'Be careful what you wish for," runs the adage. "You might just get it." In the case of the internet, or, at any rate, the world wide web, this is exactly what happened. We wanted exciting services – email, blogging, social networking, image hosting – that were "free". And we got them. What we also got, but hadn't bargained for, was deep, intensive and persistent surveillance of everything we do online.
We ought to have known that it would happen. There's no such thing as a free lunch, after all. Online services cost a bomb to provide: code has to be written (by programmers who have to be paid); servers have to be bought or rented, powered, housed, cooled and maintained; bandwidth has to be paid for; and so on. So there were basically only two business models that could have supported our desires.
One model involved us paying for stuff. But we (or most of us, anyway) proved deeply resistant to this idea. We had the fantasy that everything online should be free, after we'd paid an ISP for a connection to the net. So paying for stuff was a non-starter.
The companies that provided the "free" services therefore had to find another business model. And in the end they found one: it was called advertising or, rather, putting advertisers in touch with the users of "free" services. And it turned out that the only way to do this involved intensive surveillance of everything those users did online.
Which brings us to where we are today, a world in which, as the security guru Bruce Schneier puts it: "The business model of the internet is surveillance. We build systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Corporations call it marketing."
vaporwave
gracieabrams
germansingergirl
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
2087
ellievsbear
izzy806