About 1995, I became acquainted, thru a German exchange student friend, with a former WWII German Luftwaffe pilot named Jurgen. After spending about 3 years in a British POW camp, he was able to return to West Germany and start a new career in Television and Journalism. When Jurgen visited Oregon after retiring, he hadn't seen much of the world-wide web, at the time, and I, being on the board of a local public-interest ISP, was delighted to give him a tour of the early web-- including the Alta Vista search engine, Netscape, and some of the other archaic online tools.
At the time I was stunned by his reaction. What he said, after watching me search for health information and hot air balloon tours, was that this would become a tool for governments to monitor citizens in very detailed and intrusive ways and, perhaps, take actions to suppress dissenters.
My first thought was that the web was too decentralized for that to ever happen-- all these services are spread out all over the web, owned by many disparate and non-aligned corporations and governments. Again, this was in the mid-90's and there was still an extremely optimistic "this changes EVERYTHING" attitude about the web and the internet at that time. We believed that the internet would always interpret censorship as damage and route around it-- after all, the internet was designed to survived a nuclear war with high degrees of redundancy builit it. It was a heady time and many of us looked to luminaries like Howard Reingold (“The Online Community”) and David Gelernter (“Mirror Worlds”) as visions of a quasi-utopian future that would be made possible by emerging web technology.
But, as I started to form my response to his concerns, all my protestations turned to ash in my mouth. How could I be so sure, speaking to someone with his life experience, what governments would or would not do with this technology? How could I be so sure the technical obstacles to a dystopian nightmare would NOT be overcome by massive funding and some of the best minds of my generation working in compartmentalized projects-- always, of course, seeking not to suppress discussion of issues by an informed electorate, but no, always to detect and suppress terrorism?
I realized I wasn't so sure after all and, as the years have passed, I've often thought about Jurgen's prescience, as a survivor (yes I consider "survivors" to include people on many sides of that conflict) in anticipating some of the abuses of the internet we are now becoming aware of and about my own naivete during the early stages of the web.
Historians of technology and science cannot have been too surprised. When jet planes were new, they were hailed, by many, as a key to world-peace-- How could the citizens of the world, in an age when anyone could get on a plane and go visit another country and make friends there, maintain any kind of nationalistic enmity against another people in another country when they have friends of friends there? Similarly, there were great expectations for electricity, for radio, for television, for the telephone-- and so many other technologies-- the assumption always being that on a “smaller” planet, familiarity between people of many countries would not, somehow, lead to contempt (as it had so regularly in the past).
As FaceTwitGooTube increasingly tightens the thumbscrews on free speech and as net neutrality is being shredded, it’s easy to become discouraged about the potential positive impact of the web and the internet, even for someone like me, except for one thing: The internet isn’t just one technology-- it’s an environment in which new technologies are constantly evolving. New social networking platforms are coming online as alternatives to the big 4. An exodus is in progress. New satellite ISPs are coming online that may break through some of the international barriers that governments have erected against international information sharing. Blockchain technology has given rise to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and we can envision a world economy without the need for international central banks and without the built-in tax of central-banks’ currency-issuing privileges.
But, if we want online freedom, we can’t expect it to be free. What we get for free is ourselves-- ourselves being packaged in a little white box with a generic “CONSUMER” label in black ink and a UPC code-- ourselves being sold to the highest advertising bidder-- our eyeballs in a styrofoam and shrink-wrap package. Freedom isn’t free, as the old adage goes. It will take some of our time, energy and money to build online tools, communities and ISPs that truly exist to serve US instead of some corporate or government master.
Don’t forget-- reaction time is a factor in this test. We have to evolve and use new communication strategies and technologies faster than the “powers that be” can develop tools for suppressing each technology-- and we have to design suppression resistance into our tools. Blockchain will prove to be a formidable opponent for the status quo forces that seek to maintain centralized control, or at least monitoring, for all transactions.
Many of the vulnerabilities of internet freedom exist simply because no one realized the lengths to which corporations and governments would go to monitor and suppress communication by their citizens and the designs that emerged were relatively simple. But as the truth has emerged, the techies among us have begun developing more robust tools -- like the TOR browser, the TAILS operating system, PGP encryption, VPN tools and more. As some internet pundits have observed, the fact that current e-mail communication is so easily monitored by governments and corporations is because we are using the digital equivalent of post-cards instead of envelopes. In order words, we aren’t really even trying to make it hard for them to monitor and suppress communication.
So, push yourself to keep evolving-- extend yourself to new social networking platforms. Install TAILS or some other variant of Linux on a spare computer and try out some new tools. One of the principles of disobedience is to keep moving, keep changing, keep evolving. Darwin said evolution doesn’t necessarily favor the best, the fastest, the biggest or the smartest-- it favors those who are most able to adapt. Keep adapting!