fri 29/03/2024

The Virtual Revolution, BBC Two | reviews, news & interviews

The Virtual Revolution, BBC Two

The Virtual Revolution, BBC Two

The internet - a force for good or ill?

If I wanted to be solipsistic about this, I could say that the opening episode of The Virtual Revolution, the new BBC Two series about the changes wrought by the internet, is also the story of theartsdesk.com. It certainly felt personal at times. But then we print journalists, now launched together into cyberspace, are but one (very important, naturally) sub-atomic particle of what is variously described here as "the fastest change since the Industrial Revolution" and "the most exciting development since Gutenberg".
That Gutenberg remark was made by disenchanted Twitterer Stephen Fry – just one of the pace-setters, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and agnostics interviewed during the course of an admirably intelligent and lucid opener by writer-presenter Aleks Krotoski. Al Gore, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak (Apple), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, also made time for Krotoski, a long-term (print) chronicler of the digital age. I liked her as a presenter. Clear, uncondescending and friendly without being ingratiating - one only had to imagine Niall Ferguson, Simon Schama or any of the other history boys in her place to feel thankful for Krotoski's presence.

Last night’s film was called The Great Levelling? – the question mark in the title becoming clear towards the film’s depressing/reassuring (depending on your place within the "hierarchy of information") conclusion. For it seems that the great democratisation of the web, like the hippie dream that inspired it, has been on a crash course with human nature. But more of that later, because first Krotoski provided a useful history lesson stretching way back into the pot-smoke mists of Seventies San Francisco, and the libertarian ideals that would inspire pioneers like John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for The Grateful Dead, to co-found The Well, the great granddaddy of all social networking sites, and to deliver his mock-grandiose Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.

For all these fine words, the single most important philanthropic act of the cyber-revolution was that of a quietly spoken Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1991 invented the worldwide web (as opposed to the internet, which was the much earlier creation of American military and universities), and then gave it away for the benefit of mankind (or Google, whichever way you want to look at it). “Vague but exciting” – surely one of the great understatements of history – were the words scribbled by Berner-Lee’s boss at CERN in Switzerland, atop his student’s request to discover a language to enable computer to talk unto computer.

In the commercial corner, and aiming to fill his boots from this fast-moving revolution, was one Bill Gates, looking almost ridiculously callow in the black-and-white photograph taken at the time that he first started charging for his software. Krotoski couldn’t resist asking a former associate of the Microsoft multi-billionaire, who had stuck to his original ideals of sharing software and not charging of it, what he thought of Gates now. "I guess he’s very rich," he replied, without apparent rancour.

This was indeed a young man’s game, forever associated with geeks and teenage dotcom millionaires. Shawn Fanning was barely out of puberty when he started Napster and kick-started the piracy/downloading avalanche that would bring that byword for bloated excess, the music industry, to its knees. Ninety-five per cent of music downloaded in the UK is apparently unpaid-for, and there was a terrifically illustrated scene from 2000 of Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich seated by his opulent, school-of-Versailles swimming pool, and asking plumbers and car mechanics whether they would like it if he used their services for free. If they had a pool that swish, I bet they wouldn’t mind one little bit.

Any information industry is now in the firing line, including, of course, newspapers, which are desperately struggling to adapt their business model to the new realities. It’s far from certain whether they ever will. Meanwhile Krotoski drove up to the gated mansion of Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the increasingly influential aggregation site, The Huffington Post, in order to illustrate the sting in this tale of fallen hierarchies and information elites, and equal opportunity for all. For it seems that the old order is regrouping. Huffington may live on the West Coast, but that is about all she has in common with the “intelligent misfits” whose ideals gave the worldwide web its current shape. Huffington envisions a hybrid future, where editors sift through the babble of voices on the web, while her detractors see a power grab by the aristocrats of the old media.

“It reflects the intellectual bankruptcy of the internet that someone like Arianna Huffington should have come to symbolise its supposed revolutionary qualities,” opined Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. “She is an interesting woman, but she is about as revolutionary as my dog.”

Of the 130 million blogs active since 2002, Krotoski estimated that over 90 per cent are now dormant. Meanwhile an oligarchy of brands – Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon – is swiftly and surely coming to dominate cyberspace with a startling lack of competition. And while the veterans of the web’s libertarian youth ruefully acknowledged the inevitability of new hierarchies and elites, Krotoski argued that the seeds of its own destruction were sown with its very idealism. “The lack of regulation means that those with the most resources can shout loudest and impose their authority.” Words to put the spring back to the step of old Rupert Murdoch.

Share this article

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters