We've Been Acquired
MEMORY: In the beginning, we used cyberspace. Now, the robots and overlords of cyberspace are using us. We've been had.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first posted on Facebook six years ago, on December 30, 2017.)
I am of the generation that saw the birth of the personal computer. We were the first to communicate by electronic mail. No one before us had ever found others with similar interests in forums and chat rooms in cyberspace. We were the pioneering travelers on the information super highway. No humans before us had ever heard the sound of a modem. No one before had used their fingers and thumbs to play games with keyboards, buttons and joysticks. This was our new frontier to explore and conquer.
We witnessed the birth, development, evolution and sometimes decimation and death of IBM, Xerox, Tandy, Texas Instruments, Commodore, Atari, Amiga, Lotus, CompuServe, Prodigy, Mosaic, America Online, Acer, Netscape, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Acorn, Intel, AMD, Sony, Toshiba, Dell, Microsoft, Apple and many more.
I spent my career as a news producer. First in broadcast news with ABC News. Then, as a founding Senior Producer of cable news at CNN. And finally as a founding Senior Producer of Internet news at MSNBC.com.
We were the first, if I recall correctly, at ABC News to use portable computers in field reporting. The Radio Shack Trash Eighty (TRS-80). We had small thermal jet printers to print out the script in the field. And we modemed those scripts to the home offices in Washington and New York with cups that fit over the earpieces and mouthpieces of telephones.
In the early Nineties I had left ABC News and was working for Time Inc. New Media. My beat was this new thing - Cyberspace. I covered the birth of the World Wide Web, and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. I did stories on the two young kids who had invented "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." Their site became the first online index of websites, Yahoo! I interviewed Marc Andreessen, the co-inventor of the first widely used web browser, Mosaic. I reported on Steve Case of America Online, where users could meet in public chat rooms and then begin personal relationships in private chat rooms. I was one of the producers of one of the first documentaries on this exploding phenomenon, produced for the Discovery Channel.
A few years later, I was the producer for the very first live online streaming from a political convention. We put on a six-hour show each night at MSNBC.com without a commercial break for our Internet audience.
I'm writing all this because watching the four seasons of "Halt and Catch Fire" on Netflix sent me down a digital memory lane. I was there, through all of it. I was one of the many who embraced each new technological advance, learned it, and used it well - from broadcast to cable to online.
The WWW really did start with the idea and ideal of building community. I recall doing a story about a woman who began chatting on WWW forums. She started in a forum for meeting those of like mind. There she met her husband. When he became ill, she migrated to forums where she could learn and share information about his disease. When he died, she found solace in grief forums.
In the early days, the Internet was a landscape of eclectic delights. Its reason for being was its being. No more, no less. It was a growing and expanding cyberspace without rules or restrictions. It was meant to be a free and open range.
I recall having a conversation with my boss at Time Inc., where he said the Internet would be a useless waste of time unless and until someone figured out how to make money from it. The first to make money, of course, were pornographers. Sex always sells.
At first, websites were reflections of their creators. They had no utility beyond sharing an idea. When websites began to be monetized, things changed significantly. The competition became intense, cut throat, without mercy. Companies began destroying or acquiring their competitors in the thirst for profit.
Then, along came Facebook, Google and Amazon. The most valuable commodity on the Internet became personal data. Now, anything and everything that happens online can be collected, stored, analyzed, exploited.
While we continue to share with each other, nay, over-share we each other, the information we share becomes a commodity - data. And that data becomes who we are. We are known by our political beliefs, our shopping patterns, our online travel, our geographic locations, our connections, our 'likes.'
Now, we are not a community for the sake of community. We are targets. We can be identified and vilified. We can be identified and recruited. We can be identified and manipulated. We can be identified and exploited. We can be identified and acquired.
Now, with the death of Net neutrality, we are vulnerable. In the beginning, we used cyberspace. Now, the robots and overlords of cyberspace are using us. We’ve been acquired. We've been had.
I'm not sure we ever had net neutrality. What were you referring to?