The internet we are using today was initially created by DARPA, ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. It was not until 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist created the World Wide Web.
Unfortunately, the WWW has taken a turn for the worst in recent years as it has been effectively taken over by a few monopoly conglomerates, creating an authoritarian echo chamber only dealing with their view of the world and political beliefs.
Effectively, the internet went through three stages to get to the dystopian nightmare we are in now, where users’ privacy has been severely violated, and an authoritarian totalitarian structure covers everything with its noxious cloud of censorship.
3 Stages
- The beginning of the World Wide Web was a beautiful moment in human history. This was a time when all information irrespective of political affiliation, religion, gender and class was slapped on to the internet. All thought and free speech was thoroughly respected, and anyone could put anything they wanted onto the internet without it being taken down. The internet was thus the New Frontier, and although it had a slight Wild West feel to it, it was free.
- The next stage was a consolidation period. Large industries like the music industry were losing a lot of revenue through file sharing. Many industries and companies were watching the internet trying to find a way to harness its power, and to milk it for everything it had. This stage of the internet saw the rise of certain companies who were heavily backed by governmental intelligence agencies. Although most information was moving freely, there were signs that this would end shortly and these companies would take over with their regulations.
- The third and last stage. The EU and its many totalitarian diktats has now become the de-facto regulatory body of the internet along with communist Chinese influence. Freedom of expression irrespective of political belief is near death as massive censorship purges fall across social media sites targeting users and companies who do not hold socialist Marxist values. Users of internet platforms are robbed of their privacy, and their data sold off, or given to clandestine agencies for data farming. Only a few monopoly companies now dominate the internet effectively creating an echo chamber where only their pseudo-Marxist propaganda is allowed. Millions of voices are deleted from the internet, as these unregulated bodies take it upon themselves to create their own skewed dystopian internet nightmare that even George Orwell would have balked at.
Suffice to say, this is not the vision that many internet users envisioned to happen to the internet, alas it has, and it is certainly not the vision that Time Berners-Lee had either.
Not until 2018, did Mr. Berners-Lee emerge from teaching at MIT, to counter this massive imbalance that exists today on the World Wide Web. His proposal is to circumnavigate the mass governmental, conglomerate soup of authoritarian control, non-privacy, and censorship to wrest back some semblance of a place where people can exchange thoughts in a free manner once again.
Inrupt, his company, is working on an open-source project called Solid.
Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance — by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.
The internet today has been hijacked, broken and smeared with the excreta of totalitarianism, internet users, shamefully robbed and used like data cattle within digital prison farms.
Thanks to the visionary genius of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there is still a glimmer of hope for those who value freedom of speech, freedom of art, freedom of thought and freedom to create without the FEAR of persecution.
