The internet is an online Wild West
NOT all that long ago there was a revolution. No placards on the streets, no burning barricades. Just the blink-and-you-miss-it takeover of our lives by the computer. Today there is no tiny detail of human life that is not computerised.
How odd therefore that the great Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, has now turned against his own amazing discovery, which he donated to the world rather than become a billionaire. He has turned because of the now pandemic “dark side” of his own invention. It has become a life-diminishing monster.
Consider child-grooming for paedophiles, kiddi-porn and adult pornography of the most disgusting category (toddlers and animals), defrauding of millions on a daily basis, massive damage by cyber-hackers using the web as a weapon of war, the vast costs to us all of anti-hacker security measures – the list goes on and on.
It is “online” that youths are radicalised to commit random murder, and children are turned into screen-mesmerised zombies, pale and obese, unwilling or unable to converse or play outside.
We were told that the benefits would outweigh all this – the speed and effi- ciency of every process, from shopping by card swiping to banking and cheque-cashing. Oh yeah? I now have to tolerate more interrogation for a simple bank account check that I used to when going through the Berlin Wall. It takes a week to cash a cheque. Captain Mainwaring took two days.
Can anything be done? Oh yes, but only by governments prepared to govern rather than dither. The online “service” purveyors such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc are beyond the law and out of control. Their profits are staggering and forbid reform. They have no incentive to self-censure so long as they are allowed by supine governments like ours to get away with it and pocket the billions that the filth and damage generate. But we have our defences. We employ computer wizards at GCHQ in Cheltenham. If we authorised them, they could easily treat a cyber-giant that refuses to clean up its emissions as an enemy alien. They too have the technology to inflict such damage on the moneybags that the profitability of drenching cyberspace in filth would evaporate. Then, they’d self-censure. But our spineless regime in Whitehall refuses to take them on. So now they rule the world and Sir Tim is right. His great gift to the human race has become a monster.
THE recent savage mass shooting in a California bar received heavy coverage. But hold your hat. There have been 307 handgun massacres in the USA so far this year. That is nearly one per day since January 1st. And we think we have a knife-crime wave?