Back To The Dystopia

Information Superhighway. Bet that phrase takes you back. It's now old enough that it's become "retro-futurism," a past vision of the future, akin to Airstream trailers or The Jetsons.

Buy what a lot of people forget (or never knew) is that the phrase "Information Superhighway" didn't originally refer to the Internet. When the Internet was first entering the public consciousness, causing people to consider the civilian application of multipurpose information transmission, they assumed that some new version of the Internet would be built with the public's needs (and size) in mind.

Of course, the public internet never got built. More ordinary people started using the actual Internet, entrepreneurs started seeing up shop there, and it would have taken years to get government and corporations to agree on the format for the new system.

But I wonder what that consumer Internet would have been like. I'm sure it would have been a nightmare. Consider who would have made it:

• Media corporations that were just waking up to the power of intellectual property and the threat of piracy.
• The Clinton administration, which was desperately trying to look business-friendly, and ham-handedly trying to deal with the inconvenience of modern encryption.
• The Gingrich Republicans, who had adopted business-is-good-government-is-bad as their new philosophy.
• Technophiles, whose libertarian ideals were even less pragmatic than today.
• A public that was far less technically savvy, including youth that were much less reliant on modern technology and communication.

So we would have ended up with an internet with copyright protection and surveillance built in, no opportunity for public participation, not even a hint of net neutrality.  I'm betting a lot of what we now see on the net would be different: Startups would be difficult on a net built for large-scale broadcasting.  Innovations that started off with legally-questionable origins (like digital music) never would have happened.

Even though I believe this purposely-designed Information Superhighway would have been much worse than the haphazardly-evolved one we ended up with, I still wonder how we could have designed it better. The fact is, the Internet and its basic services were designed under the assumption they'd be used by a few thousand people in academic and corporate settings in the western world. For instance, if you knew e-mail would be available to everyone on earth, you would have designed it to discourage the sending of millions of messages at once. Perhaps you could also have made a better balance between anonymity and anarchy in online discussion.

This is purely an academic exercise of course; if we were to overhaul the internet today, it would, once again, end up as a corporate and surveillance-state wonderland. I suppose there was a moment in there, say around 1991, when netizens might have realized the Internet was going mainstream, and rebuilt things in preparation.

Why am I thinking about this? I saw a recent story about people implanting microchips in their bodies for identification or information storage. A promoter of this technology made a similar point: we can either initiate this technology now, on our terms, or get forced into it by rules dictated by government or business.