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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
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.
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).
"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.
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
Since when is disagreeing with someone the same thing as hating free speech?
Free speech gave the original poster the right to say whatever they wanted, and they exercised that right. It does not guarantee them some kind of "safe space" where they can be free of criticism or counterargument of whatever they choose to say.
The reason free speech was guaranteed by the Founders was in order to allow reasoned debate and criticism, particularly of the government, without fear of retribution by that government. But if people as individuals aren't allowed to disagree with each other then you don't have a debate, you just have a bunch of sheep compelled to follow whoever speaks first.
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