*The twenty-twenties are coming.
Public handwringing by Web and Internet elders
If ever there was doubt that 2018 is the year of fear, it was confirmed by a panel discussion involving the two men that are credited with inventing the internet and the world wide web.
Co-inventor of the internet protocols TCP/IP Vint Cerf and inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee have spent the past 20 years talking in pragmatic but highly optimistic tones about the global networks they helped give birth to.
Today, at the Our People-Centered Digital Future conference in San Jose, USA, the tone was very different. "It's a time of worry, a time of fear," Berners-Lee told attendees who range from Silicon Valleyites to policymakers to government folk. "We need to work really hard together to fix it; we've got to get to where the internet is a net benefit to humanity."
Cerf was also uncharacteristically down. "We may be building a fragile, brittle future," he warned the audience, asking: "What happens when we fail?"
It wasn't just them, either. UK-based University of Southampton computer science prof and practical optimist Wendy Hall despaired about "what is happening to our children and to ourselves." She pointed to the impact and growing influence of China and Russia on our lives, highlighting their authoritarian impulses.
She noted a range of social and internet ills, from bullying and trolling to the sale of private data, as well as attacks on democracy itself. And even former president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves – a popular invitee to California tech conferences because of his ability to turn positive tech thought into real government changes – was downhearted.
"Liberal democracies are under threat in a way that they have not been before," he despaired, before suggesting that the nature of Western governance may need to change in the face of the manipulation of elections from Russia and others....
