Book says the internet has become a shopping mall and proposes ways to reverse course
In 'A Internet Não Precisa Ser Assim' (The Internet Doesn't Have to Be Like This), Fernanda Campagnucci and Marcelo Soares point to five 'villains' that frustrated the network's early dreams.
Translated from the Portuguese original by the Panorama newsroom. Read in Portuguese
Summary written by the Panorama newsroom from the sources listed below. Facts are attributed to the original publications.
The book "A Internet Não Precisa Ser Assim," by journalists Fernanda Campagnucci and Marcelo Soares, diagnoses today's network as one big shopping mall, according to a review published by Folha. The book, from Diálogos Editora, runs 155 pages and costs R$ 65.
Campagnucci, executive director of the digital rights organization InternetLab, and Soares, Folha's first audience and data editor and now head of Lagom Data, came to know the web as teenagers, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a result, the introduction is a kind of love letter to a technology that then seemed utopian.
The reality check comes in the next five chapters, which present the possible villains of the original dream: platforms that walled off the internet, billionaires with shady interests, surveillance-driven marketing, casino-like mechanisms to hold users' attention and the flood of bots brought by generative AI.
Rather than delving deeply into each problem, the authors describe the patient, a less idealized and more popular internet. They also offer a list of concepts that works as a toolbox for understanding the recent web. One is Canadian writer Cory Doctorow's idea that companies make their services worse in order to profit more.
According to the title of the review, the book also points out that there is a solution to the scenario described.