The Internet is Gone

The Internet you think exists, or thought exists, is gone. Been gone awhile. It was damaged beyond repair while you watched. Most people did not notice. This was not done by the right-wing, the left-wing, the media, the politicians or users alone. The ultimate attack against the internet was led by the very people who created it.

Yes, the internet has helped many people, but when it started helping the worst of people with the most malicious agendas Jack, Mark, Sergey, Jerry, Jeff  and most others, did as little as possible. At the same time racists, misogynists, extremists, elitists, abusers and malefactors of every stripe did as much as possible to erode the foundation of higher principals it aspired to foster.

There was plenty of warning.

Under the thinly veiled disguise of anonymous rumors, alternative news, suppressed facts and conspiracies an increasingly subjective definition of what are facts and truth emerged. Much of this activity centered on targeting religious groups, minorities, women or immigrants and , as such, was not widely decried. Many people did call out the companies for enabling the abuse which desensitized us to corrosive behavior. Anyone within the industry knew/knows the watchdogs who called for more aggressive action by the platforms.  Both at the companies and in society. Anyone within the industry also knows that most of these people left in frustration, disgust or disappointment when it became clear that the executives of the companies were going to let hate persist unchallenged.

This was years ago.

Now the moral fabric of the internet is in tatters and the intellectual landscape is not looking much better.

Companies prioritized evolving profitability over evolving safety and sacrificed the core of the internet's true value in the process.

Now that users are pushing back, abandoning platforms and apps which fail to protect them, the scramble is on to find a cure. But hate is like a cancer. Surgery is not always the best approach, but true solutions take time, creativity and investment and hate has a tremendous lead in that race.

The New Slave Economy

It's just like the old movie Soylent Green. Just like the slave trade. You are the product. You are what is being consumed, and you have no control, no say and in some cases, you don't even know it's happening.

The internet economy is made of people. It is consuming us as data. Without our permission, explanation or compensation.

Prevailing wisdom by the companies is that the data is aggregate, each person's data is indistinguishable in the larger structure. True and not true.  In a stew you don't know if, at any moment, you are eating the first carrot you put in or last.  The untruth is that the stew you are included in is also used to target you, because the stew always needs more carrots.. "Oh, you're a carrot? How about joining our nice stew? Many carrots here."

We have all experienced doing a web-search for a vacation, or a product, and then being bombarded with ads for those very same places or products. Or how about a major online vendor who offers product suggestions that "other people who viewed cerulean blue sneakers also liked..."  The most innocuous apps and internet connected products collect your information and whenever they can, sell it, and you. Even if you tell FB or Google not to collect or sell your information, that does not apply to third party ads, surveys and forms that you fill out while on Facebook, Google or anywhere else. There is also nothing stopping platforms, which you have asked not to gather info on you, from buying it elsewhere.

There are other services which collect information about you and many others. Some even scrape data about you from websites without the website's permission (see Cambridge Analytica for example). That data is then used to categorize society into neat little stacks for consumerization.  The data can even be bought back by the platforms you have asked not to track you in the first place.

With wearables, mobile computing, cloud systems and Internet of Things, it all gets worse.

Although the plaforms and companies are guilty of exploiting the situation, the root
problem is two fold; users lack of control of  information about them and the question of Terms of Service as a legally binding agreement between companies, users and community.

User data is a Commodity. Customized packaged and sold. Yet, consumers derive little benefit from the product crafted from information about their online activity. Companies will say the internet is the benefit. But when that benefit is used to target, sell and gather more data about you, is that true?

A more equitable system would offer specific services for users who explicitly authorized data collection for/by that service and that service only. Straight up value for value.

This would empower users in how, when and where their data is used. It would also assist in converting website's Terms of Service (TOS) into the contractually binding user protection document it should have always been.

Most companies treat their  ToS seriously. More so since the EU starting enacting strict community protection laws. The reality is that, in their current form, ToS are not binding on the company for most situations. Especially in areas not covered by law.

It may be harsh and extreme to call all this slavery, but loss of control of personal data collection can't be called freedom.

Keeping One of Hitler’s Promises

Seems insane to be writing that something Hitler said has value. The historic value in the totality of what he said is about how deep the darkness of humanity can actually become and how seductive it can be. The single thing Hitler said that has true value ultimately has nothing to do with what he meant. Delusional rantings often work that way. 

The promise of a Thousand Year Reich (Thousand Year Realm, Kingdom) was uplifting to his followers and chilling to his enemies. It was Hitler’s attempt to usurp the legacy and legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806 AD) which has been called “The First Realm” or First Reich.   Now, mere decades after Hitler's promise of the Thousand Year Reich has been destroyed, we are faced with the sad reality that most of the world has forgotten how close we came to seeing that promise fulfilled. And so the problem – to ultimately defeat Hitler’s Reich and insure its like never returns, we must keep the truth, the reality, the nightmare alive - however long it is necessary.

According to an April article in the New York Times, over 40% of adults in the U.S. could not identify the significance of Auschwitz. In 70 years we have lost major pieces of important, tragic, instructive history.

 For a generation children have learned about Nazis from The Sound of Music. Bad Nazis, not the murderous, genocidal reality; so Nazis become less true to fact. Recently a generation has learned about Nazis form video games, where Nazis are just like any other game enemy; less real.  To the current generation, the historic videos on YouTube have no more gravity than cat videos. They are not seriously taught that Hitler drove the pageantry and adulation they see into horror.

Jews are often criticized for not "getting over" the Holocaust. History is not meant  to be gotten over. It is a learning tool, a way to benefit from our successes and our failures. Andersonville, Guernica, Ottoman genocides against the Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks and the treatment of Native Americans are all defining moments in their own time, but have historic value beyond their era. The difficulty in facing the facts of all those events is testimony to how important they are. The Holocaust stands out, but does not stand alone.

It is not hard to understand how some people cannot get their heads around these things. The rational mind wants to reject the implications of the horror unleashed during World War 2 by the Nazis.  In the age of computer generated images though, they let themselves believe these are just images, somehow other, unreal or manipulated.

My astoundingly unfair obligation is fostering this history into the future in whatever way I can.  If it takes a thousand year reich of teaching and memory, so be it. If it takes a  thousand years of nightmares for future generations, better that than anyone, anywhere actually living through such things again. 

Would You Stop Hate Online If You Could?

If you could stop most of the hate on the web, why wouldn't you? I know who you can ask.

Most hate online does not start on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, but that is where it finds its legs. I am not just talking about sexism, racism, ableism or other hates, but instead the ability to casually create and stigmatize any "other".

If the major platforms had put as much effort into user safety as they did into revenue streams, things might be very different.

I have seen the worst of online hate over the last decade in the Western World. It's my job. The calls for an uprising against the enemies of "civilization" (e.g. the world of white European descent) is nothing new. That a critical rhetorical mass has been reached which emboldens such things to action, that is new. It was also inevitable.

The platforms were well aware of the phenomenon of hate speech, but elected to let it remain in order to spur dynamic and heated exchanges on their services. Safety of users was not totally disregarded, but there was a gamble. All of us now know that bet was a bad one. Hate won.

The companies chose to err on the side of allowing more instead of  action that might over limit content. Hateful protagonists were quick to exploit the opportunity. Normalizing hate, camouflaging hate and encouraging hate became the order of the day.  That sliver of hate, allowed by the platforms in an earnest attempt to accommodate free speech,  was used to wedge open  the internet for seeds of  malicious content that are now a vast root network of evil.

Many argue that good and creative content would have suffered from more stringent policies. There is no question that innocent content might have been removed under such a policy. However, now that we are suffering seemingly endless online abuse, more content, innocent and otherwise, is being removed. When good content is removed people appeal to the platform. That's what they do now, that is what they would have had to do 10 years ago. The companies bought time, not progress.

It can also be said that the progress we have seen in controlling online hate, advance algorithms, fledgling A.I.s and armies of moderators, could have begun long before now. Improving the internet environment sooner was possible. In the time we waited, we lost ground to hate and incivility.

If you could stop hate online, why wouldn't you? I don't know. 

Cyberhate - An endless fight that must never be lost

There was a time Cyberhate manifest itself almost exclusively on a limited number of marginal websites, a laughably small number by today’s standards. Largely insignificant websites, even in their own time.  None-the-less, it was there from the first days of the internet.

Extremists and malcontents realized immediately that the new medium was like a fertile plot of soil waiting for weeds to take hold. They invested the time and energy to explore all of the possible ways they could make the best of an unregulated and unsupervised communication channel. 

In that way, little has changed, but everything else has.

There have always been dedicated haters. There always will be racists and xenophobes who reflexively hate what they don’t understand. They permeate human history. Their raw, unbridled hate may be easy to recognize for the desperate destructive thrashing about it is, but that does not mean it is easy to control.

More and more we are seeing agenda based hate. Where, for example  someone expressing a desire for gun control is abused on the basis of their assumed religion, political affiliation, possible ethnicity or anything but the issue that has triggered the abuse. Jews attacked for the actions of the distant Israeli government, all blacks criticized for crime, all Muslims berated for terrorists activity and on and on. It is as if, for many people, speaking their true hate is not acceptable. This is perhaps, because on examination, the true hateful sentiments are the old hates.  

Worst of all is when hate is accepted as dialogue. Normalization of hateful language is surely the soundtrack to the story of civilizations collapse. This is certainly what happened in World War II. In language, losing our ability to coherently express our hopes, fears, aspirations and anxieties is like physically evolving away from having thumbs.

Compounding the problem is the pace of technology. Our tools have advanced faster than we have. With each new development the potential for exploitation and abuse is reborn. We have not yet seen hateful messages appear randomly on Smart TVs, Fitbits or Smart Refrigerators, but the Internet of Things, and whatever comes next will surely bring new abuses. One of those abuses will surely be Cyberhate.

We have fallen too far down the rabbit hole to simply climb out. Our current position is generations in the making. The internet has only made it obvious where we are.  Enduring tools, programs and havens for policy and philosophy are needed. The real fight against hate online may take as long to undo as it has taken to get us here.  We may never completely defeat cyberhate, but we can never stop trying. 

 

Anything online, left alone long enough, will be abused.

Mark Zuckerberg is not the devil. I don't believe he has a malicious bone in his body. That is his problem.

If he had even the slightest inclination to abuse people with his creation,  he wouldn't have his current problem, and we wouldn't have ours. The same goes for Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and most of the other apps and platforms. All were convinced in the blissful ignorance that a grand idea empowering people would allow the best in society to prevail. They didn't see that the deck was stacked against them from the start.

There was internet before Facebook. It was all founded on the same boundless optimism. That electronic Garden of Eden started growing weeds on day one.  In 1995, when the commercial internet was launched, we got Amazon, eBay and Craigslist. It also brought us websites from the Klu Klux Klan and Stormfront (the grand daddy of all hate websites), followed soon after by the National Socialist Movement, white supremacist and violent extremist groups. Hate websites also emerged appealing to white women with recipes and family tips as well as targeting their children with printable racist coloring books. All before Facebook, Twitter and even Google.

 By 2005-2006 when web 2.0, user generated content, Facebook, Twitter and others emerged, it was already too late. The roots of hate had already grown deep in the internet. With each new development; email, mobile technology, interactive gaming, instant messaging, video chat, podcasts and blogging, optimism sprung anew.  We resisted looking at these wonderful advancements through the darkest lenses of possible abuse. However, malice waded in with glee.

History has shown us that every major advance has been subject to abuse - the printing press, the radio, television, phone and fax machine.  The internet is no different. All their inventors felt they were making a wonderful contribution. I envy and respect those who retain their boundless optimism and blissful ignorance. We need them. And they need those of us who credibly and professionally work to see it all... realistically.

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The Justified Banning of Klan Ken

Lessons of hate just keep on giving.

Ken is currently dressed in full KKK regalia and locked in storage closet. He is named Ken because that is what is molded into the back of his plastic head. He is a six foot tall mannequin.  His job is to model one of the ADL's civil rights artifacts, a full set of KKK robes. It is an important thing for people to see.  We knew using Ken to present the Klan robes would be powerful.

We had no idea.

Ken's Klan robes are the real deal, not some costume or idealized Hollywood version. Despite Ken's blank expression, the malice he emits is palpable. There is horror in the history of those robes which transcends my experience. Although perfectly clean, the robes are unmistakably stained with history.

I have no direct experience with the Klan. I have certainly had interactions with other extremists and I am fairly thick skinned in my own right.  I expected to have no problem managing my feelings about Ken. Sorry Ken, you are awful and shocking.

Everyone who meets Ken gasps, groans or curses. And if I am so shaken by him, what about those people whose families were directly impacted by that history he embodies.

Symbols of hate are plentiful. We've all seen the pictures of burning crosses in front of homes and swastikas sprayed on Jewish grave stones. Ken showed me and many others that pictures don't come close to the real thing. That is why he has been appropriately banned from public view, for now.