Love, Anarchictects and the Future of the Independent Web
I was hiking through the hills of Southern France with my brother this past summer. Fields of lavender and cherry trees swept down the slopes, and small paths led down to cute little French homes in the Valley. At one of those cross-paths, we came upon a little bench. Atop sat several bags of cherries, a tin with a slotted cover, and a hand-written sign:
Cerises, 10 Francs.
So I slipped 10 Francs through the slot and took a bag of cherries, and we happily munched our way upwards, amused and sated by this cozy bit of entrepreneurialism in the hills.
(Here's where I abuse my poetic license:)
A bit further up the path, we came across a vending machine. Behind it a generator noisily throttled power to the cooler in the unit, and buzzing neon letters beckoned,
Cerises, 15 Francs.
Stupid Internet
The Internet was built to be dumb. By treating all traffic that coursed through its veins with the same importance, by maintaining ignorance to the carrier and content it transported, it sought to assure that all people using the Internet would have equal access. Public nodes were established throughout the country, and the protocol through which the Internet communicated was an open protocol. Heck, browsers even let you view the source code behind people's pages! Commercial use was all but banned on the original Arpanet. Now, it takes the same number of keystrokes to access Microsoft.com as IlikeCats.org.
Corporations who want to use the web as a business tool don't like that. One consultant put it like this: "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
And while the "dot-com"ers were learning the hard way that the Internet wasn't exactly wired with their bottom line in mind, the Internet's architecture itself had gone through some disturbing changes. Originally built largely through grants from the U.S. government, by the year 2000, five companies owned 80 percent of the Internet's backbone.
Furthermore, while the large telephone companies had been forced to give smaller companies access to their lines to prevent network effects, there was no such oversight to regulate the Internet backbone suppliers during privatization. So the larger companies shunted smaller companies onto clogged public nodes, making a connection through LittleCompany.net much slower than one through HugeComglomerate.com. Plus, some of these backbone providers started building smart switches to prioritize certain traffic above others, accenting this difference in speed even more. Beyond network effects and smart switches on the backbone side, companies like Akamai started speeding things up closer to the consumer (at a price).
The end result is that the Internet isn't as dumb as it used to be; it is no longer entirely ignorant of the nature of the data it carries, or to whom it is directed.
There's a reason that Lady Justice is blindfolded: "Justice is justly represented blind, because she sees no difference in the parties concerned. She has but one scale and weight, for rich and poor, great and small. Her sentence is not guided by the person, but the cause. ... Impartiality is the life of justice, as that is of government."
So where does this leave the independent web? Whereas 10 years ago the amount of money you spent on your website had some effect on how fast or available your website could be, this difference was nowhere near as pronounced as it is now. And after leaping headlong into a virtual money pit, many companies have taken the step back necessary to realize just why their business plans hadn't worked out as they intended, and are pushing to have those reasons nullified from the core.
As many countries creep deeper towards recession, and as concerns for privacy
begin to sway under the weight of perceived safety, the push for accountability
and commodification of the Internet becomes stronger and stronger.
Time to go back to the woods
I've always seen the Internet as an international park of sorts, created for the public. The die-hard capitalist may see equal access and the various restrictions set in place to protect this environment as a problem. Of course, a die-hard capitalist could probably make a whole lot more money if we put malls on top of those mountains. And a lot more people could make it to the top of that mountain if we paved a road up the side of it. But then it wouldn't really be a park anymore.
And the fact remains, the Internet is still a public park. Some companies may be able to buy VIP passes, but you and I can visit just as many sites as Bill Gates, and we can visit IlikeCats.org just as easily as we can visit Microsoft.com. Network effects, smart switches, monopolies and pro-corporate Internet legislation may change that in the future, but we've still got our public park for now.
And in that public park, it's still a lot easier to put up a stool and sell 10-franc cherries than it is to manufacture vending machines and drag generators up the mountainside. And it's also a lot nicer to look at while you're hiking. Ilikecats.org has to provide for a computer, an Internet connection, and some free time. Microsoft.com has to pay for all those cubicles, fluorescent lighting and logoed beanbags. And even with all those cubicles and beanbags, I still like cats a lot more than I like Microsoft.
No company can yet deliver a more efficient web-content solution than a passionate geek staying up in front of his or her computer until 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. With all that overhead of a large corporation comes the need for more revenue. A huge news site can't pay the bills with cute cat pictures. They need to do some market research, establish a broad target demographic, and create content that will reach a wide-enough audience to make their site economically viable. My passion for big ugly yellow buttons will never be adressed as a viable target demographic.
I just have to write about what I love, and, chances are, there are plenty of people out there who love it too. And that's the clincher. Who's going to make more money on the web? Well, if anyone is, I guess it'll be the big companies. And who cares? Well, they do.
The Internet's veins may be a bunch of electrons running through wires, but the blood that courses through its veins is human thought, human emotion. The Internet as a whole behaves very much like a living organism. It learns, it adapts, it grows and mutates as we build, learn from, and then edit it.
All the target marketing in the world will never touch anyone as dramatically a single poignant story from an individual. A substantial portion of the Internet thrives on what has often been called a "love subsidy." If <self-plug>webactivism.org</self-plug> doesn't raise its revenue by the next quarter, will I stop staying up until 3 a.m. on a Tuesday? Will IloveCats.org stop loving cats?
But if TargetedMarketing.com can't prove that its site is recouping its losses either directly or in brand value, how long will its board of directors continue to invest?
As our suit told us earlier, the Internet "was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive." And it's kept thriving by a bunch of hippie anarchists who don't have a strong profit motive. Rewiring the next generation of the Internet so that it is more "intelligent" will make it a lot easier to profit from, but keeping it a dumb international park will keep it open for those driven more by love than profit. And paving the Internet for easier economic access will make the view a whole lot less enjoyable.
