A History of the Future of the Internet
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For several years I gave talks on the future of the Internet, varying the talks as the Internet evolved. For this talk, I'll do a bit of excavating, digging into past ideas about the Internet's future (via slides for those talks). Was I prescient, or deluded?
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A History of the Future of the Internet
- 1. A History of The Future of the Internet
- 2. The democratization of technological power has made the shape of the future hard to know, even for the best informed. ~ Tim Wu, The Master Switch The past may be linear, but I believe the future is not: it is a vast array. ~ Lea Redmond
- 3. CyberDawgs
- 6. Maps
- 11. Evolution
- 12. From Mindwest Strategies (http://mindwest.net/)
- 14. The Internet and the Web
- 17. Future
- 18. How should we experience the Internet? Should our Interface with the world and its data be owned and controlled by corporations? Or public? Or distributed? What does it mean for a Facebook or Google to “own” a network effect, personal data for whole populations, core interface and infrastructure?
- 19. Questions Identity: who has a right to your data? How do you manage the manifestation and use of your identity online? Power: who has authority for a relationship? Example: vendor/customer – who has a right to manage the relationship? Abundance: how do you manage information and sustain an accurate world perspective with literally millions of potential information channels?
- 20. Scenarios: Network Internet: Free and open network of networks, end to end principle, “dumb network” Cable television: limited selections delivered with a high quality of service. Relatively high barrier to entry on the content side Balkanized hybrid: walled gardens and pay walls plus low-bandwidth, lower-value everything else; providers and users pay for higher QoS
- 21. Scenarios: Applications Many distributed sites, platforms, and applications, open architectures, data portability Mobile and targeted applications Recasting the stockpile of information in usable form (Doug Imbruce in Newsweek, “The Wild, Wild Web”) – Qwiki / Curated information experience: machines filter and present content Facebook/Twitter and Google rule: people filter, find, and present content (with help from search tools)
- 22. Scenarios: TechnoUtopian? DIY home, media environment, life Empowered patient Empowered citizen Sustainable communities Networked transportation Noosphere (global consciousness) Singularity/Superintelligence
- 23. Scenarios: Dystopian? Cognitive automation Outsourcing Rapid change to dynamically stable systems Winner take all business models Efficiency-borne reductions in redundancy and competition Information availability causing loss of individual freedom Network exclusion
Editor's Notes
- Peanut butter, jelly, bits and bytes.
- The future is always hard to know – there are so many possibilities. When I gave talks about the future of the Internet, I think it was more a consideration of the NATURE of the Internet. And as the Internet has evolved, it’s become many things to many people – not one thing with a single path forward.
- CyberDawg Barking! That was the name of my first email list, and “CyberDawg” was what we called EFF-Austin’s social events. There’s something about the Internet and dogs…
- In his book Neuromancer, William Gibson gave us a way to think about computer networks as places, based on a consensual hallucination of physicality. We often thought we were “going somewhere” online. We were in “cyberspace.” Our natural inclination was to map the “space.”
- Kevin Kelly had an Internet mapping project, for “folk maps” of the Internet. This one shows the state of the Internet around 2009. The whole set is at https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinkelly/sets/72157613562011932/with/3390479096/
- A 2007 map of online communities by Randall Munroe of xkcd fame.
- Slovakian designer Martin Vargic mapped the major sites of the web – this is a section of a larger map. He was inspired by the Munroe map, but this is ‘way more ambitious.
- Here’s the whole thang. 2014. A decade after mainstreaming, the Internet was already quite complex and challenging to interpret – or predict.
- We have watched the Internet evolve with adoption. 90% of US adults use the Internet as of 2019 (via Pew Research Center). It took a while, but the craziest among us are now online.
- A brainstorm about the Internet as a platform for “serendipity enhancement.” The idea of web as noosphere had been percolating within a few techno-utopian cells for a time: “a philosophical concept developed and popularized foremostly by the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the planetary ‘sphere of reason’. The noosphere represents the highest stage of biospheric development, its defining factor being the development of humankind's rational activities.” The term was popularized by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Internet seemed to fit.
- In the early to mid 2000s, we started talking about digital convergence. We imagined that all media would eventually be digital, and that smartphone devices would be pervasive. We saw the importance of creating persistent wireless networks, what we called the wireless future. Actually pretty accurate.
- The Internet experience became the World Wide Web experience.
- More evolution – from web 1.0 to web 2.0 to…
- … web 3.0, whatever that might mean. For some of this, like AI, I would argue that the capabilities are overstated. And we seem to be less, rather than more, peer to peer and decentralized.
- This is where the rubber meets the road: thoughts about the future of technology and society.
- That first idea is losing ground to #2 and #3.
- All of the above?
- The cool future.
- The scary future – and this doesn’t mention the Internet as a petri dish for nationalist propaganda, the manipulation of minds through memes.