Many, when the charismatic founder of Apple died, and the guru of the free software Richard Stallman expressed his satisfaction for “the end of the negative influence of Steve Jobs on the world of software“, thought that the old Richard had lost a good chance to shut up. However one needs to understand him: after a life it spent to fight for digital liberties, the panorama he finds today before him is proprietary software, and Internet itself is distant from being that promising grassland of creative anarchy that was dreamt. It is, rather, a net tailorized in an increasing way for the needs of the enterprises, in which the logics of the market have succeeded in bridling and taming what seemed for its own nature endless and fleeing, asin continuous change. And are imposing their laws, in whose calculation there’s no room for any ethical or political kind of consideration.

The government legislators are unable to regulate cross-border phenomena, and they are too slow: once they had reached the consent on a proposal to regulate Internet, the Net would already have changed. Therefore, as Luca Ascani, Ceo of Populis and one of the only three Italian guests at e-G8 wanted by Sarkozy in Paris, “On the Internet, firms make the rules“. And the ones that count are just a few: Amazon, alone, hosts on its servers thousand of sites that depend on its infrastructure for their existence. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!. Some other of smaller dimensions. Stallman is not alone in his disenchantment and in the fear for the twist the Net is taking: one of the fathers of the latter, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, had tried to wake up again the consciences last year with a pamphlet published in the magazine Scientific American, entitled “Long live the Web. A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality”.

In the article, Berners-Lee polemizes above all with those who have betrayed the founding principles of the social pact of the cyberspace: guaranteed access to all the content for whoever had a connection, independently from the spoken language, from the account in the bank, from the etnia of affiliation and from possible disabilities. The rise of fenced gardens like Facebook, in which the posted contents are reserved only to the members and are not crawlable from search engines and the behavior of some providers, that decided to limit the amount of band destined to particular uses, i.e. file sharing. were some of the things that particularly bothered the great British scientist. But the appeal of Berners-Lee, after the proper attestations of respect from the young multimillionaires that became so after doing exactly what he stigmatized, was soon forgotten. It arrived late: the merchants had already invaded the Temple. Which doesn’t of course mean that liberty doesn’t exist on Internet anymore; the Web is so vast that any corporation or any State, for that matter, can’t dominate it completely.

What the great commercial groups have succeeded in doing, is to change the experience that every consumer has of the Web: the trip toward cybernetic horizons is no more the leap towards the unknown, certain uncomfortable and with some potential dangers, that allowed to discover at every footstep unsuspected gems. It resembles more an organized trip, in which every trail, even every deviation, is pre-manufactured to offer a personalized experience to the consumer: contents are tailored on what you is looked for in precedence, on the suggestions of the friends, on the chirrupings of Twitter and on your “likes” Advertising announcements follow you from site to site and to discover who you are and what your weak points, on which to make lever for a sale, use the enormous data banks accumulated by corporations that almost nobody has ever heard but that hold an economic and political power, lato sensu, with few precedents.

Corporations like Acxiom, that in its boundless date center situated in Arkansas preserves around 1.500 fragments of information for every individual belonging to that 96% of Americans (and half million of people in the rest of the world) it monitors: from the number of the credit card, to the address, to the debt accumulated, from the sporting tastes to the political opinions, to the driver’s licence and more still. It tells it, with great abundance of details the journalist and activist Eli Pariser, who has written a whole book, “The Filter Bubble”, on the personalization of the Net. In the first chapter he quotes the case of a Google search made by two people of similar census and vision of the world, both residents in the East North of the United States. The object of the query was the same: the oil spill by British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico, but while the first surfer got, among the first results, links to news on the environmental disaster, to the second were proposed only news on the financial investments of the firm. The total number of results was different, as well.

Did Google go crazy? Nothing of that kind: despite what many non experts think, it’s been a long time since the algorithm of Mountain View has stopped being a cold and impartial arbiter. And precisely from December 4th 2009, when a post on the enterprise blog announced the beginning of personalized search. Starting from that day, Google would have used 57 “signals” (today many more), from the place of connection to the kind of browser, to the preceding searches, to scoop out custom results. The motivation behind this choice is the same one offered by Facebook to explain why, when one has thousands of friends he still see only the posts coming from the people with he interacted more or that seem to have the same tastes: give people what they want. Avoid the contrasts. All of which is very beautiful, on the surface, and until it deals with discovering musical groups that you probably appreciate, since your contacts also do.

The point, Pariser explains, it is that this mechanism risks to confine us in “bubbles” in which everyone sees only the part of the Web that has been selected for him by invisible curators. A part conceived as a perfect mirror of what somebody else has found out to be our digital personality, and in which there’s no room for comparison, dialogue, unforeseen events. Pariser’s warning has something in common with the one launched òast year by Jaron Lanier in his book “You’re not a gadget”. But if both see the risk of the trivialization of a Web that betrayed its roots, the author of the “Filter Bubble” goes further. The idea to fondle and strengthen with ad hoc content the convictions of a certain navigator can lead to perverse effects: if a search engine knows, for instance, that the surfer is a poor or illiterate person, it will give him the contents it thinks are fit: and the surfer could never even be aware of the existence of certain economic or cultural opportunities.

In a world in which the information is taken more and more from the Web, if dissonant voices are hidenn to the elector that has always voted for the Democrats or Republican (or, in Italy, Pdl or Pd) , if content that could shake up his convictions and make him open his eyes on determined problems, is not visibile, how will it be possible to find a common ground for conversation? Eventually, it is the public space itself that gets worn out. And if the palinsesto of the daily that I read on Facebook is composed from the articles selected by my friends and by the ones favorited by the majority of the members of the network, is probable that disturbing and “boring” article – on the drought in Somalia, let’s say – will never appear in my stream. They could have made me more aware as citizen and as a human being, but they fade and disappear in front of the buttocks of Belèn that sure do make more audience.

This article first appeared in Italian in the webzine Apogeo

Related articles

• Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, and Gopher’s still not cool. (boingboing.net)
• DuckDuckGo attacks Google’s filter bubble (philbradley.typepad.com)
• Pariser’s Filter Bubble (101digitalsp13.wordpress.com)