Our Freedom Online
Our Freedom Online
Reimagining the internet on human terms
Hi friends 👋,
I spend a dozen hours online every day. That is a shocking number. But it seems almost reasonable when measured across all my devices, and split between my work and personal life.
I have ecstatic days where it feels every hour is well spent - used with complete intention and discipline. But most days it feels like the internet got the better of me, as I spend more time scrolling or mindlessly consuming than I’d like to admit. For most of us, this is the reality of life online; that it can be so completely self-empowering and yet so dangerously all-consuming.
That’s what got me thinking: why do we accept this darker side of digital life? The internet, after all, should be made to serve us, its people. Instead, we live in constant tension. Doing our best to walk the tightrope between an online existence that is purposeful and one that is aimless. In this article, I want to understand the causes of our dissonance, so we can imagine a better future for ourselves.
Let’s get to it 🚀
There were some incredible sources that inspired this article. If you’re looking for an interesting book I highly encourage you check out: World After Capital (free!), Revolt of the Public, and Enlightenment Now.
Our Freedom Online
As our primary information system, the internet is failing us. What once was a passive window to the world now has a hidden agenda. We find our feeds controlled by algorithms, indifferent to their impact on our lives. We feel a growing uncertainty about what we can trust online. And our favourite platforms act like feudal states, taxing us in time and attention.
Is this the profit motive gone wild?
In some ways, yes. But there is a bigger picture to propose: in the online world, we are second class citizens.
Though we broadly enjoy our digital experience, it seems coupled with an inseparable human cost. Unlimited knowledge balanced by endless distraction. 24/7 connection through physical isolation. We so deeply rely on algorithms to define our experience that we have pushed our own wellbeing to the margins. What more evidence do we need to create a more human-centric online life?
I argue it’s not evidence we need, but alternatives. We are so limited by our conception of what the internet is today, that we can’t see what it might become. As with most cold starts, it is a failure of imagination - which is the real catalyst for change. Together, across this article and the next, we will stimulate our imaginations: first by understanding the problems of the current internet, and then by presenting a solution.
My thoughts are captured by four core premises. The first two will be covered in this article, and the latter two in it’s sequel article (two weeks from now):
The internet isn’t plagued by misinformation, but by an abundance of information.
Algorithms are not the problem, but the answer to psychological freedom on the internet
Achieving freedom will require building entirely new systems to process and propagate information online.
Our solution lies in Web3 (sorry haters!)
Collectively, the internet does more to influence our attention than any platform in existence. For many of us, it is the greatest source of input in our lives. As vital as clean air and nutrition, the information we consume informs our opinion on the world and our place in it.
The Information Landscape, Then and Now
The internet isn’t plagued by misinformation, but by an abundance of information.
There’s a growing argument that we are living in a ‘post-truth’ world. And while this certainly captures the feeling of today’s confusion, the real question is whether we ever had a firm grasp on the truth to begin with. If we are post-truth today, what intellectual innocence did we then spring from? In Yuval Harari’s essay on the topic, he has this to say:
A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.
Our existence today isn’t defined by having strayed from the path of truth. We were never on the path to begin with! It’s really our inability to agree on a version of the truth that causes so much turmoil. In this sinister reality, facts come second to narrative.
Today’s intellectual chaos can be contrasted by looking to a time when public discourse was more organized. Pre-internet, the boundaries of public discussion had important gatekeepers: credible media institutions. As an information consumer, your world consisted of a handful of easily accessed sources: cable news, your local newspaper, and the government. It was a few-to-one relationship. Easy to navigate and strictly one-way. Your job was to consume. But unless you were a journalist yourself, your own opinions mattered very little.
Putting aside whether this was an era of absolute truth, it was easy enough for large groups to harmonize over a national or local narrative. Society could unify: calling these people friend and those people foe. De facto good and bad were possible because of a cumulative confidence. A confidence guided by trusted sources.
Enter mobile phones. With keyboards put into the hands of the masses, the information landscape turned on its head. Now millions could join the conversation - not just as consumers, but producers. Every blog, tweet, and ‘gram part of a cathartic release. In Revolt of the Public, former CIA analyst, Martin Gurri reflects on the influence of the internet on public debate.
The first significant effect I perceived related to the [media] sources: as the amount of information available to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased.
The old guard - traditional media - hemorrhaged their one defining trait: authority. Any story, no matter how legitimate the source, could be brought into question by a single anecdote. And with a populace armed with cameras and microphones, contradiction is bound to follow.
We don’t live in a post-truth world. We live in a post-authority one.
Algorithmic Intervention
Algorithms are not the problem, but the answer to freedom on the internet
Authority was the force of gravity; holding everything together. Without it, the flow of information has become disordered and we have degraded from a system where discourse was possible, to one where it is impossible.
In this primordial internet soup, the conditions for new life appeared. Amidst a sea of information, we found a way to restore order to the online world. What better way to bring sense to data than a creature of its own making.
Customized to our wants and needs, algorithms offered a fundamentally better experience than generic chronological timelines. They could parse through petabytes of data, and present it in ever more pleasing ways. Personalization quickly became the new standard and algorithms would go on to curate our entire digital lives.
As it would turn out, the introduction of algorithms didn’t incline the internet towards organization, but extreme separation. In just a few years, our online lives exploded into an infinity of subcultures. We became so immersed in personalized content that we found ourselves unable to communicate outside our filter bubble. It became our own Tower of Babel. But it wasn’t the hand of god that separated our species, it was machine intelligence.
Psychological Freedom
I used a term above which I don’t want us to take for granted: psychological freedom. I first encountered this concept reading World After Capital. Though it sounds like a weighty philosophy term, I think it can be understood simply. Psychological freedom is our freedom to have intentions. When we are intentional, we make active choices about the life we want. We make decisions about our health and careers. We choose to spend our time being educated or entertained.
Psychological freedom goes a level deeper. It asks about the worldview that informs your intentions. Are these your beliefs, or were they borrowed from some headline? Do you really want to make that purchase, or was it just compelling advertising? To be psychologically free is to have a worldview that is wholly your own. The degree to which outside forces influence your worldview is the measure of your psychological freedom.
With this in mind, I want to make my formerly implicit message explicit: today’s algorithms are impeding our psychological freedom. If we are a product of the information we consume, then we are very much a product of our algorithms. This matters because personalization is different from actualization. Who you are (or who the recommendation engine thinks you are) is different from who you might want to become.
We should strive to make algorithms part of our ‘becoming’. This is not a question of their use. They are already strictly necessary for life online. It’s about redesigning the internet in a way that returns agency to users. This will demand rethinking our relationship to browsers, identity management, and data ownership in a way that supports algorithms as an extension of our intention.
In a digital age, to truly have agency over our minds we must have control over our algorithms.
The Four Horsemen
Given our understanding of the internet, I’ve broken down the challenges above into four distinct problem statements. Though they are deeply intertwined and co-dependent, I believe the following categories offer the right perspective approaching our future solution:
Consensus: Debate on the internet is unstructured and chaotic. In the absence of rational frameworks for discourse we default to emotional appeal. This makes it inefficient, maybe even impossible, to come to consensus on certain narratives or “the truth”.
Authority: Credibility on the internet is implicitly measured as a function of influence. This can skew conversations away from experts and facts towards those with large followings. So long as this measure remains implicit we can never evolve our judgment beyond a ‘wisdom of the crowd’ assessment.
Media Literacy: We have insufficient information about our information. This problem is structural: being unable to connect claims to credible sources, track how ideas propagate online, or measure authorship bias. But it is also deeply individual, concerning our ability to critically think and overcome biases for updating held views.
Incentives: Current incentives shape our behaviour on the internet. They define the games we play: post for likes, tweet for followers, etc. Any improvement of our digital lives must be coupled with more enlightened incentives that create paths for a better existence online.
In the sequel post, we will use these problems statements to explore and discover tangible solutions. You’ll learn that many such tools are already being worked on, and where they don’t we will create our own.
Conclusions
Some final thoughts on which to leave: It feels strange to critique the internet - an invention that has been so positive for our species. But knowing its immense impact on our lives - good and bad - it’s more pragmatic to believe we should never settle into complacency. What’s good about the internet can be made great, and what’s bad can be lessened or altogether removed.
We must reckon with the truth; that every moment online leaves its mark on who we are. In a world where we are ‘plugged in’ for uncountable hours, that impact amounts to an ever-greater part of our identity. Perhaps even the majority of it. This is more than a critique of the internet, it’s a conversation about our digital rights. In becoming more digitally native we should strive to retain the best parts of our humanity. Even if it means tearing down old monuments.
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With gratitude, ✌️
Cooper
Such a great read!