MAKE THE WEB GREAT AGAIN

While watching the news from the USA last night I felt like the young student in The Social Dilemma “fiction”: after a love affair gone south, he is bitter and sad, he starts to follow extremist groups, day and night, sucking only news from the bubble that “the network” prepares for his preferences, to reassure him that the world, there outside, appears to be exactly as he fears/wants / can buy.

He ends being arrested as a result of participating in riots for / against ideas he does not even know how to spell.

What we watched yesterday is one of the outcomes of a toxic mix of the digital nasty soup of the day: extreme polarization + fake news + improper use/ very bad example of social network for communication. Plus a few other ingredients, and for the best who like historical easy parallelism, go back to the Reichstag fire (1933) or the Roma March (1922) to see how tragedies of humongous proportions were engineered and purposely built.

The digital environment is heavily polluted. Reclamation is urgent, because it is the most important environment in which we live, after our earth. Rules must be restored and bandits must be banned.

First I would focus on a root cause: all the persons in charge of institutional roles — public officials- should be refrained from using social networks. Always. As they are in charge of public roles, they cannot have access like everyone else to social networks, because they are NOT like everyone else. They are always in charge, hence they should use official channels, public channels under control of independent powers (to be clear, power is different from the profit of Wall Street).

The public officials must use public and official tools. Always, to protect themselves and our Constitutions.

This is just the beginning of other much needed digital hygiene practices; other rules around fake news etc. can follow.

But let’s consider that if the digital flask contains vinaigrette, there is no way you can convert it by adding good wine. There is no effect with Twitter banning the “like” option once the shit has hit the fan. You must start from the roots again.

In the Social Dilemma fiction, the programmers who created “the network” look into the camera speechless, when asked: so, what’s wrong?

Maybe today the Social Dilemma programmers would be able to answer that question: Yes, we know.

Let’s make the web great again. Now.