Society Desperately Needs an Alternative Web
forbes.com
forbes.com
Here's my personal opinion: blaming technology for failures of humanity is something stupid people do.
Yes, people are angry on the Internet. That's not the Internet's fault, it's the fault of societies whose top products, recently, are profits and poverty. When simple people support a guy whose slogan was "Make America Great Again," they're acting on a legitimate gripe.
"America great" could mean a lot of things, but I think the simplest rendition of it could be a society where a single full-time job was enough to support a family, pay its medical bills and save up for college for the kids. Are people wrong to be angry that this scenario is increasingly out of reach?
What society desperately needs are smarter people. Or at least better informed people. Or better educated people who are able to make smarter choices about their sources of information.
This is a challenge to society, to the education system, and it's one that desperately needs to be met. Not by partitioning, walling and gating the Internet, because nothing assures us that the "new net" wouldn't quickly succumb to the same basic problems. The solution to bad information is not making less information accessible, but more.
People need to learn to distinguish fake news from the real McCoy; this is increasingly becoming a survival skill. That being so, pressed by necessity, people can and will learn. There are growing pains, but the Internet isn't making the sky fall any more than steam engines did in their day.
That being said, this is nonsense alarmism. It's not clear what the authors intent is aside from getting attention, but "the internet is scary and sometimes people are mean to children on it" isn't exactly a meaningful pitch.
That's a super lame excuse by Forbes. Is it under Forbes domain? Is it approved by Forbes editorial staff? Yes and yes, thus it's a Forbes piece.
Why I am emphasizing this? Because I am really annoyed by offloading certain opinions and shaking off the responsibility of the quality of the content published unto "independent" contributions.
Lots of publishers have taken this route recently such as Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg (this one upsets me the most) and others in favour of getting some cheap pageviews.
Well, if that's the route they are taking, at least they deserve to be named as crappy content publishers.
Opinion pages are by no means new.
It's an article geared towards the audience of Forbes, who are affluent highly educated, business-minded consumers of and investors in digital products. Which is a different audience from those frequenting Hackernews.
At it's core, the article paints an easy to grok good-vs-evil narrative by corralling billion-dollar corporations one side, and small grass-roots projects on the other side, the underdog. Then it ends with a cliffhanger "will the underdog win from the alpha dog?" leaving how the story might end open to the reader.
That unwritten conclusion should be clear to the reader: The decentralized web might create an investment opportunity. Incumbents are struggling with a perception problem, and under that vague umbrella of "dencentralized web" you'll find these new technologies that people might trust.
The article doesn't address the real issue: the lack of proper regulation. It just mentions that in the last paragraph, almost as a side note. Which basically acknowledges that the author(s) do have an understanding, but are simply choosing not to focus on that because it doesn't fit the narrative.
Lambasting TBL's initial vision of the Web as "pollyannic" and then not even mentioning him as an important instigator of the decentralized Web - linked data, Semantic Web, Inrupt/Solid,... - is just another clue that the authors are just interested in their colored narrative of the history.
What's happening here, is this just self-PR of a few people? Are they selling links from forbes.com? Are they just hoping to sell membership on their own site? Are they paying Forbes, or does Forbes consider those valuable contributions?
The message itself is naive at best, so I wondered the same things.