Internet access is rapidly becoming a human right, like access to healthcare, or the exercise of free speech. It has become one of the most effective vehicles through which we practice our “constitutional liberties”: our spiritual, public, and political freedoms, such as freedom of thought, word, opinion, religion and conscience, and it is often the means through which we organize peaceful associations of individuals. But according to Tim Berners-Lee, “Humanity connected by technology on the web is functioning in a dystopian way. We have online abuse, prejudice, bias, polarisation, fake news, there are lots of ways in which it is broken.”* The original vision of cyberdemocracy that he had in mind when he invented the web has also brought to life a dark, photo-negative version of itself. For all the ways that the web has made possible things we could have never dreamed before 1990, it has also created some very real problems, the most pressing of which are data manipulation and dissemination of false information.

Because of the central role the Internet has come to play in our lives, it has become imperative that we come up with a better way to protect it and regulate it, as we would any other central institution created by the people, for the people. This is why Berners-Lee has now created a Magna Carta for the internet, “a contract to make the web one which serves humanity, science, knowledge and democracy.”* This contract is fundamentally based on ensuring that the internet remains a public resource for all, that is safely accessible to all, and that allows protection of one’s private data. I believe this contract should be enforced – and probably should have been many years ago – but I am also skeptical that much will change.

Capitalism is a powerful force in our world, perhaps the most powerful (behind climate change). The tenacity with which humans continue to prioritize profit over public good never ceases to astound me, and probably never will. The internet, which was created in the spirit of collective intelligence and democracy, has become in many ways a means through which we sell ourselves to ourselves. But the Internet is also not monolithic – it is used for different purposes in different ways at different times. It is simultaneously an information source, a communication tool, an entertainment database, a creative platform, a shopping center, and many other things. Perhaps one of the big issues is that profit-driven tech giants are in control of the internet in all its multiplicity, rather than being constrained to one particular aspect. They gather equal data on us whether we are researching for an academic article or doing some cyber Monday shopping on Amazon. If one of the goals of Berners-Lee’s contract is for companies to respect consumer privacy and personal data, it would necessitate a reversal of practices that have been in place – and that have been extremely profitable – for over a decade.

And yet, in order to build on all the things that are positive about the Internet, this kind of regulation is a necessity. In Becoming Virtual, Pierre Levy states, “Only in reality do things have clearly defined limits. Virtualization, the transition to a problematic, the shift from being to question, necessarily calls into question the classical notion of identity, conceived in terms of definition, determination, exclusion, inclusion, and excluded middles. For this reason virtualization is always heterogenesis, a becoming other, an embrace of alterity.” (34) The virtualization afforded by the internet is turning further and further towards alienation, what Levy calls “the intimate and menacing opposite” of heterogenesis. In order to enable the proliferation of collective intelligence, a process of embracing alterity, we urgently need a way to stop the polarization and division currently being allowed to flourish through the Internet, and to reestablish sovereignty over our own data.

*https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/tim-berners-lee-launches-campaign-to-save-the-web-from-abuse?CMP=share_btn_tw