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Veteran author and longtime Silicon Valley resident Andrew Keen has stepped up his criticisms of the Internet. Describing the net as a platform that has devolved from its initial ideals and promise into a vehicle of monopolistic, manipulative and exploitative practices, a Guardian article summarizes views now gaining traction. By using Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber or any other online giant, are we striking a Faustian pact, behind which lays a mass of suffering, surveillance and ruthless harvesting?
Keen supports his arguments by mentioning that even online businesses that cite individual collaboration, those of the 'sharing' economy, are mere cynical fronts for firms already valued in the billions. As money has been sucked out of retail, transportation, photography, research and other industries into the coffers of new Internet giants, the net result has been losses of jobs and the compromise of working conditions. As for the Internet's much-touted 'individual empowerment', Keen counters with the rise of mob mentality - “Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network". Keen's book - The Internet is not the Answer - is, a touch ironically, available on Amazon.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:39PM
This is a great insight. You can get out the pitchforks and torches as long as there is a dictator you can dethrone but what if it's supposedly yourself you have to be angry at? That's the real kicker of democracy.
And it gets even more silly if there are basically two rotten parties you can choose between...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 11 2015, @06:47PM
Interesting...and very true.
If you are choosing between multiple parties you don't have a Democracy, you have a Republic. Of course that first insight can be applied to both (as well as a few other systems probably.) Which is worth pointing out I think because the entire point of a republic is supposed to be to mitigate some of those problems of democracy. If you read some of The Federalist Papers you'll see that America's founders put a hell of a lot of thought into how to prevent the problems of mob rule. The solution they came up with kinda sucks too, but they did put a lot of thought into it...and at the time it might well have been the best solution available. We can do better today, but raw democracy still is not the answer.
I do actually think raw democracy is perfectly fine on the internet though. It's not quite what actually exists there, as a lot of companies have far more power than other individuals. And decisions are most often based on dollars, not votes. But when you're just talking, democracy is fine. It's when you start looking at decisions about where to send troops or who to lock up in prison where things start to break down. Mob rule is only a problem IMO where it becomes impossible for people to simply disagree and walk away. Mob rule is a problem when it starts violating peoples' basic human rights, but it's damn hard to do that with TCP/IP packets alone...