#oneaday Day 355: Contemplating the Web

I read a news article on the BBC this morning where World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee attacked the UK's Conservative party over a recent bit of controversy. During a recent leaders' debate ahead of the upcoming General Election, one of the party's Twitter accounts had apparently rebranded itself "Factcheck UK", suggesting that it was some sort of official fact-checking service for the claims made at said debate — when, of course, it was nothing of the sort.

"What the Conservative Party has done is obviously a no no. That's amazingly blatant," said Sir Tim.

And it is. And this got me thinking… as the man credited with creating what we know the World Wide Web as today… what does he think of what the modern Internet had become?

As it happens, the BBC had already got there before me. Speaking in March of this year, Sir Tim said that he felt the Web was in a "downward plunge to [a] dysfunctional future", and that this needed to be stopped, perhaps through programmes such as Contract for the Web, which he played a part in creating.

Trouble is, the Web seems to be a bit of a Pandora's Box at this point; its lid has been left open for so long now that it's impossible to put everything back inside the box, and any attempts to regulate it in any way will inevitably be met with resistance. Said regulation would probably be unenforceable anyway.

It's hard to argue with Sir Tim's concerns, though, of which he has three main ones:

• malicious activity such as hacking and harassment

• problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait

• unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

All of these are things that are very much in evidence today, and just sort of accepted as part of everyday life. While actual hacking remains a relatively unusual occurrence for most people to come into contact with — by "actual hacking" I mean something beyond someone getting hold of your password and posting offensive things on your Facebook page — few can argue that harassment is very much part of the modern Internet.

And not just in the way that it is most commonly argued, either. While I'm not denying that harassment against specific groups does exist — it absolutely does — there's also lots of it going on under the guise of "activism" and "progressiveness". Just yesterday I saw someone participating in a "controversial food opinions" thread on Twitter — lightweight, throwaway fluff, by anyone's measure — and then get extremely publicly dragged over hot coals by a variety of people for saying that he didn't like Indian food and didn't understand why it was so popular. His words, which were pretty straightforward — and which I don't personally agree with, but I understand where he's coming from — made it pretty clear what he was talking about, yet numerous people took the opportunity to use this as evidence of racism.

This ties in with clickbait, too. I've seen numerous examples of deliberately provocative content presented by commercial websites deliberately followed up by the writers complaining about "how much harassment they received" — when they knew full well that people were going to respond negatively to their Hot Take of the Day when they posted it. It's manipulative and deceptive… and people fall for it every time. It drives me nuts to see.

And then, of course, we have the most difficult to define one; his third point about "unintended consequences". It's difficult to establish exactly how this happened, given that the Web was always intended as an open marketplace of ideas, ideologies and opinions. But as time has passed — and over the last decade in particular, I'd say — people have set up camp in very specific areas, erected fortifications and made it a lot more difficult to exchange ideas and interact with one another. Aggression is the default response to disagreement; many people feel that they have free reign to insult and belittle people with whom they disagree, and this further poisons overall discourse online, because it makes people less willing to share their ideas — and less willing to discuss and help one another understand them.

It's not all bad, of course, The modern Web allows people to express themselves as never before, and have an important outlet for the things that mean something to them. At this point I can't imagine what sort of life I'd be leading if I didn't have my various creative projects to use as an outlet… though I also can't help but think that if the Internet wasn't a thing in the first place, there's a lot of stress and anxiety I wouldn't have come into contact with at all.

In summary, I can entirely understand why Sir Tim might feel a bit… disappointed in what his creation would go on to become. It's like seeing your kid grow up to be a delinquent… only instead of one kid, there's several billion of them.

Bleak? Maybe. But I'm feeling hugely anxious today so just wanted to offload some random thoughts. Thank you for listening!