Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute has published an article, taken from a talk he gave to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, on LinkedIn calling for a Reformation of the Internet:
There is a bug in [the Internet’s] original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.
Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content.
All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.
Certainly not an essay to everyone’s taste, but there is, as Walter points out, the possibility (and probably the only way to get there) for both classic Internet and new Internet to co-exist. Properly done, a web browser could probably work on both simultaneously. And I have to love his allusion to the ancient Greeks:
In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct.
And while I added that for its smile factor, in a queer sort of way it does play into my thinking about the cancer of national and international corporations (and, yes, full disclosure: I work for one of the largest). The upper management are really the people with the rings of invisibility, because while they make decisions that affect remote communities, they aren’t there to experience the negative consequences – thus they’re invisible – and consequently they don’t care what happens to the environment at their manufacturing plants. The equivalent of the Internet trolls caused the Bhopal disaster.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanywho. This sounds like an interesting proposal which should be pursued by those with the means to make it happen.
