IF the internet had an off switch, I’d flick it right now.
It’s not that I’m a luddite who despises technology and wishes for an Amish-style golden age of Spinning Jennies – I just know a bad thing when I see it. And the internet is now well and truly bad. Of course, no technology is bad in and of itself, it can only assume a moral dimension thanks to the purpose humanity puts it to – but we humans have definitely pointed the web down a dark and nasty path.
New research shows that 60 per cent of Britons believe at least one conspiracy theory. People who voted Brexit are more likely to believe a conspiracy theory, but Remainers are far from immune – 71 per cent of Leave voters believed at least one outlandish tinfoil-hatted scare story, compared to 49 per cent of pro-EU voters. Some 31 per cent of Leavers believed Muslim migration was part of a plot to create an Islamic majority in the UK – six per cent of Remainers believed the same nonsense.
I don’t raise this issue to make a political point – I raise it to make a social point, for these conspiracy theories are bred online. The research was conducted over six years and in nine countries by academics at Cambridge University and pollsters at YouGov. One of the lead researchers, John Naughton, found that conspiracy theorists were early adopters of the internet as they realised it could help peddle their madness where the mainstream media – with its experts, facts, and statistics – would not. Professor Naughton calls the top tier of conspiracy theorists – the likes of David Icke with his lizards, and Alex Jones with his InfoWars – “conspiracy entrepreneurs”, as they make a hell of a lot of money out of propagating claims that a monkey in a tree would have trouble believing.
The internet allows lies to prosper –whether it’s claims that Jews run the world, or the Democratic Party is a paedophile ring, or Muslims are taking over Europe – and these lies play into our politics, infect and inform it, distort it.
If you focus on this latest research you get the shuddering sense that the net has curdled our minds, but look beyond that research and you’ll see that it’s set rot in everywhere.
Some years back, I made a documentary about extreme pornography – one of the things that shocked me while researching the film was the rise of impotence among young men. These young men had been raised on a diet of online pornography so out there that when it came to sex with ordinary young women they couldn’t perform. Now, I am no prude and I see pornography as just another part of our adult world, but when sexuality is expressed in a form primarily of degradation, violence and complete objectification no good can really come to the human spirit.
Let’s move away from the bedroom to the outside world – it has been corroded by the internet as surely as acid melts plastic. Look at your high street, it’s either dead or dying. It’s a smear of betting shops and charity shops. Your local bookshop has gone, the local clothes store has gone, the list goes on. That is not a result of giant supermarkets – they did for your butcher and baker – it’s a result of you shopping online. You sailed up the Amazon and killed off your local entrepreneurs.
Even the seemingly positive side of the internet has negatively changed society – think of the benefits of email, then think of all the posties it put out of work. Wikipedia murdered the encyclopaedia. Every time you buy a property online, that’s an estate agent job as risk – and even if you don’t like estate agents you surely don’t wish them unemployed. Buying insurance online? Goodbye independent insurance broker. Taking a trip via Trivago? Farewell local travel agent.
The internet isn’t just changing us and the world for the worse, it is narrowing choice while falsely being seen as an instrument of widening choice. Most people just shop with the internet giants – that’s not choice, that’s domination.
And so what do we do? We can’t just sit and cry boo-hoo it’s all so difficult. We can’t just shrug our shoulders and say well that’s the world, buster, like it or lump it. And we can’t label criticism of new technology as some anti-progress, reactionary scaremongering.
Not all progress is good progress – the arms industry has taught us that from gunpowder to white phosphorous. And all progress carries with it some casualties – only a fool would think otherwise. The printing press certainly left a few illustrating monks without a shilling, but the benefits outweighed the cost. With the internet the cost seems never-ending, the damage is relentless.
How we think, how we have sex, our jobs, the shape of our cities, our politics – it is all slowly eroding away. This is not like the change from vinyl to CD, this is an unregulated social, political, economic and cultural maelstrom.
And we might have just hit on the key word there – unregulated. What is it with internet exceptionalism? Just a few days ago Mark Zuckerberg was talking on CNN about giving “special deference” to certain types of news content on Facebook. To me, that sounds very much like being a newspaper editor or the editor of a TV current affairs programme. If Facebook is acting like the BBC then regulate it like the BBC.
We all know the old aphorism that when it comes to freedom of speech you can’t run into a crowded theatre and shout “fire”. The online world is a pretty crowded space too, and getting back to our starting point of the web and its propagation of conspiracy theories, I don’t think you should be able to shout “the Jews run the world” while protected by the nameless and faceless anonymity of entities like Twitter. Want to say something? Then show your face and give us your name.
Technology has no morality without humans. We’ve had more than 20 years now of seeing what we’ve done with the internet, and morally it’s not pleasant. We need to throw a lasso around it and bring it to heel. In a way, it would be throwing a lasso around ourselves – perhaps no bad thing.
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