The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside The Shadow System That Shapes the Internet - Hardcover

Ball, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1612198996 ISBN 13: 9781612198996

Publisher: Melville House, 2020

Synopsis

We all see what the internet does and increasingly don't like it, but do we know how and more importantly who makes it work that way? That's where the real power lays...

The internet was supposed to be a thing of revolutions. As that dream curdles, there is no shortage of villains to blame--from tech giants to Russian bot farms. But what if the problem is not an issue of bad actors ruining a good thing? What if the hazards of the internet are built into the system itself?

That's what journalist James Ball argues as he takes us to the root of the problem, from the very establishment of the internet's earliest protocols to the cables that wire it together. He shows us how the seemingly abstract and pervasive phenomenon is built on a very real set of materials and rules that are owned, financed, designed and regulated by very real people.

In this urgent and necessary book, Ball reveals that the internet is not a neutral force but a massive infrastructure that reflects the society that created it. And making it work for--and not against--us must be an endeavor of the people as well.

About this title

About the Author

JAMES BALL is the Global Editor at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Previously special projects editor at The Guardian, James played a key role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden. At WikiLeaks he was closely involved in Cablegate--the publication of 250,000 classified US embassy cables in 2010-- as well as working on two documentaries based on the Iraq War Logs.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
 
The internet was supposed to be a thing of revolution. From the first days of coming to the public’s attention, it was connected to a certain type of counter-culture – to cypherpunks and hackers, people learning, exploring and challenging authority. As early as the 1990s there was a declaration of online independence, telling the powers that be in the old world to stay away. A new order would surely emerge.

Even when business came to the internet world, it was going to be different. The reach and scale of the internet would enable a ‘long tail’ of small and independent producers to flourish. Online companies were launched talking in earnest terms of changing the world, with ‘don’t be evil’ mantras alongside – and generous share options making even their office decorators rich.

For a long time, you could convince yourself it was all the real deal. At the start of the last decade, WikiLeaks used its unique online platform to challenge the world’s biggest superpower with an unprecedented series of leaks. Shortly afterwards, the world’s biggest social media companies were credited with boosting Arab Spring protests against corrupt and dictatorial governments.

Such was the mood towards the internet that the exultant opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics culminated in a seventeen-minute dance sequence celebrating Tim Berners-Lee for creating the World Wide Web and giving it to the world for free. Berners-Lee himself featured, tweeting the words ‘This is for everyone ’ as they simultaneously appeared in lights across the stadium. The internet was almost indisputably a thing to be celebrated.

That’s not the spirit of the world at the start of a new decade. The internet giants are viewed with mistrust, accused of playing a role in spreading misinformation, enforcing censorship and avoiding taxes. Its billionaires are scrutinized and condemned for their working practices. Residents around the palaces of Silicon Valley have come to resent their corporate neighbours.

Has the internet and the people running it changed so much in such a short time? Did we get them wrong all along? Or is the problem with what we suspect they’ve been up to?

One thing, at least, is clear. The world’s biggest technology companies are now the world’s biggest companies full stop – and they are not ready for the scrutiny that goes along with that. From being hailed as ‘disruptors’ and the good guys shaking up the system, they have suddenly discovered they are the system.

The easy route – and the conventional wisdom – is to say that the dream has gone bad, that an engine of tremendous potential has been wasted. That story says also says the dream can be reclaimed: the internet is still inherently a force for good, a democratising power.

It’s a story that needs a villain, and there are no shortages of candidates on offer: the bosses of the technology giants, the agents of Russia’s intelligence agencies, dictators and party bosses across the Middle East and into the Great Wall of China, whoever. These people are standing in the way of the dream – move them and the internet’s disruptive power for good will be restored.

It’s a tempting story. It’s a story many armchair pundits want to tell. But it’s not the story of this book.

Whether they are loved or loathed, the four companies we always talk about when we talk about ‘the internet’ – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (now formally known as Alphabet) – are not the internet itself. They are products of the internet, engines running along the railway lines set out by the internet’s very structure.

Despite its lofty language – the use of words like the ‘cloud’, language which suggests something free and natural, beyond the control of people – the internet is a network of physical cables and connections. It’s a web of wires enmeshing the world, connecting huge data centers to one another and to us, storing and sharing the innermost details of our lives.

Each of those cables is owned by someone, as is each of those data centers – and every piece of that data is also owned by someone, and that someone is almost never the person who that data is about. In turn, each of those owners was backed and financed by someone, and each physical site lies in the jurisdiction of a government and a myriad of regulators. We refer to the online world as if it’s abstract from the reality we all occupy every day: this is a myth, and it’s a myth that obscures where the real power lies.

Online power is offline power: the internet has handed more power, control and money to the people who already had plenty. It may have changed the people in one or two seats at the top table, but it has not changed the system itself in any ways that matter.

Systems don’t build themselves. The internet and the way it works were all human decisions, made by groups of men – it’s almost always men – in small rooms, with their own particular ideologies, motivations and divisions. This book aims to take you into those rooms, to meet those men, to find out why they made the decisions they did, and what the consequences were for them, and for us. Not all of them are household names, but each of them has helped shape the internet, and the world the internet has shaped, in profound ways.

The internet is fundamentally hard to think about and hard to understand, despite the fact that more than three billion of us use it in some form every day. What do we even mean when we talk about ‘the internet’? Do we mean the World Wide Web, what we see from our browser? Do we include the banking networks that now operate online, between businesses, almost every time we buy something? Do we mean the complex series of rules and protocols that govern flows of data across the world? Do we mean the business model behind it all, joining and auctioning our data, thousands of times a day, always out of our sight?

Most of these issues aren’t in our daily thoughts, and often seem too technical to be worth understanding. But it’s these things that shape the real internet – the big four tech giants are products of all of these factors.

Looking into the architecture of the internet – who built it, who governs it, how it works, and who funds it – becomes, then, a way of looking at the real power structure of a huge swathe of the modern world. While we might think of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos or the other charismatic dotcom CEOs as the new rulers of the world, they’re just the tip of an iceberg. It’s time to see what lies beneath.

I am at my very core a creature of the internet. My earliest childhood had computers hooked up via creaking modems to the bulletin boards that were the precursor of the popular web.

As an adult, my childhood obsession had metamorphosed into using the internet, and working to chronicle it – as a tech journalist, as a WikiLeaks staffer, as someone later working on the NSA (National Security Agency) leaks from Edward Snowden, who documented how the intelligence agencies dominated the networks that had felt like my home.

A decade or more of reporting on the internet takes you across the world – from south London squats full of idealistic hackers, to secure operations rooms. For this book, I have tried to get inside the closed rooms, to meet the people who’ve made the decisions that have shaped the internet and to hold them to account. I’ve tracked down people in cluttered academic offices, in corporate penthouses, in electromagnetically shielded secure rooms from which no signals can enter or leave. The result, I hope, offers us a chance to meet and to confront the power brokers, the money men and more who are usually well beyond our view.

When it comes to the internet, there is a truth we need to acknowledge early: this story is overwhelmingly Western, and overwhelmingly male. Trying to tell the story without noting this fact – and, as we go, noting the effects of this homogeneity in missing some of the mistakes on the path – would be to tell the story badly.
 
 

A moment, though: if the internet is less a concept than a collection of infrastructure, cables, rules and regulators, is it really anything more than a tool? If it’s a tool, it’s tempting to believe that its potential for good or ill lies solely with who’s wielding it. A hammer can be used to build a house or break into one, and can be blamed for neither. The internet, surely, must be similarly intrinsically neutral.

We have to remember that new tools – even ones on a far smaller scale than the internet – can reshape the world, with seismic consequences felt across decades, if not centuries.

If we want to think of how a tool can reinvent the world, we need look no further than the invention of the railways and the steam trains to run upon them. In the nineteenth century, railways were a communications technology – at the very least, they connected the world in a way that was faster and more reliable than before. They boosted the potential for efficiency, and they became integral to the business models of numerous other industries. And because not everyone could easily start a railway – all that track, not to mention the labor to lay it, doesn’t come cheap – the industry quickly became dominated by a few giant players and their financiers.

These things can similarly be said for the architecture of the internet: just as railways could be used to create new monopolies in other industries – by charging different rates to different companies, or playing favourites – so too can the internet.
The internet, left unchecked, is a monopoly-making machine, an engine designed to concentrate power, attention and more in the hands of those who already have it.

This was the potential of the railways, too – and the reason we don’t live in the second century of a gilded era of monopolies in every industry is not thanks to the benevolence or wisdom of the people who built and owned the railways. It’s because we took deliberate political and legal actions to stop them, in a series of vicious political and social battles that took decades.

That required building whole new branches of law, it required huge political will and it required some dramatic showdowns. It took nerve. But when an invention truly changes the world, that’s what needs to happen next.

More than a century ago, a handful of wealthy and well-connected men seized on the inventions of others – some themselves would-be entrepreneurs, some well-intentioned naïfs – and used them, with their wealth, to build the industrial era and leverage its huge financial returns for themselves.

The consequences of what those men did – in what is sometimes referred to since as the ‘Gilded Age’ – were calamitous, fostering resentment among millions of struggling masses against an increasingly rich elite, sowing the seeds for populism in the twentieth century, and through industrial technological change and political pressure, fuelling in different ways both of the twentieth century’s world wars.

The parallels could hardly be clearer: we are once again seeing a technological revolution, benefiting a new elite and their old-money financial backers, until recently with the enthusiastic support of most lawmakers and regulators. And by telling us all that the whole thing is too boring and complicated for us to understand – it’s code, it’s algorithms, it’s machine learning, it’s AI, they say – they’ve stymied our questions.

The early consequences are the same, too. Across the developed world, the share of wealth held by the very richest is increasing to the highest it’s been in decades.2,3 Globally, a populist backlash is rising, with far-right and anti-establishment parties and movements doing better than they have for decades.

These are the stakes in play: working out how to shape and control the internet means working out how to shape and, to an extent, control the world.

We need to figure out how to harness it as something which works for all of us, in the way that we managed to at least partially harness the potential of the industrial era to work for humanity as a whole: enriching us, giving us more to eat, easier house-work, travel and more, and averting the disastrous backlashes to gross inequality we have seen in the past.

The first step of this is seeing the system as it really is. This book is an effort to do exactly that, to tell the story of how the internet came about and how it works.

Edition details

• Publisher: Melville House
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1612198996
• ISBN 13: 9781612198996
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272