World Wide Death

THIS YEAR MARKS the 50th anniversary of the invention of the internet. One day in October 1969, scientists successfully transmitted data from a campus computer at UCLA to a computer at Stanford. Twenty years later, the infrastructure for the World Wide Web went into operation, and the creation of our whole digital universe quickly followed.

Lately, there have been plenty of days that have convinced me that the invention of the internet is one of the worst things that has happened since our first human parents decided that a little bit of “knowledge of good and evil” couldn’t possibly hurt anything.

Today, with the withering of newspapers and brick-and-mortar retail, all but the most determined Luddites among us are forced to find our information and do much of our shopping in a corporate-controlled web environment that monitors and records our every whim or idle curiosity and turns it against us with barrages of targeted advertising. Most people do much of their socializing and information searches through social media platforms that thrive on ill-informed conflict and hyperbolic outrage.

I’ve known all that for a while, and you probably have, too. But we mostly shrug and live with it. Then one day in March, a man in New Zealand shot and killed 50 innocent people at prayer and streamed a video feed of the carnage worldwide on Facebook Live.

That’s enough.

In the past 30 years, we’ve allowed the Big Tech corporations to create a world in which anyone can transmit anything to everybody without ever stopping to think about it. People have streamed suicides, rapes, and murder-suicides. A couple of years ago, fake news transmitted through Facebook helped the Myanmar military provoke the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. And recently came the Christchurch massacre.

Maybe social media’s utopian vision of universal “connectedness” started out as fuzzy libertarian optimism about human nature among a few Bay Area geeks and hipsters. But it has become nothing more than a predatory business model to enrich the very few, very wealthy investors. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” The social media world has given us plenty of proof of that.

In the past 25 years, Google, Facebook, and Amazon—to name the worst offenders—have become monopolistic public utilities. Like electric, water, and garbage collection companies, they dominate necessary functions of daily life. Those old analog utilities are usually either owned by governmental entities or very tightly regulated by some state commission that sets prices and terms of service. The same should be true of the new digital monopolies. They could be nationalized: It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

But, failing that, they have to come under a regulatory regime that would have the authority to, for starters, do things like ban the sale of personal data and shut down Facebook Live as a public health hazard. But only the U.S. federal government can effectively do that. So, if we want to protect life and promote the common good in cyberspace, we’ve got to send leaders to Washington who will put the public interest ahead of anyone’s private profit.