The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [95]
None of this is easy: Private data is a moving target, and the process of balancing consumers and citizens’ interests against those of these companies will take a lot of fine-tuning. At worst, new laws could be more onerous than the practices they seek to prevent. But that’s an argument for doing this right and doing it soon, before the companies who profit from private information have even greater incentives to try to block it from passing.
Given the money to be made and the power that money holds over the American legislative system, this shift won’t be easy. So to rescue our digital environment from itself, we’ll ultimately need a new constituency of digital environmentalists—citizens of this new space we’re all building who band together to protect what’s great about it.
In the next few years, the rules that will govern the next decade or more of online life will be written. And the big online conglomerates are lining up to help write them. The communications giants who own the Internet’s physical infrastructure have plenty of political clout. AT&T outranks oil companies and pharmaceutical companies as one of the top four corporate contributors to American politics. Intermediaries like Google get the importance of political influence, too: Eric Schmidt is a frequent White House visitor, and companies like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have spent millions on influence-mongering in Washington, D.C. Given all of the Web 2.0 hype about empowerment, it’s ironic that the old adage still applies: In the fight for control of the Internet, everyone’s organized but the people.
But that’s only because most of us aren’t in the fight. People who use the Internet and are invested in its future outnumber corporate lobbyists by orders of magnitude. There are literally hundreds of millions of us across all demographics—political, ethnic, socioeconomic, and generational—who have a personal stake in the outcome. And there are plenty of smaller online enterprises that have every interest in ensuring a democratic, public-spirited Web. If the great mass of us decide that an open, public-spirited Internet matters and speak up about it—if we join organizations like Free Press (a nonpartisan grassroots lobby for media reform) and make phone calls to Congress and ask questions at town hall meetings and contribute donations to the representatives who are leading the way—the lobbyists don’t stand a chance.
As billions come online in India and Brazil and Africa, the Internet is transforming into a truly global place. Increasingly, it will be the place where we live our lives. But in the end, a small group of American companies may unilaterally dictate how billions of people work, play, communicate, and understand the world. Protecting the early vision of radical connectedness and user control should be an urgent priority for all of us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing may be a lonely profession, but thinking isn’t. That’s been one of the great gifts of this writing process—the opportunity to think together and learn from some extremely smart and morally thoughtful people. This book wouldn’t be the same—and wouldn’t be much—without a large team of (sometimes unwitting) collaborators. What follows is my best attempt to credit those who contributed directly. But there’s an even larger number whose scholarship or writing or philosophy gave structure to my thoughts or forced me to think in a new way: Larry Lessig, Neil Postman, Cass Sunstein, Marshall McLuhan, Marvin Minsky, and Michael Schudson come to mind as a start. What’s good in this book owes a lot to this broad cadre of thinkers. The errors, of course, are all mine.
The Filter Bubble began as a sketched fragment of text jotted down in the first days of 2010. Elyse Cheney, my literary agent, gave me the confidence to see it as a book. Her keen editorial eye, fierce intellect, and refreshingly blunt assessments (“That part’s pretty good. This chapter, not so much.”) dramatically strengthened the final text. I know it’s par for the course to thank one’s agent. But Elyse was more than an agent