attuned to the ebb and flow of life around you, and the most important thing you want to find out is the weather report.

The biggest deterrent to tuning out is that you might miss something. But with sufficient detachment you realize that in the larger scheme of things, life goes on without you, as it did before, and as it surely will when you are gone. You see that your time is truly limited, and really think about what you are spending it on. You can get a slight sense of this when traveling, but everywhere you go the world is wired, and as long as you remain connected you are never completely detached. You don’t get a true sense of life apart from electronics, or of life that is not  socially networked to everyone all of the time. 

Yet no one will go to their grave wishing they had spent more time on the Internet. I am in no way suggesting that everyone should drop out, but rather consider how much time you are spending with electronic media, especially while other things remain unattended, and try to place some limits on it accordingly. I try to limit social media to fifteen minutes a day now, because otherwise you can get drawn in for hours, and miss the larger truth that life is what is happening while you’re on the Internet. 

DON'T GIVE UP THE INTERNET

If someone set out to deliberately undermine the United States he could not do worse than this President. Now he has decided to give control of the Internet to the “world.” This has to do with domain assignments, etc. which are working fine in their present, American, incarnation. There may be some foreign resentment of the fact that the US controls key aspects of the Internet, never mind that they originated and evolved in America and have been working fine. Nevertheless no on can say that the US has in an real way disadvantaged others with this. What’s next? The dollar?

One could argue that the Internet has long since become an international phenomenon and it therefore ought to be under the purview of an international body. However, there are many other instances of global standards being maintained by a particular country. For example Britain and Greenwich Mean Time, as well as other standards and measure. It is thus, not unprecedented for standards that originated in a particular country to be maintained by that country. Only a basic hostility to the US can account for a wish to change this. 

Furthermore the record of international bodies is less than impressive. There are many countries clamoring for various forms of censorship, and this is the surest path to that end. It will also provide the pretext for exclusion, i.e. of Israel, as has happened in other international bodies. How about Islamic, or any other restrictive standards? How about erasing something because some regime somewhere finds it offensive? This is effectively taking the part of repressive regimes rather than the people on the street. The possibilities for mischief are endless, but what is certain is that it will be the end of the wide open Internet. Some governments may   oppose the US hold on the Internet, but the people don’t because they trust it to be free and open. That will end the minute the US gives up control. For an American President to take such a step is just disgraceful. The only way to stop this now is through congress and by making our voices heard. 

SOCIAL MEDIA

I’ve been trying to catch up on things backed up in social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and lately Linked In. I used to ignore or trash requests for the latter as I initially thought it was only for career advancement, job prospects and connections which I didn’t need, but I’ve come to realize that this is the only one that actually pretty accurately “suggests” people you actually know or have a lot in common with, unlike say, Facebook. If you’ve read what I’ve written previously about the latter you know I don’t think much of its long-term prospects or IPO. Facebook basically does what AOL did much better more than a dozen years ago, without some of the inane juvenile rules. Back then people were much more reticent about posting their personal information or pictures (which also wasn’t that easy to share at the time) and usually went by screen names, But at the same time it was a lot easier to find and organize common interests, groups, and discussions.


However AOL was a closed system in its heyday. It all happened within the network, and when the Internet started to boom people left for the larger universe and AOL stumbled, missing the boat when people eventually contracted again into another closed system with Facebook. Before that there was MySpace, which lost out because it allowed pages that blasted music and loaded ever so slowly due to a lot of graphics and had a cumbersome linking system, and by the time it corrected all of that people had moved on to Facebook with its simple interface (at least until it started imposing those awful timelines). But history shows that closed systems don’t last, and people will break out again to something else. This has been true going all the way back to old Compuserve in the pre-Internet era. In those days you had to sign up with one out of several mutually exclusive competing systems and it was costly because you paid by the hour. 

Now everyone’s on Facebook, because... everyone’s on Facebook. But it isn’t the Internet, and sooner or later people will break out again when something else comes along that allows greater freedom and there’s not a smarmy kid somewhere sanctioning you for doing something wrong with your account. For the moment it has displaced a large number of other services, like say Classmates. Why bother when everyone’s on Facebook? But trust me, that won’t last. You can already see that with something like Linked In, which serves a particular purpose well (although it can be kind of funny when you see the things  that some people are “CEO” of, or who insist on headlining themselves as “Visionary” and are serious about it). But as soon as someone comes up with a simple way for people to have their own URLs or equivalent on the Internet the exodus will begin again.

WE NEED AN "OTHERNET"

The NSA is now working with Google to investigate the recent spate of cyberattacks emanating from China. It is high time more attention was focused on this issue, for what is clear is that potential foes now realize they don’t need nuclear weapons and all out war to destroy the United States; they can instead attack it electronically and wreak havoc with commerce, the countries infrastructure, communications systems, and anything else that is wired. Thus far effective defenses against such attacks have been limited, but this should be one of the highest security priorities. Virtually everything is wired today, and all aspects of life could easily be brought to a standstill. Obviously one way to deal with this is to hire hackers to probe for weaknesses and plug them before our enemies can get to them
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What is most disturbing in all of this is that the government itself is not protected sufficiently. Although I was in New York during the horror of 9/11, what disturbed me more even then was the fact that the Pentagon was so vulnerable to attack. It has also been subject to cyber attacks and has been hacked. This is totally unacceptable and a solution must be found that is foolproof.

The Internet initially came to life through DARPA and the Defense department. Given how ubiquitous it is now I believe we need something more fundamental than plugging leaks and fixing break-ins after they occur. Something new is required that will wall this stuff off from the Internet. Top security matters should not be connected to an entity anyone can use. What we need then is an Uber-net, an OtherNet that cannot be penetrated from the existing Internet, particularly for military and security information. This new net would be designed from the bottom up with security as a foremost concern. It ought to be possible to come up with the protocols and even the infrastructure necessary to accomplish this. I’ve come up with the concept, now the people working in these agencies should figure out how to engineer it. I encourage anyone reading this to forward it to the responsible parties.