Oh, the Internet. It definitely has potential. But this one’s fully shitted up now. It’s not like, broken or anything; it’s functional. It’s disappointing in ways we fully understand, yet find ourselves unable to change. As parents, we collectively fret.
Where did we go wrong? The reviews are bots. The search results are bots. The posts are bots, the emails are bots, the replies are bots. Think of your favorite Internet hangout that isn’t bots. Trick question; it can’t exist. Someone right now is scraping it into an LLM and pointing a bot at it. You don’t notice because you can’t notice. The bots are trained specifically for subterfuge.
Won’t somebody stop the bots?! Don’t miss my point. We’re not fixing the bot thing. The bots aren’t going away. We clearly want the bots. Just admit it, you like the bots. They like you. (Literally!) They follow you when no one else is looking. They write “This gives yes” on review sites, so you don’t really have to decide what to buy or where to visit. My point isn’t to stop the bots. We need to accept that these are totally the droids we’re looking for.
So what’s the problem? Well– I don’t know about you folks1, but I store my bank information on this thing. Yeah, right next to my social media account full of tiny rubber hand shitposts. The very same internet we put all the porn onto. Take a left at the culture war, walk on past the boomer-branded gambling apps, and there it is! Everyone’s tax returns!
My point is this. The Internet isn’t going to be the best answer to everything. It’s got this one limiting quirk. That quirk is a sacred cow known as ‘internet anonymity’. Not only is it the air that bots breathe, it’s also a full-on techno-religion. You can’t question it. You can’t ask a government to interfere with it.
There’s no migration path off of internet anonymity. The only option is to outcompete it. There’s always going to be this primordial Internet bolted onto reality, like the PVP zone in your otherwise favorite game. But if there was another internet without that, some people would hang out there instead. If it’s incentivized correctly, perhaps most would.
The remainder of this post is about that other choice. We’re going to talk about a second internet that doesn’t have internet anonymity. If that makes you angry, shut up! We’re not touching your Internet! You’ve had plenty of time to do your idea! You can keep doing it! Let the rest of us try something else!
Here’s the vision board for this new internet.
Goals
- Authenticity in human interaction.
- Mirrors social dynamics in meatspace.
- Can administrate legal and governmental services.
Identity
To get the ball rolling, we need a network-wide identity service. Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s fine if it’s a centralized service. And I think it’s double fine if it’s administered by the government. We’re not going to build another World Wide Web. I’ll be speaking very U.S.-centric, because that’s where I live, and that’s all I know. We’re going to build a Nation Wide Web. You need an online passport to access it. And every packet you send on it will be fingerprinted by a Real Human, who has been recognized by the government-orchestrated identity service. They won’t know what’s in those packets, but they will know who sent them.
I know, I know. You feel that outrage bubbling inside your chest. And you’ve been Pavlovian trained to lean into that instinct for attention points on the Anonymous Internet of Infinite Screams. But that’s the other Internet. If you’re outraged, just keep using the other Internet. That’s what it’s for. I’m sure many bots will like your post and give you the dopamine you crave, and your Time On Site will skyrocket, and you’ll all be very codependent and content. But this new internet doesn’t have anything on it. So there’s nothing sacred to be lost or threatened. So there’s no reason to be angry. It’s a big government panopticon as a fundamental principle. We’re rolling with it!
Authentication
Now imagine an entrepreneurial spirit who wants to host something on this new internet. They are asking you to sign up, which involves asserting your identity. Do you want this random entrepreneur knowing your name, your address, your email? I mean maybe they’re benevolent. But maybe they’re Mark Zuckerberg. So no thank you.
What you do instead, is implement a system like Mail Privacy Protection on Apple devices. The central identity service hashes the nebsite’s2 identity, and generates a unique token which only they can link to your real identity. That becomes your unique identifier when you sign up for the nebsite. So the nebsite knows you’re a Real Actual Human and not a bot, because they trust the central service. And all your actions on the nebsite can be attributed to a a single Real Actual Human. If you were to do crimes on that nebsite, the owner can rat you out to law enforcement. Hi, I’d like to report a crime and their ID is this. Law enforcement can then get a warrant to figure out who that ID points at in meatspace. Or something. I’m not a lawyer. All I know is you can’t bot it.
Sir, Please Show Yourself Out
Check it out, we’ve already solved two major unsolvable problems on that other Internet.
One: Bots can’t sign up for services. Nebsites could let you sign up multiple times, but it’d all be with the same ID, so behind the scenes they’d know what all your alt accounts are and can do something or nothing with that knowledge. You could automate your actions, but they’re still your actions. There’s no hiding that. You are responsible for everything your bot does. And you care about that because…
Two: There are consequences for actions. You can’t simply get another passport from the central service. You only have the one. And if you fuck it up, it’s gonna be some DMV shit to fix it. However that ends up working, you aren’t gonna want to do it. So don’t fuck it up. Kind of like how you go out into society every day of your life and don’t end up in jail. Don’t ask me why that seems so foreign an idea for a digital world. Probably because this current Internet we’re all on right now has the societal structure of The Purge, and our brains are smoldering from unbounded psychic damage, and we’ve forgotten how to dream. If I had to guess.
If a nebsite bans you for some period of time, there’s no way to circumvent it. Think of how easy this makes moderation, and at scale! You could be a Very Large Online Platform and know that at max, you’d need to ban about 330M accounts, to fix any problem. Because that’s how many people there are in the country. To put the fundamental difference there into perspective, consider that Twitter was banning 1M accounts, per day. If those were all humans, Twitter would have put itself out of business in less than a year. So, like, they’re all bots.
Age Verification
Here’s another thing the current Internet can’t do - verify ages. Our new one can. Want to enforce existing age restrictions on websites about nicotine, alcohol, gambling, nudity, etc? No problem. Incredibly easy to implement. The identity service knows how old the Real Human is and can attest on your behalf. Nebsite owners don’t even need to know your actual age; you grant the “Old Enough To Alcohol” scope and you’re in.
All that common sense online legislation you wish we had? We can do that too. Are we all feeling like there should be some kind of age restriction on social media? Maybe nobody under 16 can be on any service that exposes them to content from more than 100,000 other users? I don’t know, ask a psychologist. Whatever it is, we can implement it. Can’t do that on the current Internet. Go ahead, try.
Age verification will also open up interesting new ways to coordinate online. We can reliably create age leagues in video games so that broader audiences can enjoy competitive games with fairer opponents and less risk. We can create niche communities for people of a certain age, who want to engage on a topic with their generational peers.
Okay, How Do We Build It?
I’m hoping this post inspires some incredibly smart, technical, detail-oriented people who want to spend their time thinking about that with me. For one, we probably need a way to implement this on the existing hardware network. I doubt we want to build another one of those. And I feel like there’s a way to get rid of individual nebsite passwords? The central identity service is basically an SSO.
If you’re interested, reach out. I’d tell you exactly how to do that, but this Internet is full of bots.