L. M. Lloyd

When I was a teenager, and the Soviet Union was still around, I used to regale people with hyperbolic tales of a dystopian future, which I was sure was what lay down the path for America. I would plead with people to recognize the little things, which were the first baby steps toward a society that was the antithesis of everything people said set America apart from the "evil empire" of the USSR. I talked a lot about slippery slopes, and unintended consequences to well meaning laws. I carried predictable trends to absurd extremes, to try and illustrate a point. Yet never did I actually expect those dark scare tactics to be so oddly prophetic. I never actually expected that America would become a country with tens of thousands of state video surveillance cameras at intersection, or where the state would charge you fines for not living a 'healthy-enough lifestyle', or where smoking a cigarette was illegal. Sure, I might have told people they could look forward to a future where they couldn't board a plane, train or bus without presenting their papers, but I didn't actually expect it to happen. I certainly never seriously predicted that America would become a secure Homeland, where citizens were denied the right to travel because their name was on a suspicious persons list, or where women are required to be felt up before they are allowed to get on a plane. Even in my most elaborate Kafkaesque vision, I never expected the state to issue software for handheld computers to aid citizens in informing on their neighbors. I never even imagined that the US would have more of its citizens incarcerated than any other nation on Earth. It never occurred to me that people would be arrested for exercising their first amendment rights without a permit, or that American citizens would only be able to gather, under the watchful eye of armed troops in full body armor. No, I never actually expected the bleak reality of my imagination, to become the world I actually lived in.

The reason I never expected it to actually happen, even though I could see the writing on the wall, was because deep down, I really believed that once it became blatant enough for the average American to notice, they wouldn't stand for it. I believed that Americans were, by nature, freedom-loving people, with a healthy mistrust of authority. The very reason for all my dreary prognostications of doom and gloom, was because I honestly believed that if you could just shock people into seeing the disconnect between the rhetoric of freedom, and the developing reality, then they would snap out of it, and choose liberty over oppression. I thought that ingrained in the American psyche, was the idea that it was better for a hundred criminals to go free, than for one innocent man to be imprisoned. I had always taken it as a comforting article of faith, that Americans were the ones who would purposely do the stupid thing they knew was bad for them, rather than submit to to someone telling them they had to do what was good for them. I had never questioned that Americans were the people who would die to protect your right to say the most offensive shit imaginable, no matter how much they hated you for saying it. In my imagination, Americans were the type of people who would go back to a barter economy, before they would stand for businesses reporting their cash transactions to the FBI. In short, I apparently completely misjudged the culture in which I grew up.

I was reading a fascinating interview a Facebook friend sent me, and started to reply to him, but realized it was a long enough topic to deserve a post. One of the things I saw mentioned in the interview, was a concern, which I have heard voiced quite a bit around the world, that people fear 'the Internet' will soon be under siege by corporate forces, who will seek to "own and control it." Now I don't know if it is because I have actually been involved in the Internet industry for so long, or if it is because I am American, and we have a bit of a head start on a lot of the world when it comes to the Internet, but for whatever reason, my perspective puts me in the unenviable position of delivering an uncomfortable message to the everyone. I'm afraid that fight already happened around the turn of the century, and the corporations already won. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding around the world, of what kind of control corporations want from the Internet, which is probably the reason people don't understand that they already own everything on the Internet.

See, corporations don't want to keep people off the Internet, they don't want to decide who does or doesn't use the Internet, they don't want to control what you do on the Internet. They want three simple things.

1. To convince as many users as possible that their service is essential to their life.
2. To use this perception to raise their stock valuation.
3. To find a way to monetize as much of their user's lives as possible.