Thursday, March 13, 2014

The Dystopian Internet of 2025

Well, you may have seen reports like this, at the Independent UK, "25 years of the World Wide Web: Tim Berners-Lee explains how it all began."

Ok fine. But what about this little symposium at the Wall Street Journal? The experts aren't so thrilled with the future world of 2025, "What the Internet of 2025 Might Look Like":
Daily Dark Realities

Llewellyn Kriel, CEO of TopEditor International Media Services: “Everything — every thing — will be available online with price tags attached. Cyber-terrorism will become commonplace. Privacy and confidentiality of any and all personal will become a thing of the past. Online ‘diseases’ — mental, physical, social, addictions (psycho-cyber drugs) — will affect families and communities and spread willy-nilly across borders. The digital divide will grow and worsen beyond the control of nations or global organizations such as the UN. This will increasingly polarize the planet between haves and have-nots. Global companies will exploit this polarization. Digital criminal networks will become realities of the new frontiers. Terrorism, both by organizations and individuals, will be daily realities. The world will become less and less safe, and only personal skills and insights will protect individuals.”

*****

‘Dystopian World’

John Markoff, senior Science writer at the New York Times: “What happens the first time you answer the phone and hear from your mother or a close friend, but it’s actually not, and instead, it’s a piece of malware that is designed to social engineer you. What kind of a world will we have crossed over into? I basically began as an Internet utopian (think John Perry Barlow), but I have since realized that the technical and social forces that have been unleashed by the microprocessor hold out the potential of a very dystopian world that is also profoundly inegalitarian. I often find myself thinking, ‘Who said it would get better?’”
I don't doubt it for a second. The Net's already a mean and dangerous place. And the way things are going right now, it's only going to get meaner, more dangerous, with Hobbesian indifference to lurking pain and enduriing malevolence. I have no doubt.

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