Can We Fix the Internet by Introducing Chaos?

Homogeneity is a heck of a drug.

I recently finished reading Meganets by David Auerbach. I was asked to write a review of it for The Gospel Coalition. I’m sure will be published in the next month or so. The book was good, if a bit wonky, and I think Auerbach makes a bunch of good observations and provides some helpful solutions for living in a world in which our lives are increasingly governed by technologies that themselves seem to be ungovernable. 

Toward the end of the book, Auerbach provides a handful of solutions for “taming the meganet” that he acknowledges may be a bit outlandish and controversial. He’s right: some of the suggestions he makes are a bit outlandish and controversial, but I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong. It’s really just a matter of how far do we want to go to grasp some semblance of control. 

One of the funnier, and honestly smart, solutions he suggests is sowing chaos into our internet experiences. He writes about how volume and homogeneity are the chief culprits in our war on “fake news” and misinformation generally, which I think are right. One of the solutions we may want to use to solve for this, he says, is to introduce a bit of chaos to break up the homogeneity. He writes:

Geographical allocations of people are somewhat arbitrary. We end up in a location through any number of factors.
….
And geographical heterogeneity isn’t planned. It’s largely the result of chance. Introducing this kind of randomness into the meganet, without any particular agenda, would be both a more benign and more effective way to disperse the tight affinity circles that have developed. In short, this would mean that across the internet, users in various spaces, from Facebook to Reddit to Google to YouTube, would see strangers enter their midst. Feeds and notifications would be scrambled, so that every person would periodically see unusual content from strangers. 
If this sounds intrusive, it only is to the extent that being on the internet would become closer to walking outside in public...
….
Once users are regularly seeing content and links shared by people with whom they have no association and once they see less content from the same gang of people with whom they should usually interact, they will bear in mind that the world is larger than their little bubble. The nonlinear spread of the meganet, deployed in this way, would fight against its intrinsic tendencies toward homogeneity.¹

To be frank, I think Auerbach’s assertion here is great even as I think it’s pretty unrealistic. Unfortunately, I think that we have become so consumed with the current homogeneity provided by our personalized social internets that we simply would not stand for an internet experience like the one Auerbach describes above. And if every current social media platform introduced chaos for the sake of more healthy interactions among users, some enterprising people would just spin up new platforms that appeal to our appetites for homogeneity. And they would succeed, because homogeneity is insanely profitable. 

I want to believe Auerbach’s suggestion here would work. I think, ideally, it would. But practically and realistically, I think it’s dead on arrival. Why? Because at the core of the social Internet is the following problem:

Delivering people more deeply into their desires is far more profitable than delivering them from their desires. 

This is, I think, the core of what makes the social internet a poisoned well. The meganet that is the social internet is not designed for the good of its users but for the profitability of its owners, and unfortunately, the two are often inversely related to one another. The more deeply the internet delivers us into our basest desires, however unhealthy, the more profitable the internet is for those who create and maintain it. 

By introducing chaos and heterogeneity into our internet experience, we may begin a long walk on the road toward a more healthy relationship with the social internet. But unfortunately I think that when most users approach a fork in the road that provides an avenue to homogeneity and echo chambers, they would take it. 

Remember, friends: you may feel like the internet works for you. But more often than not, you’re working for it.

1. Meganets: 267, 269.