The Internet was supposed to be free and free. What went wrong?

Thirty years ago, counterculture thinkers declared the internet an independent space. Today, it is controlled by a handful of large companies. Have we been deceived?

In the beginning, it was just a game. A game we’ve all played countless times: select the squares with a stop sign, enter the text below, reassemble the puzzle — and check the box that states: “I’m not a robot“.

However, every time we select images to determine whether what we see is a cat or a croissant, we end up work for big companies technological.

When Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn first proposed the idea of ​​“games with purpose” (GWAPs) in 2004, his aim was to harness human intellectual capacity so that computers could learn from it. His idea was simple: make humans solve tasks that were trivial for us, but difficult for computers of the time, such as labeling images, transcribing texts or classifying data.

And what better way to get people working for computers than turn work into fun? Get rich by letting others work for you.

Von Ahn developed the ESP Game (extrasensory perception): two players were randomly paired and received the same image, but were unable to communicate. Each described the image within a time limitearning points when their descriptions matched. These matches verified image descriptions, which were then stored in a database.

In 2006, Google licensed the concept to create its own version, the Google Image Labeler. A year later, von Ahn launched reCAPTCHA, based on the same principle: humans solving problems that computers couldn’t. But when solving CAPTCHAs, humans were unknowingly transcribing words from digitized books and newspapers that computers could not digitize. Von Ahn sold reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009.

And he didn’t stop there. In 2011, he and Severin Hacker founded Duolingoapplying the crowdsourcing model to language learning: users translate texts and label images in exchange for free lessons, creating a huge database of high-quality linguistic information that is monetized: it trains AI models and is used for Duolingo’s commercial English proficiency exam.

“The idea was to contribute to a common good, so that we could help computers become smarter, and the benefits would be distributed equally,” Ulises Ali Mejias, professor of communications studies at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego, told DW. “But history didn’t follow that course, right? Because Luis von Ahn captured all this free data, sold them to Google and used the profits to start your next venture: Duolingo.”

First came the hippies, then the tech moguls

By finding a way to harness humanity’s collective intellectual power, von Ahn helped lay the foundation for how businesses today monetize data on the internet – turning users into unpaid workers. This contrasts sharply with how the internet was originally imagined by counterculture thinkers in Northern California in the 1960s: as an independent, communal, utopian fantasy.

In the midst of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, millions of Americans embraced community life, LSD and hippie culture. When the counterculture fell apart, some of its key figures sought translate these utopian dreams into technology.

Consider Stewart Brand, who founded one of the first virtual communities in 1985, The WELL (or The Whole Earth’ Lectronic Link), and popularized the phrase “information wants to be free.” Or Apple founder Steve Jobs, who described taking LSD as one of the most important experiences of his life. And Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who wrote the “Declaration of Independence from Cyberspace” thirty years ago.

But the dream of escape from politics through utopian technology was “incredibly naive,” says Stanford professor Fred Turner, author of “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.” “They may have left political America behind, but when they came together, they built a patriarchal world. And they were naive to think that this would somehow create a utopia for the rest of us. You can’t leave politics behind — that’s a lesson from the counterculture we see on the internet today,” Turner told DW.

From collective consciousness to profit from data

The utopia did not last long. Early technology enthusiasts soon realized how monetize this collective consciousness developing search engines, algorithms and collecting data.

“We see this in the ideology of Facebook in its early days. The intention was very similar to: ‘Let me collect all this data without permission and use them to build something that I can monetize,’” says Mejias.

“We went from a era of bridging to an era of extraction“, adds Turner. “Digital media have become mining industries. Now we are like oil or coal — embedded in a social terrain from which companies extract resources and sell them back to us as products and advertising.”

Is data extraction digital colonialism?

In their book “Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back,” Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry argue that only one historical parallel matches the current scale of data extraction: colonialism.

“A Land grab is now a data grab; everything is taken over by a small elite. And that’s exactly what evolved with the early history of colonialism, a mentality that justifies taking everything,” Couldry tells DW. AI, he adds, is the continuation of this logic, the icing on the cake.

Thirty years after being declared free and independent, the internet is in the hands of a handful of corporations.

“I think this is a tragedy“, says Mejias. “Behind the scenes, we were deceived. While we contributed to this shared space, corporations built platforms to privatize all this knowledge and use it for their own benefit”, he adds.

The common good above machines

Even so, Mejias and Couldry believe that resistance will come. They point to movements opposing the construction of data centers or gig economy workers demanding better working conditions. And they place hope in youth.

“Young people want their lives to be better than they have been in the last 10 years. They have the imagination to build a better future“, diz Couldry.

Recent polls suggest widespread disillusionment: almost half of young people in the UK say they I would rather have grown up in a world without the internet. Separate studies show that nearly half of American teens and nearly two-thirds of UK Gen Z believe social media is harmful to them.

For Turner, the path forward is clear.

“Our attention needs to be focused on politics, not machines“, these.

“We need to think about what we want these machines to do for the general public good. That’s what the counterculturals didn’t do, and that’s what we need to do now.”