Perhaps the greatest lesson from the Apollo 11 moon landing was that there is no “natural” way of doing things when it comes to vast and complex technological undertakings. Every procedure, process and piece of hardware and software is created by humans making an uncountable number of decisions about what the end product should look like and behave. Most importantly, those standards come together to define the norms and standards that we eventually take for granted. When it came to putting humans in space, everything had to be decided, from who would be in charge to how communication would be managed. Similarly, the idea of an ad-supported free Web, centralized teams of moderators enforcing global speech rules and the ability for anyone to publish anything are all concepts we take for granted as defining the modern Web, but they are all in reality artificial constructions that could have turned out very differently. Looking more closely at this process of construction reminds us that we can change the Web to make it better.
We think of America’s space program today as the result of a natural evolution of decisions and creations that had no other way of being done. The reality is far different. Should the astronauts themselves be in charge of their missions or should controllers on the ground? How should communication between those in space and the myriad ground support staff work? Should decisions be made through democratic committee or through a single ultimate commander with absolute authority? Should missions simply be launched into space and left to their own devices or should they be managed in real-time from a centralized control center on earth? None of these had “natural” answers. They were all decisions made by those who founded America’s space program who had to sit down and artificially construct the very idea of what space travel would look like and how it would function. Their decisions we take for granted today as the “natural” approach to space travel, but in reality things could have turned out very differently.
Similarly, while today we accept that Web browsers have a “URL bar,” a “forward” and “back” button, a “stop” button, a spinning icon to indicate activity, display images inline to the page and myriad other interface designs, these were all decisions by human beings that created the now-ubiquitous interface that today we could not imagine any other way.
When it comes to technology, everything from the way it functions to the way it looks is built upon artificial constructions from the minds of people. An uncountable number of decisions have gone into building the Web as it stands today, nudging it along on its steady march to a commercial-first world.
The idea of an ad-supported free Internet is not a “natural” construct – it represents a series of decisions made in the early days of the Web that has become simply how we as a society expect the Web to look today.
What if the early Web had mirrored the offline world that preceded it? What if we paid a subscription fee for every service, from news Websites to search engines to social media sites? If the Web’s early innovators had laid out a subscription-based framework that mirrored the digital services of the era, today’s Web might not be confronting the surveillance state it has become.
What if the early Web had been designed to enforce the same gatekeepers that managed the flow of information in the offline world? What if to post online required proof of expertise in a given area and every Internet user was assigned a set of topical areas they could not stray beyond? Could such an approach, modeled after journalism and academia, have prevented today’s deluge of digital falsehoods?
What if the social media era had been built upon the pre-review model of journalism and scholarship, requiring each post to be reviewed by an expert prior to publication, rather than today’s world of selective post-review in which content is published instantly and only reviewed if it is reported as a problem? Could such editorial oversight have prevented the rise of hate and horror online?
Putting this all together, the evolution of America’s space program reminds us that there is no “natural” way of doing things when it comes to technology. That everything we take for granted is the result of a long chain of very human decisions that could often have turned out very differently.
In the end, if we don’t like today’s digital surveillance state, the long history of technological evolution reminds us that we can step forward to change it.
