When I was a student in the early nineties, like many people I was impressed by the concept and the reality of the Internet. A number of things that were very hard before the Internet, became possible.
I was an active person in student movement, mainly working on lowering the financial barriers to education. I saw (and still see) education as a very important tool for people to achieve something in life. For many people, education has been the tool that allowed them to escape from a circle of poverty.
The Internet opened a myriad of ways to improve this even more. It offered the possibility to lower the barriers to information, news, discussions, knowledge and wisdom. If we could make sure everyone, no matter what background, has access to the Internet, our collective knowledge would increase, which would benefit many things.
In those early days, I participated in the creation of some “platforms” that allowed many people to collaborate. Access to those platforms was mostly free, because we did everything in our spare time, driven by passion, and the infrastructure was often provided by universities.
I’ll never forget a discussion I had with a fellow student, in 1994. He told me that soon, access to information on the Internet would not be free anymore, and that business models would rise taking advantage of the opportunities of the Internet.
At that moment, I didn’t believe him. The Internet as I saw it was created, maintained, and expanded by people with vision, ambition, dreams, creativity, and with the guts to make things happen.
The naive me didn’t see that entrepreneurs and marketeers were already creating platforms to monetize the Internet. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I’m happy for those early visionaries who created a good business, leveraging the opportunities created by the Internet. I never really succeeded in transforming good ideas and code into a great business model, but it’s good that others managed to do so, and the economic gains thanks to the Internet are probably very important.
However, the most famous business model currently on the Internet — or more specific, on the World Wide Web, worries me. Many websites and platforms seem to be free, but they are not. Users get the idea that they are getting free access to news, information, a network of friends,… but they pay a lot. They give up their privacy and independency. The amount of trackers on websites is scary, our data is traded between huge IT companies and other commercial companies. We are the product.
If I compare the platforms we created in the nineties with what is today offered by Facebook, I don’t see a big difference in functionality. But there is a huge difference in the goal, and the way it is presented to the user. On Facebook, and by extension other sites/platforms that generate revenues by selling ads, the goal is to keep visitors as long as possible active on the platform, so that more ads can be shown. It’s a very simple rule, and it works well. In order to keep visitors, the platforms have to show content that a particular visitor wants to see — otherwise they leave. It’s not in the interest of Facebook to show neutral, balanced content. A strong pro or con post is more likely to get peoples attention — and their eyeballs. And thanks to the huge surveillance network of trackers and data processing, the platform knows exactly who you are and what posts will make you stay longer on the site.
Unsurprisingly, popular posts are often from people bragging about what they are buying and doing, begging for likes.
This is not the Internet I hoped for, in the early nineties. We can and must do better. Therefore, I #deletefacebook.
Johan's blog 