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A fairy tale about the internet and what it has become.
The Peaceable Kingdom
by Del Miller
August 29, 2003
Once upon a time there was a valley, ringed by mountains, where the people were happy and free and in love with learning. They lived simply and spent their days visiting with their friends and sharing freely their abundant knowledge, living the quiet lives of scholars and philosophers.
But news of this valley reached beyond the mountains to the powerful kingdom of the north. The great noble families heard tales of gold and diamonds buried beneath the valley, unknown to the natives, and they sent their agents to the valley to search for the treasure.
The people of the valley, however, wanted no part of this and told the agents that they were not wanted. This enraged the nobility, who then pleaded with the King to send his armies and crush the insolent people of the valley and grant them the riches buried there.
The King was no fool, he too wanted a share of the valley's treasure, but saw that conquering the valley was unnecessary. All he needed was to control the gold and with that he could tighten his control on the nobles and the people as well.
So he summoned his priests and sent them to the valley. The priests built temples at sites where the gold was said to be found. Here they performed sacrifices to the spirits of power and wealth. The people of the valley were tempted by the riches promised by the priests and slowly they began to change their ways. The scholarship of old gave way to the new order. They gave their knowledge and their labor to the priesthood in return for the promise of power and they accepted the rules that the priests handed down.
Around the temples, the priesthood set aside vast tracts of land for holy purposes and quietly put them in the charge of the nobility. Soon the agents of the nobles began to persuade the people of the valley to dig for the gold; promising wealth and a nobility of their own. But when the first gold was found, the King saw that his time had arrived. He divided up the wealth between his priests and the nobles and kept a share for himself. The people of the valley labored on.
Lured by wealth, the kingdom's higher classes moved to the valley, and hired the native folks to build them fine houses and to work in their stables. The new elite looked down on the simple lives of the valley people and mocked them. Shamed, the people began to adorn themselves with fancy clothing and jewelry and take on the trappings of wealth. For someday soon, when the golden lode was found, they too would live in splendor.
But there was little gold. The mines played out quickly and the nobility no longer paid the people to mine. The kingdom's elite moved back across the mountains and the priesthood divided up what wealth remained, always sending a portion to the king.
The people were outraged. This was not what they had been promised. They demanded their share but the King only sent his guards to enforce his rules and make sure that his nobles continued to get their due. The people of the valley were left with nothing but their labor and, all dressed in their finery, they looked at the desolate landscape and realized that their friendly valley was no more.
A Grim Fairy Tale
What a sad little fairy tale I've penned, a story of a world so different from our own. We should be thankful that reality is so much kinder. Unless, of course, you're prone to the overly dramatic flourish and, like me, happen to look back on the course that the internet has followed over these last few years.
When first I discovered the World Wide Web, it was a magical place, a neighborhood populated by people who had something to share and who expected no reward for sharing it. The whole point of the web in those days was disseminating knowledge to anyone who might be interested.
The pages were clean and simple, pure HTML text with no flashing bits or gratuitous graphics. This was much appreciated since this was pre-broadband days and dial-up modems topped out around 14kbps. The fancy stuff would have been a pain.
Commercial use of the web was forbidden and actively lobbied against by the purists who liked the web the way it was. They feared that business interests would ruin the community feel of the medium and, depending upon your definition of "ruin," they were right.
Feudalism Redux
Business interests saw quite an opportunity in the web, and worked hard to overcome the internet's self-imposed ban on commercial activity, which they resented as an affront to the nobility of commerce and their divine right to capitalize on it. To speed up the process they lobbied the government to force the issue of a commercial web.
Politicans saw gold to be mined here, taking their lead from the business interests, it became, in the lexicon of campaign speechmaking, "The Information Highway," and was touted as the route to the "New Economy." Treasure was promised for the online world.
Of course this required a new set of rules and government sponsored lawyers and lobbyists appeared by the oxcart, shoving aside the academics that wanted to keep the web a marketplace of ideas rather than see it turn into a marketplace in the more literal sense. Like the high priests of yore, who controlled access to power, they took over the high councils and changed the rules regarding access to make it an engine of commerce. The original users of the internet were seduced by the opportunity to make money doing what they already did for fun or for other more noble motives.
As commercial endeavors began to multiply on the web, so followed the advertisers and the graphic designers who stood aghast at the drab and artless displays that they found. This would have to change. There followed a great makeover in the aesthetics of the web, as the marketers worked to recreate the glossy pages of print publications onto the pixels of the screens.
The simple, understandable and durable standards of HTML, designed originally for simplicity and efficiency, we're hijacked down a glitzier road. The overiding purpose of HTML came to be merely a vehicle for graphics designers and as a tool for advertising. Bandwidth be damned, the web was going to be pretty and it was going to sell.
And then the gold ran out.
A Fine Mess
Why the dot.com boom turned to bust is a story for another day, but bust it did. Away went the high priests of venture capital and with them went the holy church of universal broadband. Away went the corporate nobility. Away went the royal house of government - except to occasionally send in the palace guards to hobble what was left with extravagantly moronic legislation fervently favored by everyone except those who actually used the web.
Of course the high class graphics are with us still, our web sites all dressed up to sell but with the shelves now bare. Our old friend HTML has morphed into a monstrous set of standards so complex and confusing that it defies the definition of a standard. The bulk of web browser design consists of trying to simultaneously render dozens of competing, and often contradictory "standards" that no two people anywhere agree upon.
The standards organizations themselves have become corporate bureaucracies, embroiled in politics and conflicts of interest so deep that they are a running scandal. Governments around the world have mired the once global aims of the internet into a confusing morass of local regulations and schizophrenic moral legislation. The internet is about a hair breadth away from corporate monopolization and power plays between Microsoft, the telcos and Hollywood have driven those that really care about the web into twitching spasms of paranoia.
Over 75% of internet users are still on dial-up, and the broadband we have is under serious threat of worms, viruses and spam so bad that some are declaring the death of email.
And practically nobody is making any money.
All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go
So what am I saying here. Am I suggesting that we should go back to the days when the internet consisted of email and plain vanilla web pages? Frankly, I don't know with any degree of clarity what I want to happen. But I'd like to dump this vague image of the internet as an abandoned car with looters sneaking off with the parts that make it run and leaving nothing but the chrome and the dingleballs.
I'd like to see us stop worrying about who's going to take over the internet and instead reach a solid, global concensus about who isn't going to be in charge. I want the internet to be its own organizing principle instead of the taffy in some planetwide, politicized taffy pull. I wish we could pare down some of our dot.com flash to match the realities of today.
Basically, I'd like to have some of that peaceful valley back, where the underlying feeling was that we were trying to achieve a better world.
Okay, so I live in a fantasy land.
Copyright 2003, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
If you think that this fantasy isn't so bad, let me know here.
Check out the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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