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Internet Is Having a Midlife Crisis (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices has damaged trust in the internet, pioneering entrepreneur Baroness Lane-Fox has told the BBC. The Lastminute.com founder also called for a "shared set of principles" to make the web happier and safer. She said the internet had done much good over the last 30 years. But she said too many people had missed out on the benefits and it was time to "take a step back". "The web has become embedded in our lives over the last three decades but I think it's reached an inflexion point, or a sort of midlife crisis," she told Radio 4's Today programme. Baroness Lane-Fox co-founded travel booking site Lastminute.com in 1998 before going on to sell the firm for 577m pound seven years later. She described the early days of the internet as being "full of energy and excitement," and akin to the "wild West". "There was this feeling that suddenly, with this access to this new technology, you could start a business from anywhere," she said. However, she said that while technology had become a hugely important sector of the UK economy, it had not fulfilled its early potential.
... I cannot think of a better way than imposing more regulation.
And if she thought that the 'net was a "nice" place in its early days, well, I suspect that she missed huge swaths of usenet...
With this said, she is right. The character of the 'net has changed. But her own response seems to be very midlife in and of itself: let's try to recapture a childhood that cannot be returned to.
Check your premises.
It is now the surveillance and propaganda arm of the government, and the surveillance and psyops arm of corporate America
You've lost
You can still start a business with ease the issue is having something original (or improved) enough to compete in the saturated market. As new tech comes out new opportunities for business arrive. It's far from impossible.
I don't like this push to deanonymise the internet. While yes it would be a good thing to prevent bullying on the other hand it needs anonymity to protect those that would use it for things that fall outside their countries laws( oppressive regimes not sickos).
Well, she's 44. And, when I hear someone start talking about how things "just aren't the way they used to be" in that context, I think maybe it's she and not the internet who is having the mid-life crisis.
sothe inaSo the internet is half over?
The Lastminute.com founder also called for a "shared set of principles" to make the web happier and safer.
Umm. Ok. Now compare to:
She described the early days of the internet as being "full of energy and excitement," and akin to the "wild West".
You can't have a vibrant, safe, wild-west. IMO, it's your "shared set of principles" that killed the Internet (or at least made it a lot, less interesting).
Is that a name or a title?
The Lastminute.com founder
Is mentioning some unknown website supposed to clarify things somehow?
#DeleteChrome
"Cyber-bullying" affecting "young people's self-esteem" is not a problem. The problem is that young people from Western countries are now unable to cope with "bad" words which might hurt their precious little feelings. It's not "the Internet is having a midlife crisis", it's "Western civilization is crumbling".
The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices has damaged trust in the internet
Internet culture died around 1993..
Since then, it has been stamped into the dirt by idiots who have begged for and bought with their own money: more surveillance, less freedom, more censorship, less end user control over their own devices, and a wholesale transfer of that control to megacorps. They've constantly favored Facebook and other data-broker intrusions into "private" communication, putting a few for-profit companies into gatekeeper roles over ever increasing swaths of the internet. They've punished open standards and open protocols, replacing them with closed, central control ones. They've removed the ability of people to defend themselves against that "cyber-bulling" by requiring more and more be tied to real world identities, which enables the bullies and denies the victims a key form of self defense.
No... the internet died long before this "Baroness Lane-Fox" probably ever heard of it. She's part of the problem, not part of the solution.
pioneering entrepreneur Baroness Lane-Fox
Who?
The Lastminute.com founder
What?
You have not established who the fuck this person is, what they fuck they've done, or why the fuck I should care.
I'm going to assume it's some egotistical rich busybody that has achieved nothing of significance by their own hand and is looking for some more ego stroking.
Mid-life crisis? It's a cesspool and always has been a cesspool.
It's not having much of any positive benefits and plenty of negative ones.
The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices...
Corresponds directly with the rise of Facebook.
"Let's make the web happy where everyone feels safe!"
in my opinion...backed up by these fats...
"NO OPINION! ONLY HAPPY AND SAFE!"
It certainly has changed over the years.
Back in the earlier 90's it was just a Telnet/FTP/Gopher with the other competing network of Fidonet. It was all about the techies, though there were still some stupid trolls about then.
Over the years it has changed with normal folk getting onboard and pretending the internet is the web (www) and knew nothing of FTP/Usenet/etc and today with have most of the world online is some way or another, big corpartion trying to make money of everyone, companies moaning about adblockers as the Ad industry explotied everyone and now we have Trump and is fake news clan. Where will we be in 5 years time
And right now companies tries to gobble up the users and the traffic making everyone a "customer" when everyone is actually the "product" in big data.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Her own description of the issue sounds more like the Internet has finished growing up, not that it has entered some kind of mid life crisis. It has gone from some kind of playground to a place where real work is being done, kind of like how my computing experience has changed from high school to my current role as a senior software engineer in my 30's. I may still have the desire to play around with new technologies, but most of my time is spent integrating various software packages for the financial industry so I can afford a home in the pricey suburbs.
The midlife crisis is when there is a new younger competitor to the Internet comes along and the Internet needs to feel cool again. Maybe you could say the desktop browsing experience is in a midlife crisis as it competes with the mobile experience. Reactive design is the corvette in this analogy.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The internet has become too corporatized, monetized, and regulated! The internet is nothing more than a tool for corporations to reach their customer bases. It's lost the glamour of innovation and fun. The internet used to be far more open and the barriers to entry far less. Now that big telecom got its ugly mitts on it, you have to pay a minimum of 50.00 a month for a connection. Certainly it is at a higher speed and with today's technologies you need more speed but prices are still high enough to block out access for the poor. The poor need to visit a library with big brother Librarian and Government watching their every move. It is time to fork the internet into a community maintained network to take it out of the hands of regulation and corporate interests.
Things that have contributed to eroding my trust of the Internet to some degree:
Proliferation of fake news (by which I mean ideological propaganda specifically designed to look like news but with incitement as its goal rather than information)
Government (pick whichever one you want) sponsored spying
Dodgy business practices by large, well-known, IT-focused companies
Data breaches and other hacks
Viruses
Spam
Advertisers trying to disguise their ads as if they were a natural part of the parent page
Advertising by looking at metadata
Things that have definitely not contributed to eroding my trust of the internet:
Cyber bullying
Aww yeah, more regulation means it's going to be like when there was no regulation at all.
Everything stupid makes sense when you're doublespeaking.
The point of the internet and anonymity was to minimize the unfair advantages, unearned platform and preferential treatment that women receive due to gynocentrism.
Every 'the internet needs to be better for teh wimminz!' article is just another demand that everything be changed to benefit women with the justification being 'because vagina'.
1993 was the turning point, when the big ISP's like America Online started getting everyone online through free CDs through the post and in magazines, and gave them access to USENET. Up to then it had just been universities and research divisions of corporations, with no AdWare industry. Even a commercial .signature or ASCII banner ad wasn't tolerated.
It would be nice if they didn't know anything about Usenet, then those newsgroups wouldn't be spammed with junk mail ads.
It was worse when Walmart sold bargain bucket PC's . Those systems were absolutely crammed with bloatware and crapware in order to get the price down.
I think she is confusing the Internet, which is a technology used to connect computers together, with the people who use it.
The internet itself is running pretty well. You can transfer files, go to web sites, use text or voice chat. You can even stream video. Amazing!
There are certain sites on the internet where people are going crazy. I don't go to those sites. Also, the sites I do go to where there can be crazy people, I block them, or don't follow them to begin with. I have several family members in this category.
Now, I'm not sure how changing the internet is going to fix the problem of crazy people using it. That's a sociological problem. In general, you can't fix sociological problems with technological solutions.
You mean you think there was turf around that wasn't subject to organized criminal rent seeking? There are lots of billionaires in the world and they don't like competition. Like Katy Perry said in her PRISM concert dvd- "There's not enough room for us all kiddo".
In order to start a new business via access to internet technology requires a server. Try getting the ability to operate one of those with your internet connection without being subject to the arbitrary anticompetitive (*cough* non-commercial servers allowed *cough*) whims of billion dollar corporations, not to mention mobs of fascist anti fascists.
Things could still turn around toward enuf liberty with enuf social justice, but the ship of society is one of the slowest barges around. Fuck, my city is littered with centuries old torture device worshippers polluting my views. Tech is a big deal. The Holocost was real. The next one will be too. Sooner than we'd like if we aren't careful enuf.
The main problem today is the utter hatred that leftists show for anything resembling free expression.
Of course, they're perfectly fine when somebody's expressing something they agree with, or that otherwise conforms to their leftist narrative. It doesn't matter how harmful, abusive, crude or intolerant it is. They're perfectly fine with it.
But the moment any sort of an expressed idea deviates from what leftists define to be "acceptable", all hell starts to break loose. If we're lucky, we only see censorship (downmodding, deletion of content, cancellation of web hosting, de-registration of domains, and so forth). In more extreme cases we see it spill over into rioting and violence perpetrated by leftists.
The attitude with respect to free expression differs significantly as we move from leftists through to centrists through to the right.
Leftists only support free speech for themselves, and not for anyone else. They hate the idea of free expression for all, as this allows others to criticize the leftist narratives that they hold so dear. Such criticism often shows the severe hypocrisy and contradiction inherent to leftist beliefs, and so it must be suppressed to avoid this from happening.
Centrists tend to be indifferent. They usually don't have much of value to add.
Those on the political right have consistently shown that they support free expression for all. They're very much against censorship, and in fact relish in the idea of discussion and dialog. They know that their ideas have a sound basis in reality, and thus they don't need to protect them from criticism. Criticism is welcomed because it actually helps strengthen their ideas. Those on the right support freedom of expression for all, even those who have differing opinions. Their focus is on discovering the truth, rather than pushing a predefined narrative.
It isn't those on the right who are seeking to get comments deleted, users banned, websites shut down and domain registrations cancelled. It's those on the left who are doing everything they can to force those sorts of things to happen, and in turn these leftists are causing severe harm to the fabric of the Internet.
It's not possible to have a robust, effective global communication medium when there are leftists who do everything in their power to control the flow of ideas and information, and in the cases where they can't exert control they seek to destroy the ability to communicate.
As long as the political left is pushing for censorship, the Internet will continue to get worse and worse. We can't have real communication when censorship is involved.
Yes, it is a great tool, unfortunately it cannot be better than those which is serves, humans.
What a great opportunity for us to give up our freedoms on the internet so that a group of people who are not us but are very well meaning can civilize it and of course she had to throw in the obligatory "Save the Cheellrun!" nervous nancy hand wringing about Cyberbullying, oh noes! Unless I misread the article, the people she thinks should take on this "burden" is all the big players who are already bad actors and oh yeah, herself. Did she invite you? No? Don't worry, you let these people set up their bureaucracies in your 'not broken' system and hey, what could go wrong. I for one welcome our new Internet overlords.
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
Yes the Internet grew up and we don't have all the old fun stuff. But we do, if you look for it.
There is so much out there and so much good stuff, if you look for it.
There is so much information and stuff to do, if you look for it.
When you stop looking for it and let others do it for you then you find what they want, not what you want.
I prefer this internet then the one I started with, way back when.
The Bwitish are having a bad case of "No badness please, we're BWITTISH!"; they already have at least three separate censorship mechanisms, and are probably thinking of more ways to make the internet "good and clean" (as Cameron wants it), so yet another "internet pioneering entrepeneur Baroness" (pffft) doesn't really add much substance to the censorship thing, just gives it more upper class varnish. As if they're still relevant.
To me, the interwebbertubes are having bad-and-deteriorating cases of assault on the basic premise of cooperative unfettered information exchange. That's not nice, that's not rosy, that's harsh and brutal and exactly what we need to grow the fsck up. But clearly the Bwitish aren't up to the challenge. Just like Germany isn't (with their "protection of youth" filter), and Russia isn't, and China isn't, and Iran isn't, and Best Korea isn't, and so on. Now you know what "internet pioneering entrepeneur Baronesses" are good for. They know all about good company.
I have a solution but no existing government will like it. Not even Mr. Orange. He can call me to discuss it, though, if his TLAgencies can figure out my phone number.
Or realize it's all gone downhill since we let lawyers on this thing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I blame everything bad on the internet on advertising. Everywhere that vile filth goes, it ruins.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Aside from whatever you're assigned to do at work, nobody has to use these "internet platforms" that you're talking about. Maybe instead of bitching about them, take your ball and go home.
There is probably some absolute fuckwit who sees my previous sentence ("take your ball and go home") as negative or cynical. If you are that type of fuckwit, maybe try to learn that taking your ball and going home, is pretty much the only thing that any happy person has ever done. See a happy person? That person took their ball and went home, instead of getting all wrapped up in someone else's bullshit.
Midlife crisis, pfft. It's easier than ever to make a website. (Or a server app for whatever protocol you're doing.)
By "our" experience, I think this person meant their experience, since they opted in and go to so much trouble every day, to keep up with whatever those nearly-irrelevant companies are doing. Hey, maybe if you didn't bother doing that, your experience would be different. Ever think of that?
The person who wrote TFA is hopelessly caught up in media, and has merely lost her own enjoyment. That's a shame, but quit trying to brainwash everyone else into giving up too. Keep your depression to yourself, bitch.
Frankly you really don't have a clue about cyber bullying do you?
Ever seen a 13 year old girl cut her arms because of it? No, thought not.
Saying things along the lines of "unable to cope with bad words" is a very American 'snowflake' viewpoint, i.e. said in a sad attempt to make other people feel inadequate.
FTFY: You were unnecessarily limiting the scope of your observation.
Requiem for the American Dream
Eh, in the real world I've found there are also non-advertising-caused things that are bad. Like cockroaches and getting punched in the face.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"...she said that while technology had become a hugely important sector of the UK economy, it had not fulfilled its early potential."
I guess that measly 577m pound return you got growing and selling an internet service in less than a decade was somehow a pathetic attempt at demonstrating "potential", right?
The only reason that "energy and excitement" has waned a bit is because your favorite domain name is being squatted on, and a million more patents exist to short-circuit innovation. Other than that, you can still start a business from anywhere (social media whore pays big these days), the internet is financially worth trillions, and is priceless when it comes to the value of the information it holds and delivers.
That's assuming the "wild west energy" is something worth recapturing. Sure, a lot of people struck it rich in the dot com boom, but the lion's share of fortunes made were on the naivete and herd behavior of investors.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Rejected; they're also caused [indirectly] by advertising :P
Requiem for the American Dream
The internet is probably the most important technology since agriculture and will exist for possibly thousands of years. I hardly think we are anywhere near "mid life"
It is still a newborn.
Nope, your comments are not acceptable even with Trump as president.
Sure ANTIFA. whatever you and Soros say.
Or maybe, we all got a little too excited about the Internet and it's potential?
Let's face it, the early Internet was drab and small compared to what we have today. At the time it was the bee's knees, but if you actually had to work today with the tools of yesterday, you'd be awfully disappointed.
Then the Internet grew like a weed, we got hypertext, routine and durable connectivity, and there was success on every front. So then Internet evangelists started to think that the Internet was the answer to every question, the chicken in every pot, the jelly to go with your peanut butter. There are a lot of people (especially here on /.) who still pine for the old days, but not me.
We didn't change human nature. We didn't change greed, or consumerism, or porn, or attention whores, or cute cat videos. We certainly didn't change self-interest.
The Internet is fantastic. We need to stop loading it with expectations that it will end war, replace totalitarian governments, feed the hungry, and close the gap between rich and poor. The Internet was never going to do any of those things. It might play some small role in improving the human condition but the nature of humanity endures.
And if you still don't believe me, tell me what you think of the next /. headline: "The Internet Cures Opioid Addiction, Everywhere, In All Humanity!"
The issue here is our inflated expectations, not the shortcomings of the Internet.
"i can no longer think of easy ways to make money and there for must use convoluted terms to confuse people for long enough to let me get ahead"
The Internet is still the wild west if you know what you are doing, like it always has been, the only difference is the price of admission is a much loftier knowledge base. But then again what do you expect from someone who made it from a booking website and doesn't seem to grasp any of the layers below a web-page.
to quote her directly: "There was this feeling that suddenly, with this access to this new technology, you could start a business from anywhere,"
there still is, etsy, tindie, amazon, ebay etc, you can start a business and sell your wares across the globe and make money for it. the only difference is you will no longer be able to sell that business for 577m pounds as all those large business ideas have already been taken and no ammount of complaining is going to be able to close pandoras box
If you can write that sentence you were probably never bullied to any significant degree. e.g. you're teachers didn't join in. I've known people who had that happen. Repeatedly. I suppose you can say, well, if it keeps happening something must just be wrong with them, but, well, no shit Sherlock. There's a lot of broken people out there. Do you suggest we start rounding them up and gassing them? Because if you're only other response to them is to say "suck it up" then you might as well. It'd be the merciful thing to do.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
... is to call oneself a "baroness" in the XIX century?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I dealt with that; hell, in 5th grade my math teacher (also the football coach) spent the entire year following me around, calling me "quitter" every damned day, because I tried out for football and couldn't play as none of the equipment fit my big fat head.
And you know what? I agree with OP - because I went through all that bullshit 20 years ago, and not only survived it, used that behavior to shape the far more reasonable person I grew into.
That's the choice a bullied person makes - do I let the bullies win, and drag me down, or do I rise above?
So yea, suck it up, because literally no onein the adult world gives half a shit about your feelings, and never will. Learn to accept painful truths, rather than be consumed by them.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The Internet was once a fun place, it had it's share of kooks, but today's Internet is data collection, business, and crime.
Any of these groups will kill all of us before releasing their death grip on us. The late 1990's early 2000's internet is dead, and will never be revived.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Nothing of the sort, there was Usenet and it was about everything, pickup , politics, DIY building .
Well the Brits have single ministry of Truth , called BBC and for that they kind of have no fake news problems. Everything you say in public should be pre approved by a relevant policy committee. And if you want to peel an apple in public, you d need a cold weapon license.
Midlife crisis as in the world is ending in forty years? We're screwed!
There are a few people in this thread asking the important question: "Is her name baroness?" But nobody answering it. I guess I'll have to be that person...
It it looks like it's a title, her name is Martha. Though apparently it's not a title by birth, but rather awarded to her by virtue of the fact that she's rich.
This was disappointing in every respect.
No, the Internet is still in its childhood. Maybe the teen years would be a better comparison. It's still a place where people do crazy stuff, and are stupid enough to think they'll get away with it. I don't think the Internet has reached any kind of adult level of maturity.
With that said, like any teenager, it's sorting itself out. Teens have to crash their car a time or two before they realize that it's a dangerous tool. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are starting to realize that they too are dangerous tools.
There was a company back then offering to provide free PCs if you allowed advertisements. Their commercials mentioned the internet was developed just like television, free based on advertising, so why not have a free PC. After hearing their commercial once too often I sent an email to their support staff and sales and complained the internet was not built from advertising like TV it started as a DARPA project so stop with the false advertising.
Sales didn't answer but tech support sent a reply saying "yea we know but most other people don't so that's our marketing pitch". The ads stopped a few months later and far as I know they went out of business.
I used to get beat up in school all of the time and my parents had me removed from a teacher's class, does that count? (Said teacher had a nervous breakdown and quit later that year). Not for name calling, but for constantly taking my lunch away and not letting me drink from the water fountain. Maybe name calling too, but I don't remember that.
Cockroaches were genetically modified by bug pesticide companies in order to sell more extermination products.
Getting punched in the face is caused by people being targeted by advertising to make them think they're more badass than they really are.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
As someone who was bullied relentlesly for about 2 years starting when I was 11, I disagree with this completely.
What those 2 years taught me is that it is not the words that hurt,
but your (over)reaction to them.
How you react, and what perspective you take is completely under your own control, they are things you choose.
While that's not an easy lesson to learn, your life will be a whole lot better once it's learned, regardless of whether you're being bullied or not.
Being verbally/socially bullied is not pleasant, but it's also not the end of the world.
To be pedantic, Usenet and the internet are not the same...
Can someone tell that lady that you can disable javascript and network without a web-browser?!?!
That cleans up most of it. If you base your business, put your money, or data on it; then you have the right to try and protect it. If you don't know how, maybe you can pay someone. Not much different than anything else. But as soon as we make this thing a legal necessity of life, that is when it all goes down for good.
The only regulation that will change anything, is one that enforces punishment for connecting a non-certified machine to the net. That means no one will be protected from attackers, since you can't know how to use your computer. It'll be against the law. You alter that device and you might as well stamp "Internet Terrorist" on your legal form of identification fakebook account.
We'll get there.
People who came out of a traumatic event well often say it's choice, and that those who can't take it chose unwisely. This sounds to me much like telling someone with clinical depression to choose happiness.
Some people are more resilient than others. Some people have better family support than others. Some people are born or raised better able to handle verbal abuse. Have a little compassion here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This whole internet thing is going to blow over any day now.
I do have a little compassion.
Just not enough to agree with curtailing civil liberties to protect feelings.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
What is killing Internet? Money. Money always ruins everything. When money comes in, all the fun is gone. Internet has become too monetised and thus less fun.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti