— and how to fix it —
(spoiler alert: with crypto)
What’s wrong with the internet today ?
1. Internet was originally built with trust in mind
Initial implementations of essential protocols such as SMTP or HTTP did not feature encryption nor security. They used to send and receive plain data packets across networks of interconnected computers.
The internet was thus built with default trust in mind and, guess what, globalized internet-connected world is no longer trustworthy if it ever was. Text communication especially, missing important non-verbal cues, is less and less trustworthy.
Twitter and the other traditional means of communication pushed this logic to the extreme. Today, communicating with someone on twitter, unless you really know that person from personal life, is a hard endeavor to try: it may be a bot, it may be a fake account, it may impersonate someone else. It may not be available, it may exercise their saying no to random people, sometimes of the opposite sex. It may explore karma, energetic, cabbalistic ways to own and exploit the internet. It feels like a living being, caught in an enormous mechanic system of dented wheels, trying to establish a trusted connection of communication on a path which can be jeopardized any time by the least movement of the ever-moving mechanic patchwork of mistrust and hate.
As such, social networks seems to be, more and more a misnomer, which might be replaced with the more appropriate maybe entertainment platforms. The difference is not to be taken lightly: while an entertainment platform can get away with minimum regulations and your usual podcast talk on free speech against privacy issues — a social network is to some extent simply an alternative term for society. As such, in order to work properly, a social network must benefit from variants of all institutions of a normal society: democratic representation, government, free expression, police, democratic regulation and justice, social security.
Is there a common answer to these problems which seem to arise from all parts?
2. Cheap communication is not honest communication
Fortunately there is. They are the product of the thinking of a French researcher, Jean-Louis Dessalles, and of people preceding his line of thought.
It is called the theory of ‘expensive signals’.
The great success of the internet was brought be the cheap cost of communication. Cheap communication is communication whose cost is zero or close to zero.
On the other side, honest communication is expensive communication. As the adage goes, talk is cheap. But honest talk is not cheap and we’ll see why.
A common example features in Dessalles‘ Aux origines du langage or in its English translation Why we speak , the paragaph treating on the peacock’s tail. In nature, a male peacock features a enormous tail which does not make a lot of sense from a purely evolutionary point of view. The heavy tail actually hinders the male’s normal movement and may put to peril his life when attacked; its only function seems to be only that of an honest channel of communication, typically with a female. A healthy, resourceful male sports the open beautiful tail that we know and admire. It is, in other words, an honest way to communicate to females: look how strong I am, what a great partner I can make. As such, costly communication is honest communication; it is expensive and seems to be the natural channel of true unbiased information in nature.
This is not the only example. The animal reign is full of similar situations referenced in Dessalles’ work.
Following the peacock’s trail, the internet is not designed for this kind of honest communicaton. The traditional protocols of the internet: SMTP, FTP, HTTP being designed in competion-free academic places, do not feature a built-in paying feature. Cheap communication can quickly be overcome by less-than- or downright dishonest forms of communication such as advertising, impersonation, fake news and so on.
As such, highly competitive, capitalist enterprises have secured for themselves the lion’s share in the actual revenue-bringing part of the internet business, — bridging older payment forms with newer internet technologies — which is also what keeps alive the mainstream infrastructure.
The ‘free’ part had be subject of a capitalist way of monetizing which basically means finding commercial use for user’s profiles and content.
We do not judge this. Capitalist revenue is the engine of the economic model of the free world. Where there is no money to be made, free entreprise moves its focus. The problem then, I would point out, would not be in capitalism itself, which, as far as this particular article goes, only needs to be thoroughly reglemented and subjected to social justice systems (which basically comes down to respecting countries’ law system). — the problem is that precious content on the internet is not, by design, accompanied by the natural label assigned to it— a price.
HTML, HTTP and all the original web protocol did not foresee specifications for assigning price and payment (and micro-payment) to its functions. As such, the original web was a common endeavor, amazing and magnificent, still, lacking support for one of the engine of the modern (modern meaning since about ~ 550BC) worlds — that is money.
The micro-payment issue was an addition to the bill: most internet content at the beginnings (typically blog articles) were not expensive enough to justify a full-fledged bank card transaction. While not all internet payments are micro-payments, as a general rule, being able to successfully process small amounts seems to be the central point to successful web payments.
As a consequence, piracy has become tolerated on the internet. It is hardly a secret that, for decades now, you can freely download copyrighted material such as films, books and music. Not only is piracy possible but is has become a state of mind of a certain kind of internet users which seem to think that it is normal to steal ideas, text, content or anything really, without paying. They seem to think that sharing should be the norm, regardless of copyright and authors’ right to make a living out of their work.
Enter Crypto
This is why crypto-currencies are a first step to tackling this problem. They are supported by the internet and use web and internet infrastructure.
Crypto has been shown as similar to stocks. But the particularity of crypto is that it has no underlying. If a stock is a part in an enterprise that may produce a physical product or some service — if you can buy derivatives based on oil, gold, wheat or what not — crypto is purely an envelope for the hope that people put in it.
Crypto is then a measure of hope.
As such, it is interesting to point out that mainstream crypto adoption was immediately followed by intense, often automatic crypto trading systems — which amounts to no more and no less than an instrumentalization of hope.
At a social level, intense trading of crypto seems to bring people down, ruin social trust, destroy societal fabric, instrumentalize and distort hope and trust and put people in virtual mental prisons. It also enhances sociopath and autist behaviour, throws people on the streets, distorts normal human relations, enlarges revenue gaps between the rich and the poor.
Can we remedy this? I think we can: making that one step which remains to be done: integrating the crypto micropayment infrastructure into the existing internet. Maybe by largely available open source libraries and plugins, maybe by infrastructure, maybe by sheerly adding dedicated micropayment chapters to the main web protocols RFCs.
Yes you can already pay services on the internet. But, adding payment to web resources is often expensive functionality that need to be added using special development teams which can only be afforded by relatively large structures. It is by no means ubiquitous and even less built-into the internet infrastructure.
An exampe would be the enormous amount of blog pages who may or may not have a precious content. Having good content available for free diminishes the value of their creator. A good novel published on a blog remains without readers, and not being connected with a reliable payment system, leaves its creator a pray of the internet which gets used to ‘eating’ or ‘consuming’ valuable content which is offered for free because the internet does not offer any alternative.
So this step of integrating crypto into the internet remains to be developed. It would mean, for example that there would be a free easy-to-enable crypto payment plugin for wordpress, to make content payable, with cryptocurrencies.
It would be default for new blogs, for new vlogs. For new text, audio and video content on basically any platform. You would simply be conditioned to pay for creators that impose it, or optionally for all the rest: anonymous, or would-be influencers. It would feature an optional way to specify the payer’s reference because, well, you do want that pretty girl to know that it’s you that payed those few pennies.
This is how the internet can be fixed: by integrating in the very protocol support for payment and maybe the most appropriate money support is crypto. Mainstream crypto can be converted to actual money on the exchanges, but also symbolic tokens can be used that are not necessarily listed — as the case may be.
Non sanz droict 