Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.