Andrew Marantz, in a challenging piece in the Sept.
30, 2017 New Yorker, p. 69, called “The More Things Change: does connecting the
world actually make it better?” but called “the Dark Side of Techno Utopianism”
on the cover and in the online article.
He gives a short history of the democratization of
information for the masses, most obviously going back to the printing press,
but even before in ancient times – and also some attention to English Bible
merchant William Caxton. Centuries
later, the Internet became the next iteration of what could amplify the
personal asymmetry of speech.
He goes give some biography of Mark Zuckerberg and
Chris Hughes, and some other people like Christopher Poole. They all wanted absolute
connectivity and free speech at first, and even like in 2011 with the Arab Spring
some of their ideas were going right. By
2016 when Trump one, they learned that the life cycle of free speech with all
its asymmetries was like the life cycle of an insect or of a star. It had a
main sequence.
Much of this has to do with the dangers of asymmetry
when hyperindividualism runs away and people who live at a distance and watch
others gain too much power by staring at them without any responsibility for
them (relativity and quantum theory teach us that). But it also has to do with
the change from Web 1.0, search-engine driven in a simple way inviting to amateur
speakers, to modern social media, which now have to pretend to be both
platforms and publishers, and depend on clickbait for a business model. The 2016
election showed what happens when too many people are left behind and feel neglected. We face returning to gatekeepers, or to using new cyclical norms of "social credit".
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