The Death of the Internet: About the Web We Must Save

 Seven months ago, I sat at the small kitchen table of my 1960s-style apartment on the top floor of a building in a busy area of central Tehran, and did something I had done a thousand times before; I opened my laptop and posted something on my new blog, but even so, this was my first post in six years, and it almost broke my heart, a few weeks ago I was pardoned, and suddenly I was released from Evin prison in north Tehran, I was expecting To spend most of my life in these cells In November 2008, I was sentenced to twenty years in prison, mainly for things I wrote on my blog.  The timing of the release was unexpected. I smoked a cigarette in the kitchen with one of my fellow prisoners, then returned to the room I shared with a dozen other men. We drank tea together. When the dorm announcer—also a prisoner—announced in every room and hallway hoarsely: "Dear comrades, the bird of fortune perches again on the shoulder of one of the comrades, Seyyid Husayn Derakhshan, from this moment on you are free. 

That night was the first time I had walked through the prison gates as a free man, everything seemed new: the coolness of the autumn breeze, the noise of vehicles coming from a nearby bridge, the smell, the colors of the town I was in.  I lived most of my life observing around me a Tehran different from the one I had known; 

A flood of new, stately luxury apartments has replaced the charming little houses I'm used to, new roads, freeways, hordes of aggressive SUVs, and billboards advertising Swiss-made watches and Korean flat-screen TVs.  , women in headscarves and colorful coats, men with dyed hair and beards, hundreds of charming coffee houses playing modern Western music and hiring women, these were changes of the kind that crept into the people; The kind you only notice when your normal life has been taken away from

Two weeks later I started writing again Some friends agreed that I should start a blog as part of their art journals I call it Ketabkhan, which means "book reader" in Farsi In prison six years was a long time but the internet has been a big era Writing on the Internet itself was no different, but reading, or at least the process of making things read, has changed  I was told how essential social media had become when I was working, so I knew one thing:

If I wanted people to see my writing, I had to

. I'm using these networks now, so I tried posting a link on my Facebook account, but it turns out Facebook didn't. Regardless, it ended up looking like a boring personal ad; No description, no photo, nothing, I got three likes, only three! In that moment it became clear to me: Things had changed, I wasn't meant to enter this new world, all my efforts were wasted and I felt devastated.

When I was arrested in 2008, blogs were in their heyday, bloggers were like rock stars at that time, except for the fact that the government was blocking access to my blog for Inside Iran, I had about twenty thousand visitors a day, everyone I linked in my blog was It can have a sudden and extreme surge in traffic.

I was able to enable or confuse whomever I wanted, people read my posts, left a lot of relevant comments, even those who strongly disagreed with me, read deeply, and many other blogs made it clear that in order to discuss My blog, 

I felt like a king, the iPhone was a little over a year old at the time, but smartphones were still mostly used to make calls, send texts, forward emails, access the web, there were no real apps, not as we understand them today didn't There was no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Viber, no WhatsApp. Instead, there was  On the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative ideas, news, and analysis. These blogs have been my life

Two weeks later I started writing again Some friends agreed that I should start a blog as part of their art journals I call it Ketabkhan, which means "book reader" in Farsi In prison six years was a long time but the internet has been a big era Writing on the Internet itself was no different, but reading, or at least the process of making things read, has changed  I was told how essential social media had become when I was working, so I knew one thing: If I wanted people to see my writing, I had to. I'm using these networks now, so I tried posting a link on my Facebook account, but it turns out Facebook didn't. 

Regardless, it ended up looking like a boring personal ad; No description, no photo, nothing, I got three likes, only three! In that moment it became clear to me: Things had changed, I wasn't meant to enter this new world, all my efforts were wasted and I felt devastated.

There is a story in the Qur’an that I have always thought about during the first eight months of seclusion, where a group of persecuted Christians took refuge in a cave, they and their dog fell into a deep sleep and woke up smelling it.  As if they took a little nap, but in fact it lasted 300 years. One version of the story relates how one of them went to buy food—and I can only imagine how hungry they must be after 300 years—and found that his money was now spoiled; Alternatively, it could be an object in a museum, and then I realized how a hyperlink six years ago was my motto stemming from the idea of hyperlinks giving us the diversity and decentralization that the real world and open links - the interconnected, Mobile World Wide Web, a vision that began with its inventor , Tim Berners-Lee.

it was a way to decentralize all connections, lines, and hierarchies, and replace them with something more distributed, with a system of points  Blogs embody the spirit of decentralization. They were windows that looked into the lives of people about whom we knew nothing, and bridges that connected different lives to each other, and thus changed them. Blogs were coffeehouses where people shared their thoughts on any topic that might interest them. The number of taxis has increased in Tehran.

Since I got out of jail, I've realized how devalued the link is, and it's pretty much outdated. Almost all social networks now treat a link like any other thing, such as an image or a piece of text, rather than seeing it as a way to enrich the text, we encourage you to post a link and then go through a semi-democratic process of collecting likes, love hearts or plus  Multiple links to a piece of text are generally not allowed, and links have been frozen, removed, and stripped of their power. With more respect than those on external pages, a photographer told me how photos he posts directly to Facebook get a lot of likes, which means they appear in a lot of people's news feeds, in turn, when he posts a link to himself.  

The photo, on his off-Facebook page — for example, his now-derelict blog is now less visible on Facebook itself, and thus receives fewer likes, and the circle gets stronger.

Some networks, such as Twitter, handle links a little better, and the rest of the unreliable social services are a bit scarier. Instagram - owned by Facebook - does not allow its visitors to leave itspage in the network under your photo, but it will not take you anywhere. Many people start their daily online routines on these windowless social sites, and their journey ends there. Many don't realize that they are using the internet's infrastructure to like a photo on Instagram, or to leave a comment on a friend's video. It's just an app. 

However, links are not only the structure of the network, it is its eyes and the path of its soul, and the blind page is the one that is devoid of links and does not look at another page, which has serious repercussions on the strength. network dynamics. 

One way or another, most theorists have thought about gaze's relationship to force, often in a negative way: the gaze defines what one gazes at, reducing them to inanimate, powerless objects, devoid of intelligence and autonomy.  From web pages, this theme works differently. It's a catalyst, when a powerful website - like Google or Facebook - looks at or links to another page, it not only connects us to it, but gives it existence, makes it come alive, figuratively speaking, without stimulating your gaze the page doesn't breathe, no matter how many The links you place on the page, without anyone looking at them, are actually dead and blind, and therefore unable to transmit energy to an external page, on the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that are viewed by many, just like celebrities who gain type Of power due to the millions of human eyes watching them at all times, web pages can collect and distribute their power through links, but apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind, with their eyes turned inward, preventing their massive power from being passed on to others, leading to their quiet death , and the results are that web pages outside communication sites are dying, even before I go to jail, the power of links is beginning to be curbed, and its main enemy was a philosophy that combined the dominant and exaggerated values ​​of our time: modernity and vogue, which is reflected in the dominance of the world's youngest true celebrities.  

This philosophy is flow, or the flow of information. Feed now controls how humans receive information on the web.

Few users connect directly to specialized pages, instead they receive an endless stream of information selected for them by complex and secret algorithms, the current option means you no longer need to have multiple websites open at once, and you don't need multiple tabs that you don't even need You need a web browser You open Twitter or Facebook with your smartphone and dive in This mountain has come to you Algorithms have figured it all out for you Based on what you and your friends have read or seen before You predict what you might like to see It's good not to You waste time finding things to interest you on so many sites, but are we missing something  What do we trade for the quality of our performance? 

In many apps, the votes we give others — likes, hearts, mentions — are actually more about cute selfies and celebrity posts than the substance of what's being posted.  Celebrities are given an instant digital presence, and traditional algorithms not only equate newness and popularity with importance, they tend to show more of what we once liked. 

These services meticulously analyze our behavior, pruning the news feed with posts, photos, and recordings that they think we might be inclined to see. Popularity isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it does have its downsides. In a free market economy, goods of poor quality and unfavorable prices are doomed. 

A person feels sad when a coffee shop in Brooklyn closes. Their staff is arrogant and their coffee is bad. But opinions are not the same as material goods and public services. They don't go away if they are outdated or bad. In fact, history has shown us that most great ideas (and many bad ones) have been out of date for a while. For a long time, but it was reinforced by her marginal status. 

Minority opinions become radicalized when they cannot be expressed or acknowledged. Today's mainstream is the primary form of organizing information through digital media. It's been on all social networks and phone apps since I got my freedom. I see the current. Wherever you go, I suspect it won't be long before news sites organize all their content along the same lines. 

Not only does this trend skew much of the Internet against high-quality content, it signals a deep betrayal of the diversity that the World Wide Web originally envisioned for itself.

I am convinced that there is less variety of topics and opinions on the Internet today than in the past. Today's networks have suppressed new, different, and challenging ideas because of their classification strategies, which favor popular and usual ideas (it's no surprise that Apple employs human writers for its news apps) but codify diversity in other ways and for others.  The reasons, and some of these reasons are visual, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look like a personal blog.

 They are arranged in reverse sync (from newest to oldest), on a specific page, with a private direct link to each post, but I have very little control over what my page looks like, and I can't make it more private, it must follow an official format given to me by the designers of social networks, centralized The information also worries me because it makes losing things easier.  After my arrest, the host closed my account because I couldn't pay the monthly fee, but at least I had a backup of all my messages in a database on my web server.

But what if my Facebook or Twitter account gets locked out for some reason? Those same services may not end anytime soon, but it's not impossible to imagine a day when many US services close the accounts of their users in Iran, under the current sanctions regime.  If that happens, I might be able to upload my posts to some of these services, and I suppose it's easy enough to get the backup from another platform, but how about linking to my account's social network?  Can I trade it later after someone else owns it? Internet addresses are also transferred from person to person, but managing the process is easier and simpler, especially since there is a financial relationship between you and the seller, which makes you less vulnerable to sudden and opaque decisions.  

The centrality of information in the age of social networks is something else: our vulnerability to governments and corporations.

Surveillance creeps into civilian life, and it gets worse with time, the only way to stay away from that big surveillance device might be to go into a cave and sleep in it, even if you can't sleep for 300 years, surveillance is something we have to get used to.  Governments that have a tight grip on the internet, like Iran, but don't have legal access to social media companies.

What scares more than being watched is being controlled. When Facebook can get to know us better than our parents based on 150 likes, and more than our spouses based on 300 likes, the world looks predictable. Governments and companies.  Predictability means control. Middle-class Iranians, like most people around the world, are obsessed with new trends, and the popularity of things always takes precedence over their quality or degree of usefulness. 

    In the early 2000s, writing blog posts was cool and popular. In 2008, it became Facebook, then Twitter, and since 2014, we've been talking on Instagram, and no one knows who he is. Then but the more I thought about these changes, the more I realized that all my fears could be directed in the wrong direction, maybe I'm worrying about the wrong thing, maybe it's not entirely because the links are dying, or the centralization, maybe the text itself is disappearing.

The first network pioneers spent their time reading digital magazines, then blogs appeared, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now, most of the people spend their time watching videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. There is a decrease in reading texts on social networks. And increase the viewing of videos and photos. 

Are we seeing a decline in online reading at the expense of viewing and listening? Is this fashion driven by the evolution of people's cultural habits, or are they following the new laws of social networks? 

I don't know, it's the work of researchers, but it makes me feel like it's reigniting the old culture wars, after the web began mimicking books for years, dominated by text and hypertext, search engines placed so much value on these things, and entire companies, even entire monopolies, rose up on their backs.  

But with the proliferation of scanners, digital images, and cameras, the state of engines and companies is changing. They all show a migration from the Internet/book to the Internet/TV.

We seem to have moved from a nonlinear connection method (dots, grids, links) to a hierarchical centralized linear method. Idle, pre-programmed, you can't see anything outside, when I'm logged into Facebook, I turn on the TV, all I have to do is scroll down: new friend's profile photos, news, brief reviews, links to new posts with short quotes, Ads, and of course, auto-play videos.  

Every now and then I hit the like or share button, read or comment on people, or even open an article, but I stay inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. 

It's not the network I knew before I went to jail, and it's not the future of it, either. 

This future is television. Sometimes I think I'm getting tougher as I get older. All you mentioned may be nothing more than a natural progression of technology, but I can't ignore what's going on: a drop in power. Culturally and diversely, with the enormous potential the network can hold in our turbulent times, the network was once so powerful and dangerous that it would land me in jail. Today for fun.

  

Even Iran does not see many parts of it - like Instagram - as a threat worthy of being banned.

I miss the times when people took their time seeing different opinions and bothered to read more than one paragraph or 140 characters, the days when I could write on my own blog, or post to my own title, without taking the time.  The time I spent promoting it on a lot of social networks, when nobody cared about likes and reposts, this is the network I remember from before prison, this is the network we have to save.