The Internet Was Doomed From the Start

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 classic Snow Crash painted a particularly unique vision of the future internet. He depicted a giant, never-ending road with real estate along both sides. People would buy their plots on the main street so as to attract potential visitors. People with less means would set up off the main drag hoping for some spillover.

The real estate model meant that everyone could manage their property however they felt, with their own style and rules to boot. Visitors could move from space to space, finding the place they wanted to be.

While Snow Crash is classic cyberpunk, it did lay out a potential vision of the internet that didn’t really come to be. In reality, we have entire planned communities controlled by a small handful of companies that never intend for us to leave their sites — in actuality, the internet turned out much more like the vertical campus depicted in another Stephenson novel, The Big U.

These companies (Meta, Google, ByteDance, OpenAI, etc.) dictate what we see in their fiefdoms, how often we see it, and what to sell us to make us feel better about what they’ve shown us. It’s all really a perpetual cycle of engagement that, in many ways, traps us in their ecosystems.

While having so much internet real estate in the hands of just a few slumlords is a big problem, it’s not the main issue. It’s that these companies actively encourage people to share whatever they want, with little regard to truth, public health, or safety — all because outrage is the best way to maintain viewership which leads to more ads and more product sales.

What’s worse, because these companies place very few guardrails in place, people are incentivized to say whatever they want. And, because we’ve been trained to never leave the walled garden set up by these controlling companies, we believe what we see.

This dynamic isn’t new; psychology has a name for it: the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Essentially, Dunning-Kruger asserts that some people with relatively low ability or knowledge in a particular area over-estimate their skills and believe themselves to be experts in that field.

Ever watched a video where someone explains how everything you eat is bad for you, while throwing around some big words that sound important without really ever providing any facts? That’s Dunning-Kruger at play.

Dunning-Kruger has led to things like Q-Anon, right-wing podcasts, and trying to diagnose the president’s health based on a bruise. People with little subject matter knowledge say things in ways that feel trustworthy, leading others to believe it as truth.

In many ways, I’m not immune to Dunning-Kruger myself. I am constantly learning about new trends and issues and finding ways to apply them to what I’m thinking about. The difference is that I try to be honest and never expect anyone to take everything I write as absolute fact — what works for me won’t work for everyone and so on.

The companies who control the internet know that the Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force on their plots of land and they don’t care. Why? Again, it’s all about capturing eyeballs. Whether we stay on their site to watch more or to argue with the people posting, they win. They profit off our numbness, showing us ever more ad-laced content.

The internet didn’t have to be this way.

A 1995 interview between Bill Gates and author Terry Pratchett discussed the potential issues with the internet:

Pratchett: OK. Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the Net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.

Gates: Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes, there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this,” or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper… they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way that you can check somebody's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today.

Gates’s vision is that the entire internet will function like Wikipedia, which has stringent standards and active moderation policies. His naiveté is on full display, whereas Pratchett could see the writing on the wall — anyone can say anything they want on their piece of internet real estate.

As all of the plots of internet land were bought up and subsumed by single entities, truth no longer mattered. The gatekeepers that Gates described were all sent home. Just as Pratchett described, we’re all left to try and discern fact from fiction — and, with Dunning-Kruger in full effect, the fiction peddlers look pretty credible.

We have few options to fix the internet and they will all be pretty difficult to implement, but a better internet is possible.

First, we have to break out of the corporate-owned planned community version of the web and get back to the never-ending road of real estate envisioned in Snow Crash. The indie web is a bastion of entertainment and knowledge. Alternative social networks like Mastodon put the power in the people’s hands and actually do separate the fact from the fiction.

Second, we have to stop thinking individualized content moderation is the solution (like Gates initially proposed) and instead look at wholesale regulation of the internet. As Tamar Mitts puts it:

We will continue to struggle with this problem until we begin treating moderation not as a job for any single platform but as a collective societal and policy challenge—one more akin to environmental protection or public health than a proprietary issue of corporate community guidelines.

A better internet requires electing officials who value factual truth, public health, and freedom of information — it requires supporting legislation that actively tries to make the internet safer, not through meaningless culture-war issues like age verification, but by making sure misinformation, hate, and lies have no place online.

This is not a free speech issue. Yes, people can set up their little corner of real estate and say whatever they want, but we don’t have to provide roads to those sites. We don’t have to be subjected to misinformation or forced to interact with it because we happen to want to communicate with our friends from college.

All of this is difficult — I downloaded Facebook and Threads to post about my book relaunch and, even just for a few days, these apps have a pull. They’re built to make us want to go to them (even with notifications turned off). We have to fight that urge.

If we can reclaim our little plots on the endless road, if we can build spaces where truth and connection matter more than engagement metrics, then we can truly build a better internet.