The mythic role assigned to progress in today’s popular
culture has any number of odd effects, but one of the strangest is the
blindness to the downside that clamps down on the collective imagination of our
time once people become convinced that something or other is the wave of the
future. It doesn’t matter in the least how many or obvious the warning signs
are, or how many times the same tawdry drama has been enacted. Once some shiny new gimmick gets accepted as
the next glorious step in the invincible march of progress, most people lose
the ability to imagine that the wave of the future might just do what waves
generally do: that is to say, crest, break, and flow back out to sea, leaving
debris scattered on the beach in its wake.
It so happens that I grew up in the middle of just such a
temporary wave of the future, in the south Seattle suburbs in the 1960s, where
every third breadwinner worked for Boeing. The wave in question was the
supersonic transport, SST for short: a jetliner that would fly faster than
sound, cutting hours off long flights. The inevitability of the SST was an
article of faith locally, and not just because Boeing was building one; an
Anglo-French consortium was in the lead with the Concorde, and the Soviets were
working on the Tu-144, but the Boeing 2707 was expected to be the biggest and
baddest of them all, a 300-seat swing-wing plane that was going to make
commercial supersonic flight an everyday reality.
There was, as it happened, a small problem with the 2707, a
problem it shared with all the other SST projects; it made no economic sense at
all. It was, to be precise, what an earlier post here called a
subsidy dumpster: that is, a project that was technically feasible
but economically impractical, and existed mostly as a way to pump government
subsidies into Boeing’s coffers. Come 1971, the well ran dry: faced with gloomy
numbers from the economists, worried calculations from environmental
scientists, and a public not exactly enthusiastic about dozens of sonic booms a
day rattling plates and cracking windows around major airports, Congress cut
the project’s funding.
All this has been on my mind of late as I’ve considered the
future of the internet. The comparison may seem far-fetched, but then that’s
what supporters of the SST would have said if anyone had compared the Boeing
2707 to, say, the zeppelin, another wave of the future that turned out to make
too little economic sense to matter. Granted, the internet isn’t a subsidy
dumpster, and it’s also much more complex than the SST; if anything, it might
be compared to the entire system of commercial air travel, which we still have
with us or the moment. Nonetheless, a strong case can be made that the
internet, like the SST, doesn’t actually make economic sense; it’s being
propped up by a set of financial gimmickry with a distinct resemblance to smoke
and mirrors; and when those go away—and they will—much of what makes the
internet so central a part of pop culture will go away as well.
It’s probably necessary to repeat here that the reasons for
this are economic, not technical. Every time I’ve discussed the hard economic
realities that make the internet’s lifespan in the deindustrial age roughly that of a snowball in Beelzebub’s
back yard, I’ve gotten a flurry of responses fixating on purely technical issues. Those issues are beside the
point. No doubt it would be possible to
make something like the internet technically feasible in a society on the far
side of the Long Descent, but that doesn’t matter; what matters is that the
internet has to cover its operating costs, and it also has to compete with
other ways of doing the things that the internet currently does.
It’s a source of wry amusement to me that so many people
seem to have forgotten that the internet doesn’t actually do very much that’s
new. Long before the internet, people were reading the news, publishing essays
and stories, navigating through unfamiliar neighborhoods, sharing photos of
kittens with their friends, ordering products from faraway stores for home
delivery, looking at pictures of people with their clothes off, sending
anonymous hate-filled messages to unsuspecting recipients, and doing pretty
much everything else that they do on the internet today. For the moment, doing
these things on the internet is cheaper and more convenient than the
alternatives, and that’s what makes the internet so popular. If that changes—if
the internet becomes more costly and less convenient than other options—its
current popularity is unlikely to last.
Let’s start by looking at the costs. Every time I’ve
mentioned the future of the internet on this blog, I’ve gotten comments and
emails from readers who think that the price of their monthly internet service
is a reasonable measure of the cost of the internet as a whole. For a useful
corrective to this delusion, talk to people who work in data centers. You’ll hear
about trucks pulling up to the loading dock every single day to offload pallet
after pallet of brand new hard drives and other components, to replace those
that will burn out that same day. You’ll hear about power bills that would
easily cover the electricity costs of a small city. You’ll hear about many
other costs as well. Data centers are not cheap to run, there are many
thousands of them, and they’re only one part of the vast infrastructure we call
the internet: by many measures, the most gargantuan technological project in
the history of our species.
Your monthly fee for internet service covers only a small
portion of what the internet costs. Where does the rest come from? That depends
on which part of the net we’re discussing. The basic structure is paid for by
internet service providers (ISPs), who recoup part of the costs from your
monthly fee, part from the much larger fees paid by big users, and part by
advertising. Content providers use some mix of advertising, pay-to-play service
fees, sales of goods and services, packaging and selling your personal data to
advertisers and government agencies, and new money from investors and loans to
meet their costs. The ISPs routinely make a modest profit on the deal, but many
of the content providers do not. Amazon may be the biggest retailer on the
planet, for example, and its cash flow has soared in recent years, but its
expenses have risen just as fast, and it rarely makes a profit. Many other
content provider firms, including fish as big as Twitter, rack up big losses
year after year.
How do they stay in business? A combination of vast amounts
of investment money and ultracheap debt. That’s very common in the early
decades of a new industry, though it’s been made a good deal easier by the
Fed’s policy of next-to-zero interest rates. Investors who dream of buying
stock in the next Microsoft provide venture capital for internet startups,
banks provide lines of credit for existing firms, the stock and bond markets
snap up paper of various kinds churned out by internet businesses, and all that
money goes to pay the bills. It’s a reasonable gamble for the investors; they
know perfectly well that a great many of the firms they’re funding will go
belly up within a few years, but the few that don’t will either be bought up at
inflated prices by one of the big dogs of the online world, or will figure out
how to make money and then become big dogs themselves.
Notice, though, that this process has an unexpected benefit
for ordinary internet users: a great many services are available for free,
because venture-capital investors and lines of credit are footing the bill for
the time being. Boosting the number of page views and clickthroughs is far more
important for the future of an internet company these days than making a
profit, and so the usual business plan is to provide plenty of free goodies to
the public without worrying about the financial end of things. That’s very
convenient just now for internet users, but it fosters the illusion that the
internet costs nothing.
As mentioned earlier, this sort of thing is very common in
the early decades of a new industry. As the industry matures, markets become
saturated, startups become considerably riskier, and venture capital heads for
greener pastures. Once this happens, the
companies that dominate the industry have to stay in business the old-fashioned
way, by earning a profit, and that means charging as much as the market will
bear, monetizing services that are currently free, and cutting service to the
lowest level that customers will tolerate. That’s business as usual, and it
means the end of most of the noncommercial content that gives the internet so
much of its current role in popular culture.
All other things being equal, in other words, the internet
can be expected to follow the usual trajectory of a maturing industry, becoming
more expensive, less convenient, and more tightly focused on making a quick
buck with each passing year. Governments have already begun to tax internet
sales, removing one of the core “stealth subsidies” that boosted the internet
at the expense of other retail sectors, and taxation of the internet will only
increase as cash-starved officials contemplate the tidal waves of money
sloshing back and forth online. None of these changes will kill the internet,
but they’ll slap limits on the more utopian fantasies currently burbling about
the web, and provide major incentives for individuals and businesses to back
away from the internet and do things in the real world instead.
Then there’s the increasingly murky world of online crime,
espionage, and warfare, which promises to push very hard in the same direction
in the years ahead. I think most people
are starting to realize that on the internet, there’s no such thing as secure
data, and the costs of conducting business online these days include a growing
risk of having your credit cards stolen, your bank accounts looted, your
identity borrowed for any number of dubious purposes, and the files on your
computer encrypted without your knowledge, so that you can be forced to pay a
ransom for their release—this latter, or so I’ve read, is the latest hot new
trend in internet crime.
Online crime is one of the few fields of criminal endeavor
in which raw cleverness is all you need to make out, as the saying goes, like a
bandit. In the years ahead, as a result, the internet may look less like an
information superhighway and more like one of those grim inner city streets
where not even the muggers go alone. Trends in online espionage and warfare are
harder to track, but either or both could become a serious burden on the
internet as well.
Online crime, espionage, and warfare aren’t going to kill
the internet, any more than the ordinary maturing of the industry will. Rather,
they’ll lead to a future in which costs of being online are very often greater
than the benefits, and the internet is by and large endured rather than
enjoyed. They’ll also help drive the inevitable rebound away from the net.
That’s one of those things that always happens and always blindsides the
cheerleaders of the latest technology: a few decades into its lifespan, people
start to realize that they liked the old technology better, thank you very
much, and go back to it. The rebound away from the internet has already begun,
and will only become more visible as time goes on, making a great many claims
about the future of the internet look as absurd as those 1950s articles
insisting that in the future, every restaurant would inevitably be a drive-in.
To be sure, the resurgence of live theater in the wake of
the golden age of movie theaters didn’t end cinema, and the revival of
bicycling in the aftermath of the automobile didn’t make cars go away. In the
same way, the renewal of interest in offline practices and technologies isn’t
going to make the internet go away. It’s simply going to accelerate the shift
of avant-garde culture away from an increasingly bleak, bland, unsafe, and
corporate- and government-controlled internet and into alternative venues. That
won’t kill the internet, though once again it will put a stone marked R.I.P.
atop the grave of a lot of the utopian fantasies that have clustered around
today’s net culture.
All other things being equal, in fact, there’s no reason why
the internet couldn’t keep on its present course for years to come. Under those
circumstances, it would shed most of the features that make it popular with
today’s avant-garde, and become one more centralized, regulated, vacuous mass
medium, packed to the bursting point with corporate advertising and lowest-common-denominator
content, with dissenting voices and alternative culture shut out or shoved into
corners where nobody ever looks. That’s the normal trajectory of an information
technology in today’s industrial civilization, after all; it’s what happened
with radio and television in their day, as the gaudy and grandiose claims of
the early years gave way to the crass commercial realities of the mature forms
of each medium.
But all other things aren’t equal.
Radio and television, like most of the other familiar
technologies that define life in a modern industrial society, were born and
grew to maturity in an expanding economy. The internet, by contrast, was born
during the last great blowoff of the petroleum age—the last decades of the
twentieth century, during which the world’s industrial nations took the oil
reserves that might have cushioned the transition to sustainability, and blew
them instead on one last orgy of over-the-top conspicuous consumption—and it’s
coming to maturity in the early years of an age of economic contraction and
ecological blowback.
The rising prices, falling service quality, and relentless
monetization of a maturing industry, together with the increasing burden of
online crime and the inevitable rebound away from internet culture, will thus
be hitting the internet in a time when the global economy no longer has the
slack it once did, and the immense costs of running the internet in anything
like its present form will have to be drawn from a pool of real wealth that has
many other demands on it. What’s more, quite a few of those other demands will
be far more urgent than the need to provide consumers with a convenient way to
send pictures of kittens to their friends. That stark reality will add to the
pressure to monetize internet services, and provide incentives to those who
choose to send their kitten pictures by other means.
It’s crucial to remember here, as noted above, that the
internet is simply a cheaper and more convenient way of doing things that
people were doing long before the first website went live, and a big part of
the reason why it’s cheaper and more convenient right now is that internet
users are being subsidized by the investors and venture capitalists who are
funding the internet industry. That’s not the only subsidy on which the
internet depends, though. Along with the rest of industrial society, it’s also
subsidized by half a billion years of concentrated solar energy in the form of
fossil fuels. As those deplete, the vast
inputs of energy, labor, raw materials, industrial products, and other forms of
wealth that sustain the internet will become increasingly expensive to provide,
and ways of distributing kitten pictures that don’t require the same inputs
will prosper in the resulting competition.
There are also crucial issues of scale. Most pre-internet
communications and information technologies scale down extremely well. A
community of relatively modest size can have its own public library, its own
small press, its own newspaper, and its own radio station running local
programming, and could conceivably keep all of these functioning and useful
even if the rest of humanity suddenly vanished from the map. Internet
technology doesn’t have that advantage. It’s orders of magnitude more complex
and expensive than a radio transmitter, not to mention the 14th-century
technology of printing presses and card catalogs; what’s more, on the scale of
a small community, the benefits of using internet technology instead of simpler
equivalents wouldn’t come close to justifying the vast additional cost.
Now of course the world of the future isn’t going to consist
of a single community surrounded by desolate wasteland. That’s one of the
reasons why the demise of the internet won’t happen all at once.
Telecommunications companies serving some of the more impoverished parts of
rural America are already letting their networks in those areas degrade, since
income from customers doesn’t cover the costs of maintenance. To my mind, that’s a harbinger of the
internet’s future—a future of uneven decline punctuated by local and regional
breakdowns, some of which will be fixed for a while.
That said, it’s quite possible that there will still be an
internet of some sort fifty years from now. It will connect government
agencies, military units, defense contractors, and the handful of universities
that survive the approaching implosion of the academic industry here in the US,
and it may provide email and a few other services to the very rich, but it will
otherwise have a lot more in common with the original DARPAnet than with the
24/7 virtual cosmos imagined by today’s more gullible netheads.
Unless you’re one of the very rich or an employee of one of
the institutions just named, furthermore, you won’t have access to the internet
of 2065. You might be able to hack into
it, if you have the necessary skills and are willing to risk a long stint in a
labor camp, but unless you’re a criminal or a spy working for the insurgencies
flaring in the South or the mountain West, there’s not much point to the stunt.
If you’re like most Americans in 2065, you live in Third World conditions
without regular access to electricity or running water, and you’ve got other
ways to buy things, find out what’s going on in the world, find out how to get
to the next town and, yes, look at pictures of people with their clothes off.
What’s more, in a deindustrializing world, those other ways of doing things
will be cheaper, more resilient, and more useful than reliance on the baroque
intricacies of a vast computer net.
Exactly when the last vestiges of the internet will sputter
to silence is a harder question to answer. Long before that happens, though, it
will have lost its current role as one of the poster children of the myth of
perpetual progress, and turned back into what it really was all the time: a
preposterously complex way to do things most people have always done by much
simpler means, which only seemed to make sense during that very brief interval
of human history when fossil fuels were abundant and cheap.
***
In other news, I’m pleased to announce that the third anthology of deindustrial SF stories from this blog’s “Space Bats” contest, After Oil 3: The Years of Rebirth, is now available in print and e-book formats. Those of my readers who’ve turned the pages of the two previous After Oil anthologies already know that this one has a dozen eminently readable and thought-provoking stories about the world on the far side of the Petroleum Age; the rest of you—why, you’re in for a treat. Those who are interested in contributing to the next After Oil anthology will find the details here.