5: We Built this City

What’s the internet to me?

Let’s turn this ethereal, weightless concept into something real, something physical.

The internet is, after all, a physical presence.

Its tubes cross the ocean.

Its servers fill up deserts in Arizona.

Too often we’re not prepared to visualize it in that way.

The photographer Trevor Paglen has done an essential project where he dives into the ocean and tracks the cables snaking along the sea floor.

He shoots portraits of Miami Beach (see overleaf), stressing the tranquillity and calmness of the scene, but look closer and you’ll see the geo-coordinates of the underground cables.

The reality of the scene becomes apparent. This is the actual site where the internet exists.

It’s a good idea.

I’d like the internet to become real to more people, especially since we’re constantly told it exists on another plane.

We’re told to live in the cloud: ‘All your data is in the cloud.’

But the cloud has nothing to do with clouds.

There’s nothing much cloudy about it.

It exists.

Your information moves from here to the mast, to a cable that is physically transferred through space, made of copper.

So let’s not become too enamoured of the idea of a cloud.

Instead, let’s tether this idea to the earth, to us, to the senses.

It’s as real-world as you could possibly make it, yet we’re not confronted with it. Caring about and fighting for a healthier internet is tough to visualize.

When it comes to climate change, people are prepared to march in the streets.

When it comes to pollution, people are willing to protest.

They’re not yet ready to go to the streets to ensure the health of the internet.

Perhaps you have your own tangible, earthy analogy?

I see it as a city, a particular kind of city.

I call it a boomtown.

Boomtowns boom because they offer access to something valuable.

Often this resource looks limitless.

In our boomtown, Big Data flows from so many oil wells.

It’s scraped from every section of our lives.

It could even be picked up by what look like inert mics.

Because it’s omni-present, it must be infinite.

But no one knows when a boom is set to end.

Those in the industry sometimes criticize the analogy.

Of course, they say, this wellspring of data is not going to dry up; Big Data is going to power every decision we’re going to make, going forward.

‘If necessary, we’re going to force people to give up the data because, well, we’re in charge.’

(This is usually the voice of a developer.

This is the most visible example of how they can quickly switch from viewing the individual as citizen to the individual as commerce.)

The tech world are the guzzlers.

They’re greedy.

They’re addicted.

They’re always going to want the machine to run faster and, in a way, they appear to be correct.

As a data provider, you won’t dry up.

You won’t stop creating data.

But in this boomtown, those gorging on the data surplus have not been taking into account a different brand of environmental movement.

People seem to be interested in pursuing a course of preservation – not so much a preservation of trees or landscape, but a preservation of the self.

It will be a minority.

It always is.

This minority will use a growing number of techniques that now include things like VPNs (virtual private networks), private browsing and ad blockers.

The mass will pay for convenience over security – there’s no arguing otherwise – but a few people seem to be interested in turning the nozzle.

Like any vanguard movement, people who don’t want things to happen can bring about change.

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Once a boomtown has been built, it exists.

You either raze the place or try to work with the infrastructure that already surrounds you.

Recreation of this particular boomtown is not possible.

After all, what are we going to do?

Tear down the entire internet?

Instead, we can look at cities for another option.

From within the existing structures, we can figure out a way to make this place work again.

Look at the existing map of the internet.

You’re constantly living in the world of Google.

You live in the nation of Apple.

There’s the land of Facebook abutting it.

They are the great real-estate developers of this place.

We’re never going to buy back all that land.

Instead, we’ve got to look for the reclaimed space.

When I survey that map and come close to despair, I like to think of the example of the High Line, an elevated park and greenway that runs for about a mile and a half above the streets of New York.

It wasn’t created from nothing.

It wasn’t built from new materials, but rather constructed on a former New York Central Railroad spur on Manhattan’s west side.

Some people say it’s just a railroad track with planters and trees on it, affording people a view of the meat packing district.

But look at it as something more.

View it as an example of reclaiming space in a place where that act is often improbable, if not impossible.

The High Line emerged from an urge to redevelop obsolete infrastructure as public space.

‘We’re gonna take this over and we’re gonna turn it into something else.

‘Something we need.

‘Something that is actually going to bring and connect and give us space that doesn’t exist.’

All of that happened within the framework of an existing city – and a city not so friendly to the idea of using space for the public good rather than private gain.

Within a city like New York, it’s a story of determination.

A non-profit group urged the process along, and yes, it did get support from some high-flying New Yorkers like Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, but there was also a great moment when an artist reminded people the High Line was not an abstraction.

Photographer Joel Sternfeld’s photos showed viewers its physical reality and potential.

The story is attractive because it’s not a typical New York tale of ‘I made a lot of money so I bought a plot of land and I put up the biggest skyscraper I could.’

It happened in the place where you’d expect the opposite.

I like to apply this lesson to the internet, because we too are dealing with a pre-existing structure.

The city’s already there.

So how are you going to improve it, navigate through it, find corners of reclamation?

We can accept the boomtown for what it is, and then try to build upon it.

Just as the High Line happened in a mature city, we can make changes as the internet matures.

We can choose to live better within the existing framework.

Once we accept the internet as a physical place, we might have more empathy for those around us.

We’re going to have to start reframing the way we look at the worth of these streams of data coming out of the ground; we’re going to have to realize the stuff of our lives is what is being used to develop AI, to fortify companies that already have a stranglehold on us; we’re going to have to change our thinking.

Maybe we’ll have to adopt a more mercenary view of the stuff of our lives.

If these companies have taken up so much space, if they’re using us as their raw material, perhaps they should pay.

Eduardo Porter noted in the New York Times, in March 2018: ‘Getting companies to pay transparently for the information will not just provide a better deal for the users whose data is scooped up as they go about their online lives.

‘It will also improve the quality of the data on which the information economy is being built.’

And, he points out, it’s only going to become more important.

We live in this place but we don’t ask for anything.

Even if we could, what would we ask for?

People have obviously benefited.

But are they sure of what they’re being paid?

The offline analogy would be a supermarket with no prices on anything.

Is your data worth $1 or $99?

So what will this improvement look like?

There are a few different options.

My chosen path leads, unsurprisingly, from my own experience.

To give you a sense of our inadvertent success, I need to go back and explain how WeTransfer came about.

We’re going to need to go to Holland.