The Internet is broken. It should be a ladder lifting us to the stars, but instead it’s a ladder leading to our own scaffold. Imagine what we would look like to visitors from another world, if the internet were considered as humanity’s crowning achievement. Instead of a free reference academic library available to all, scientific and academic debate retreats behind ever higher paywalls, whilst at the same time creative endeavour is beggared by piracy.
Instead of the books and translation services which could facilitate greater inter-cultural communication, we have mountains of nationalist-themed, semi-consensual pornography, where the poor get their clothes off for the rich, masturbatory public. These towering pinnacles which support the male gaze do not facilitate greater communication between the genders they rather stifle, chill and eradicate the concept of shared eroticism, with their gaudy, repetitive representations of coitus. The champions of the digital age, claim we have no right to judge, and the internet is the living proof of the vital importance of free speech.
Personally, I don’t want the freedom to watch torture porn, child pornography, religious bigots massacring the innocents, live executions, gang rapes, live incest shows or the more exotic representations of zoophilia. I don’t think my freedom of speech needs protecting, so that paedophiles could hide the evidence of their non-consensual sexual adventures from the eyes of the law. Even the simple matter of trolling, the practice of anonymously abusing people, is unregulated.
Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter (worth about 11 billion pounds) writes: “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.” Despite these words, he has not resigned from his job or its stock options yet. So you don’t need to watch it, I hear you say. There’s no evidence that it has any lasting effect on the viewer. It's cathartic. I say you are all wrong. The internet needs policing by two simple principles.
Firstly, by the principle of labelling, is this a factual piece with references that can be examined or is this piece an opinion piece, whose statements are unverifiable, or is this piece a work of speculation. A simple red, yellow, green coding would do.
Secondly, I am happy with freedom of speech, providing that the speaker is correctly labelled and is prepared to respond to the comments they have made. An internet passport is important, no post without a verified identity.
Finally, with regard to pornography, I appreciate that we live in a world where women and men will receive financial compensation for performing in representations of the sexual act. Ok, I don’t like this, but I accept that it exists. We know that every website visited triggers a recording of who visited the site, and which computer is watching which website. I think the secret identities of those watching porn should be publicly available, and linked to their digital passport.
I am a discriminating citizen of the world. And by discriminating, I mean I'm not going to be watching journalists being beheaded by criminals disguised as religious fanatics, rather than applying lazy stereotypes to whole ethnicities. I know that the world makes judgements about me, on the basis of the information I present about myself. I stand by the statements, poetry and works of fiction I write. I publish them under my own name, and I have in time, ambitions to make my words so entertaining that people will pay to read them. The ending of anonymous posting is the biggest step we can take not only to fix the broken internet, but to perhaps grow up, and enter the digital universe together.
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