Welcome to the Splinternet

May 8, 2016 1:37 PM

Scott Malcomsen has a brand new book: Splinternet; How Geopolitics and Commerce Are Fragmenting the World Wide Web.

Huffington Post article from December by Malcomsen about the book's contents.

Review by The Economist.

Guardian article from April by Malcomsen about the book's contents.

Video with Malcomsen and Charlie Rose Bloomberg. (10 minutes)

Audio podcast Malcomsen with Erik Davis. (58 minutes)

Malcomsen made a previous appearance on metafilter as he was at the famous secret (not for long) meeting between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange.

posted by bukvich (7 comments total)

I feel this happening. Without being able to identify the specifics, I've been frustrated over the past few years with an overwhelming sense that the Internet is fracturing. The Economist article suggests it's for our own good. I'm really not convinced- the Wild West of the Internet was hugely problematic. The economist was right to point out that most its users were privileged and male and that's a problem. But I don't think a commercialized, divided and monitored Internet is the better, natural alternative. Look at Google search results- they're nearly impossible to use unless you're shopping or want wikepedia a definition of a thing. Deep searching is difficult and most content that comes up is commercialized. I hate it.

Now the idea of nations grappling with Internet and its restrictions, dividing it up further, and the US trying to fuck over the free principles that much of the early internauts tried to enshrine and what made it so powerful is being crushed. And commercial entities are not the saviors as presented just because they are focused on encryption right now; they're helping chip away at the free and open internet in hopes of increasing their own market share. Pitting government regulation and commercialization is a false dichotomy.

Don't get me wrong- the problems with an entirely free Internet has big problems with othering and harassment of freedom of speech is the only metric we use online. But I think neither commercialization or regulations by nations is going to be able to answer that anyway.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:00 PM on May 8, 2016 [12 favorites]

Or maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic and many the "free" internet never really was.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:14 PM on May 8, 2016

Oh, that dude is smart. I have no take on what he's talking about now, but I respect his earlier work on race.

Cool, thanks!
posted by allthinky at 4:57 PM on May 8, 2016

The more you tighten your grip, the more [encrypted decentralized dark nets] will slip through your fingers.
posted by eclectist at 5:47 PM on May 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is how the paradox works: the Internet breaks the larger culture by letting members flee to smaller subcultures. And the critics think this is bad. They like the broader culture, they agree with Émile Durkheim about atomization and point to examples like South Korea, and deep down, furries and latex fetishists really bother them. They just plain don’t like those deviants.

THE MELANCHOLY OF SUBCULTURE SOCIETY gwern.net

This seems to me what Malcomsen does not want.
posted by bukvich at 6:03 PM on May 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I find a lot of the recent European litigation uncomfortable exactly because of the implications for splintering the internet. If we were to see a strict judgement that, say, data on European users couldn't pass through US servers, it would pretty much lead directly to nationally bounded networks. A cynical part of me thinks that we may see something like this happen purely so that France can create through litigation a larger market for French data centers...

Also, for interested people, Lessig's Code is still hella relevant reading alok these years later.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:22 PM on May 8, 2016

*shrug* I was predicting that the end result of the internet would be a bunch of commercially/governmental controlled walled gardens, ever since I saw that the response to online harassment was "Suck it up or go anonymous." Likewise, the response of governments to continual online attacks was supposed to be "suck it up, because freedom."

There is a basic problem with the internet that the same freedoms that people celebrate, give sociopaths essentially unlimited power. With such a fundamentally broken system, it's unsurprising that the Wild West era of the net would end.

I'm sorry that various entities were living in a fantasy world where the owners of the infrastructure were supposed to endure constant attacks and an internet that was unsafe for users, because reasons. I'm sorry that they believed the internet could continue to exist just for them. But the fact is, if they want an internet that isn't controlled by governments and businesses, they needed to build their own infrastructure.
posted by happyroach at 12:32 AM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]