"The Wayforward Machine is shocking only in its monumental hypocrisy and sick, shameless twisting of reality to push Big Tech's agenda of zero accountability."
If you haven't yet seen it, Wayforward Machine is the Internet Archive's latest fun toy.
You hop onto the site, enter your choice of URL, and the software will simulate the exact opposite of the Wayback Machine's renowned function. It will present the Internet Archive's vision not of our digital history, but of our digital future - circa 2046.
Except it's not a fun toy. The Wayforward Machine is a sick and twisted propaganda ploy by the Big Tech collective. We know from the involvement of the "digital rights" groups and usual suspects like Wikipedia and Mozilla, that this is a Big Tech lobby, not a game. And it's a propaganda campaign I predicted in my article Big Tech's Secret Fear: The Disappearing Web. This is the sqwawk of petulance that proves cybertech is quaking in its boots about losing its unfettered stewardship of other people's content. As a prediction in Wayforward's timeline of doom puts it…
"2039... Factual and news information is now available to the public only in exchange for money."
Presumably, by then we've all managed to forget about the existence of television, which is not mentioned in the timeline at all. But yeah, let's say that news costs money, and factual reading matter costs money… I mean, can you imagine that?… It would be just like… Well, 1989. Was 1989 really so bad? I seem to remember quite enjoying it.
The immediate results from Wayforward search are designed to lead the reader, via liberally-spread hyperlinks, to a timeline of disaster (you need to go right down the page, and click on each entry to see the details). The timeline predicts… Well, more or less the end of the world as we know it, basically.
It's a catalogue of far-fetched catastrophe in which all that is good and wholesome has been paywalled, banned, or destroyed in climate change disasters caused in part by villainous ISPs (who else?). An evil, monopolistic and specifically right wing news giant becomes the sole source of news, the world's books are somehow destroyed, and schoolkids end up reading e-books full of adverts, with advertising chips implanted into their brains.
Although there is a faint hint of satire, the goal is clearly to spread a sense that this demented and hugely hypocritical tale could become a real life scenario if governments are allowed to regulate the heroic defender of freedom. Which, as far as the "digital rights" groups behind all this are concerned, is Big Tech.
Yes. I did use the phrases "defender of freedom" and "Big Tech" in close proximity. The Wayforward timeline really is trying to connect the two.
The first thing you notice upon Wayforward-searching your choice of URL, is that the "scary" pop-up restriction banners meant to represent abject future dystopia, are only modest twists on the censorial, control-freak ploys Big Tech is already using. We don't need to travel to 2046 to get blocked from an open and free site on some sorry-ass, surveillance-motivated pretext. That bullshit is already here, and in most countries it has nothing whatsoever to do with government regulation. In Europe, it's singularly the work of cybertech.
In Europe and elsewhere, the supposedly evil authorities are actually the party that does attempt to defend human rights. We're not seeing governments persistently chipping away at a high digital rights standard set by cybertech. We're seeing cybertech persistently chipping away at a high digital rights standard set by governments. When a crazed dollop of Big Tech propaganda tries to twist that upside down, we have to call out the hypocrisy.
In short, Wayforward is the manifestation of cybertech bleating because political figures are beginning to wake up to the tech giants' systemic and calculated exploitation of privileged immunity. An immunity that for many years has allowed the likes of Pornhub to get away with what anti-porn campaigner Laila Mickelwait describes as a "crime scene". Whether or not you agree with Mickelwait's values and specific aims, she has created something new in the digital landscape. A reason for politicians to finally ask:
Should huge silos of content which are accessed by billions of people and which have a major influence on society, be granted complete immunity from prosecution when they DELIBERATELY facilitate harmful speech and behaviour for profit? Should laws that were devised when no one really knew what the internet would become, still be applicable in a world where there is cast-iron evidence that those laws have been systemically abused to facilitate literal crime?
Now that these questions are being asked, it's inevitable that the tech collective and its "digital rights" puppet show will step up the lobby for continued impunity. We have to recognise this for what it is.
Apart from speculating on the future to a sick degree, Wayforward's timeline tells several barefaced lies, designed to preserve support for Big Tech's impunity. The most persistent of these lies is that the scrapping of Section 230 - a safe harbour legal protection for platforms that host third-party commentary - would result in "en masse lawsuits" against ordinary internet users.
This is a repetitive claim made by Big Tech lobbies, but it's bullshit through and through. Section 230 protects one party and one party only. The owner of the website or platform where a piece of offending material is published. The Wayforward timeline claims that the scrapping of 230 would see Redditors and other UGC creators sued en masse by "reputation management firms".
But the truth is that NO UGC (User Generated Content) creator or Redditor has ever been protected by 230. If rep management firms want to sue UGC creators they can do so right now - provided they can establish the user's identity. If you go onto Reddit and tell a pack of disparaging lies about a person under your real identity, in a way that damages that person, that person can sue you, and that's always been the case. The party that can't be sued at present, is Reddit. That's the only thing scrapping 230 would change. It would make UGC platforms accountable for the violating content they knowingly harbour.
What's really protecting most UGC commentators or creators from being sued for libel damages or copyright offences is their anonymity. And that has nothing at all to do with the safe harbour laws. It's a privacy issue. The idea that a litigant would go after a small Reddit poster for libel damages when they could simply sue a rich monolith like Reddit, is truly insane. So the reality is that with Section 230 in the bin, Reddit posters would actually be safer from lawsuits than they are now.
One of the most sly ploys in these propaganda salvos is the assertion that any regulation of tech platforms automatically equates to them having to shut down. If you've studied these propaganda campaigns before, you'll know that this chant is endless.
But can you imagine Google just giving up and shutting down? Can you imagine Facebook just giving up and shutting down? Obviously not. There's way too much money in it for them. What actually would happen if their bosses faced jail for knowingly assisting in illegal activity, is that they would behave better. Beyond that, literally nothing to see. Move along.
The Wayforward timeline then moves onto another grimly embellished tale of horror, with more than a hint of deja vu…
"Two Of The World's Largest Conglomerates Merge To Form Apex... A merger between two multinational giants places most of the technology sector under a monopoly [like it's not already a monopoly, LOL], now operating under the name Apex. Many international search engines, advertising technologies, software products, and web browsers are now controlled and regulated by this powerful and omniscient entity [and the difference between this and Google is?...]."
For clarity, the bold sections are my insertions. The language is deliberately ambiguous here, implying to the reader that Apex could be a union of, say, Google and Amazon, or Google and Facebook. It prompts the reader to make their own choice of loathed powers joining forces. But remember, this is a Big Tech lobby, so the baddies in the story are not Big Tech. Apex is actually an Internet Service Provider. An ISP. Guilty of destroying "net neutrality".
If you keep an eye on the "digital rights" groups, you'll know that the championing of net neutrality (net neutrality basically meaning: allow Big Tech to do what the hell it likes with zero consequence) is a persistent theme. The overwhelming threat to net neutrality is a combination of government regulation and ISP action. And the implications for Big Tech are huge. With legal licence to do so, an ISP could theoretically do to Big Tech precisely what Big Tech currently does to others. Namely, censor it, suspend it, make accessing it unrealistically difficult, put it behind a full screen warning that says it's dangerous and may have been hacked…
Who does that? It's not ISPs or the government, is it? It's Big Tech. That's how net neutral Big Tech itself is. Block or algo the shit out of anyone who doesn't collapse in reverence at the feet of their encryption racket.
If implemented against Big Tech by the joined force of government and ISPs, these measures would have devastating consequences even for the biggest tech providers. But they're all measures that the biggest tech providers themselves inflict on others without a care in the world. No comebacks, no explanations, appeals not even read by humans. Why should the current perpetrators of these authoritarian and often biased punishments be spared a taste of their own medicine?
The Wayforward timeline has several traits that show new proof about the lengths to which the tech collective is prepared to go to get its way. It reflects the lobbying collective's anti-right wing bias in a way we haven't previously seen from the horses' mouth, and sets any claims of political impartiality into a new light. I don't support the right wing, but I find it deeply problematic that a collective as powerful as this should be showing clear political bias.
Whilst this scheme is not officially supported by the likes of Google and the social media sites, Google has heavily funded digital rights campaigners who are involved, and it's also known to heavily fund Wikipedia and Mozilla, who are listed as project partners too. Should Wikipedia be publicly supporting a definitively anti-right wing campaign? What does that say about its integrity as an information source?
We know that Google doesn't do its own shouting. But the lobbyists in this case are a who's who of Google mouthpiecing. This has every hallmark of a Google-backed initiative, and its entire premise can be considered to benefit Google, along with every other tech brand that profits from the unrestrained stewardship of other people's content.
Do I want to see the demise of Google? No. I'm posting on a Google platform. And as I've said multiple times in the past, if any one tech company had to become as powerful as Google, we should think ourselves lucky that it was Google. But do I think Google and the rest of the Big Tech collective should have safe harbours that ensure zero accountability for all publicly visible content on their servers? No!
We need an amnesty that ensures all tech providers can scrub their platforms of the harm and violation they know about, without penalty. Then a fair period for that clean-up to be completed. But after that, if a platform causes harm, and it can be proven to have known it was causing that harm, it should face the legal system for causing that harm in exactly the same way as anyone else. If it can't be proven to have known, there is no case. That's discretionary law. That's fair law. And it's the law to which all parties should be subject - whoever they are.
The Wayforward Machine is shocking only in its monumental hypocrisy and sick, shameless twisting of reality to push Big Tech's agenda of zero accountability. Let's not confuse it with art. This is commerce. It's capitalism. It's all about persuading us to grant Big Tech the very same power in the future that it's persistently abused in the past. The fact that we can look at so much of Wayforward's depiction of future dystopia and see the present, should tell us that Big Tech needs to have significantly less power. Significantly more regulation.
The bizarre interweave of climate disaster, the sick notion that parents would somehow let their kids have ad chips implanted into their brains, and other far-fetched elements, are presumably only there because frankly, the writer(s) could not otherwise distinguish the dystopia of the future from the dystopia of the present. Let's worry about the shit that the digitally disenfranchised are dealing with now. in 2021.
Not the stuff that obscenely rich surveillance capitalists might have to deal with between 2022 and 2046.