(TLS) Joanna Kavenna–Battle for the soul of the web: Three assessments of the online world

On Newsnight in 1999, David Bowie called the internet “an alien life form” with the power to revolutionize society: “We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying”. He rightly discerned that the internet was a wild technological shift, extraordinary and volatile. Since then, we have witnessed the shattering of old monopolies and hierarchies, political and creative revolutions, seismic changes to everyday life, an eruption of open-source information and neologisms, the advent of data mining and surveillance capitalism, and the emergence of new monopolies and hierarchies, including a weird kind of technofeudalism. The AI revolution has emerged from this eruption, with the AI trained on vast “datasets” – our thoughts, our creative work, our lives.

In the books under review, three authors from different disciplines and backgrounds seek to fathom this revolution. They are: Tim Berners-Lee, who has written a memoir with a focus on his status as the inventor of the World Wide Web, though he also examines surveillance capitalism, tech monopolies and polarization. His title derives from a phrase he typed at the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in London in 2012: it was “my statement about what I wanted the web to be”. Then there is Cory Doctorow, an author, blogger and journalist who presents a “natural history” of…the process by which internet platforms are “getting worse” – along with his views on how this decline might be arrested. Finally, there is Nick Clegg, former British deputy prime minister and Facebook/Meta employee. His book is also concerned with the future of the internet, and is described by Tony Blair as “a wake-up call we cannot afford to ignore”. All three authors agree that the internet is suffering from at least one, and perhaps several, pathologies. But they disagree about the most effective remedies.

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