Opinion: 30 years later, what happened to the promise of the internet?

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When you were a kid and you imagined the future, did it look like the world of 2024? Profit-seeking AI chatbots and environmentally harmful cryptocurrencies? Are social media platforms flooded with ads and banning news content from reaching Canadians? I doubt it.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web (or at least the version of the Internet we know today). In 1994, when the first web browser debuted, technology evangelists enthusiastically dreamed of a technological future as a place of free information, expression, and opportunity. Yet, as we know it, the internet is quickly becoming more privatized, more extractive, and less wonderful.

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So it’s a good time to revisit the past 30 years and take stock of what went wrong.

The first problem may be that our tech leaders—from Mark Zuckerberg to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—seem to think they can impose their latest preoccupations on the rest of us without be punished.

Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian novel Snow Crash, Zuckerberg’s mission to turn Facebook into a meta and embrace the metaverse has spurred massive investment, though one wonders if anyone is really interested in it. Feeling excited about this. Who are you?

Altman’s company may have almost single-handedly changed the way many of us work, by imposing generative artificial intelligence that often makes our jobs harder, not easier.

In my opinion, this arrogance on the part of our corporate leaders is just a symptom of a larger problem, which is that the future is no longer the domain of governments, organizations, or citizens, but the domain of technology, and more importantly, the future has become the domain of technology field of. Companies and executives who use it.

The risk is that the whims of Zuckerberg, Altman, Elon Musk and other “great male geniuses” in Silicon Valley end up shaping and limiting what the rest of us deal with and what seems conceivable of our own imagination. Meanwhile, governments and policymakers are struggling to keep up, let alone react.

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This was not the dream of many in 1994 when the Internet emerged. These goals—from open source values ​​to democratic empowerment—remain part of the internet’s story, but largely feel forgotten or unfeasible, at least under current conditions.

The future narratives promoted by today’s big tech companies have shaped the discourse for all of us. I call these “unwanted utopias” — great for the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, but not very utopian for you and me.

So what do we do now?

First we need to understand what technology is able What you do is not important, what matters is how you do it actually used. I think this should be our guiding principle as the Internet enters its fourth decade.

We must ask ourselves whether the future being sold to us has our interests in mind. Is generative AI being implemented to make your life easier, will it make your job more complex, or be an excuse to reduce your salary?

Second, we must take this realization as a sign that no technology is inevitable. Is the metaverse a box that cannot be closed, or can we meaningfully argue whether we want it or not?

Third, we must recognize that any story can go wrong. As many of these companies now face a new reality where continued growth seems more difficult, their promises are starting to look less attractive and less trustworthy. Maybe that’s because they are.

Of course, given how the internet has evolved, and how entrenched its ways have become, it’s hard to imagine how we can wrest the future back from the hands of the big tech elite and restore the opportunities it originally presented in 1994. But can you imagine where we would be if we didn’t?

Perhaps, by 2024, we can start to undo some of the things that have been done.

Jake Pitre is a public scholar and doctoral candidate in film and moving image studies at Concordia University.

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