In 1996, John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and guru of Silicon Valley’s hippy-tech idealists, wrote a stirring utopian manifesto about the future of the internet. Addressing the leaders of the world order gathered at Davos, he declared:
“Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind … We will create a civilisation of the mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”
Twenty-three years later, this utopian fantasy has been replaced with an internet that is more akin to the movie Blade Runner: a murky megapolis polluted with the smog of disinformation; where dreams of freedom have turned into unprecedented levels of surveillance; ruled over by a small group of unaccountable mega-corporations who loom over the internet-city exploiting its disoriented, powerless and resentful subjects, who are both their addicted users and the products they suck data from in order to make the powerful even more untouchable.
The great theme of Blade Runner is the struggle to tell the difference between real humans and “replicants”, robots impersonating humans. In today’s Blade Runner internet we also struggle to parse the real and the fake, as bots and fake accounts swarm social media pretending to be real people, distorting our sense of reality. These online replicants can be used to attack an enemy, or, more insidiously, make a marginal theme feel mainstream.
As decades of academic communications research have shown, people tend to adopt opinions they think are common, what the internet researcher Samuel Woolley calls “manufacturing consensus”. Faking social media accounts leads not just to individual users being deceived, but to a society that loses touch with what it really thinks, where what it “really thinks” can be reprogrammed.
In a discourse that can be so easily distorted, it is tempting to give up on any hopes for a democratic public sphere, where ideas and evidence are weighed and debated, and decided on by real citizens, and where one person has one voice. This is a challenge to the primacy of democracy as a model for governance. The message of today’s digitally driven dictatorships, from China to Saudi Arabia, is that democracy cannot cope with the online dimension, and in the confusion it’s better to surrender freedom of choice to centralised powers that use our data to make decisions for us.
In the social-media slums and darknet alleys of our Blade Runner internet, you meet the sleazy dealers of semi-legal and downright illicit services to help you manage this reality-warping game to your advantage. They sell bot-nets and hacking services, surveillance tech and data dumps. Like any dodgy salesman, they promise you tantalising dreams of unverifiable victories. At the right price they claim to have the “magic sauce” to win you elections, manipulate the behaviour of your enemies, bankrupt your rivals’ business.
“Team Jorge”, an Israeli online black ops unit uncovered by the Guardian and its partners in a stunning sting operation, is part of a whole scuzzy industry (“Team Jorge” deny responsibility).
In my last book, This is Not Propaganda, I met scores of such disinfo-dealers, from Manila to Mexico City. I was always fascinated with how they justified themselves. All were amoral – you had to be for this game. Many were outsiders who had come to the big city to make it, and saw their stories purely in terms of a little guy from the provinces playing the game set by others. Somehow they made their dirty work sound heroic. Everyone agreed that they didn’t set the rules. That was the fault of the politicians and big business who controlled the internet-city, and of the clients who paid them. If they didn’t offer these services, someone else would.
And the sad thing is, they have a tiny point here. For what will happen now that Jorge is busted? The tech companies will pull down his replicant accounts, their sticky plaster fix against “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”. But the brutal fact is the whole way platforms have been built is both a priori exploitative of citizens, and simultaneously easy to exploit by bad actors. It’s a system built on surveillance and sucking people’s data to manipulate them; where citizens have no control over, or even understanding about, the algorithms that dictate what we see and subsequently feel and ultimately do online. The Jorges are not a bug, they are a feature of our current internet.
Could we imagine a different internet, one that was actually designed to strengthen democracy? That’s an exercise we ran as a part of the Good Web Project, run by my unit in Johns Hopkins University and the thinktank Demos. Such an internet would allow people to be anonymous when it was important for their safety (anonymity is a right), but would have systems that meant online accounts were tethered to real people: the difference between humans and replicants would be clear. It would be an internet that had spaces run for the good of the community, not private interests.
We would have our political debates in spaces designed specifically to hear each other, weigh evidence, come to decisions. Facebook and Twitter might be good places to rage or preen, but they are not designed to decide policy or elaborate visions of a common future.
Such a new internet city is possible. Instead of the malign Blade Runner city, where all is owned by exploitative companies with an underbelly of online bandits, it would have the digital equivalent of public parks, libraries, town halls. But we are nowhere near it now.
So can we survive today? What can you do if you’re, for the sake of argument, an activist who wants to undermine mobilisation for Russia’s genocidal wars? Or you’re running a campaign to disrupt the far right in Europe? Or the narcos in Latin America? Will you wait for a new internet? We don’t have time. No, you will go to the dark alleys of our Blade Runner internet and seek out a Jorge.
