The Internet Has Become a Playground for Riffraff

The Roman Senator Googurekas and the poet Terawaros were childhood friends. (See Wikipedia.)

I found myself recalling the dawn of the internet, now more than 20-odd years ago.

Back then, people would say, “Be careful about whether you trust information from the internet.” That was called “internet literacy.” (Has that phrase died out by now?)

I’m not going to get into whether the anecdote above is “true or false.” I’m not a historian, I’m not a linguist, and I have zero interest in that question.

To begin with, who Googurekas actually was is lost to history, and apparently there was also a similarly named person called Googurukas, so everything out there is somewhat lacking in credibility. As for Terawaros, who knows. Doesn’t matter. Let’s gracefully move past it.

Now, here’s the actual issue.

The internet has become, without a shred of doubt, completely the property of the masses.
Because of that, all kinds of people — young and old, men and women, whether or not they can tell right from wrong, regardless of their level of knowledge — wade in half-blindly (equally, in a good sense), and as a result it’s become impossible to tell what’s true and what isn’t.
Sometimes people deliberately twist information with clear malicious intent, and once someone who “seems to have authority online” goes along with it, that’s basically the end of it — it becomes accepted as truth.

In the early days of the internet, users were mostly academics.
So the accuracy of information was, somehow, fairly well guaranteed, and it was a world you could walk through with a sense of security. But once mass adoption arrived, it rapidly turned into a playground for all sorts of riffraff.

For example, back when internet advertising was just getting started, a malicious technique became something of a template: flashy copy or too-good-to-be-true information (obviously false) would get people to click a banner or link, and they’d end up redirected to some sketchy overseas site (with ad revenue going to whoever placed the banner or link). In response, people started talking about “internet literacy.” In other words, society keenly recognized the need to educate people on how to walk safely on the internet.

So, what about today? The internet has become indispensable to society, security technology has advanced — has the internet become a safe place to walk through?
No. Put a bit abstractly, the internet is approaching something extremely close to an approximation of real society.

Real society, huh.

Japan, for example, is still a country boasting one of the best public safety records in the world.
In a country like that, if someone drops something right in front of you, wouldn’t 7 out of 10 people pick it up for them? How kind. Wonderful.

But in a country with poor public safety, this is a classic pickpocket technique. It’s a duo con: one person pretends to be in trouble after dropping something, and while the kind passerby tries to pick it up, the other person seizes the moment to grab their bag or steal their wallet. Once explained, it makes perfect sense. It’s a simple, rational method, and anyone who’s traveled abroad even a little has usually heard of it (or in some cases experienced it firsthand) — one of the classic tricks.

In other words, there are countries and regions where it’s fine to be kind and pick something up, and there are countries and regions where kindness backfires. That’s real society.
The internet has, across the board, turned neatly into that kind of world.

But even so, it doesn’t follow that:
“If it’s become a normal world, then we can just live normally in it. Happily ever after.”
That’s not how it works.
Because in the world of the internet, Japan and El Salvador, Singapore and Mexico City, Syria and Afghanistan all sit right next door to each other, and it’s always somewhat unclear which of these you’re currently standing in. No boundary exists to protect you. Domains can’t be trusted either. Emails can be forged at will. Phishing sites have become an art form.

When I lived in Silicon Valley, there was an area with abnormally cheap rent.
When I asked a local friend, they said, “Oh, that’s the area where shootouts happen sometimes. There’s a gang base there.”
(What’s funny is that Facebook’s headquarters is actually pretty close to there.)
In the real world, of course, the obvious choice is “don’t live there, don’t go near there.”
Nobody wants to put their life at risk just for cheap rent (barring unavoidable circumstances).
Physical boundaries do their job obediently.

But in the world of the internet, it doesn’t work that way.

Here’s a similar story: in middle school, there was a particular restroom where “the third-year upperclassmen always hung out.” Naturally, a decent, upstanding first-year avoided it. But you always had to walk past it on the way home from school.
If you were unlucky, the upperclassmen would catch you. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination…
So to avoid that, the sound strategy was to join a club, practice diligently until it got dark out, and go home once the upperclassmen had gotten bored of the restroom and moved on to hang out somewhere else.
That’s about the extent of the risk-avoidance a middle schooler needed in the Before Internet era. An extremely simple matter.

But in the world of the internet, it doesn’t work that way.

You may not lose your life, but you can catch a stray bullet from a shootout happening nearby. As I mentioned earlier, it might be happening right next door, or you might wander unknowingly into a danger zone.
On top of that, bullets on the internet are often indiscriminate and unlimited in number. The classic example is viruses, and the same goes for phishing and account-theft scams. From the attacker’s perspective, once it’s set up, it’s a chain-reaction bomb that keeps generating victims indefinitely.
This was about 10 years ago, but it’s said, in a tone that sounds plausible, that the hacking of the uranium enrichment facility at Iran’s nuclear site started from a single USB memory stick (I don’t know if that’s true or not). There’s nothing more complicated these days than managing security across both the real world and the internet.

There’s also a simpler point: “information whose truth or falsity is uncertain,” like the anecdote at the start, is plenty harmful in its own right.
As the term Googurekas — internet slang meaning “ask Professor Google before you ask someone else” — suggests, the tendency to assume that information found on the internet must be correct has grown extremely strong in recent years. It’s honestly alarming.
On the other hand, until Google changed its listing criteria a few years back, it was reportedly possible, to some degree, to deliberately game SEO (techniques to rank higher in search results). (I don’t know about recently.)
Which is to say: with a certain amount of effort, and in some cases money, a lie can be made to look true.
That’s a deeply unbalanced situation.

There’s no end to the false information on the internet.
From scam ads like “Now XX% off on such-and-such!”, to racist remarks on various message boards, to slander and harassment on social media.
From public spaces to conversations among friends, it’s genuinely overflowing with false information.

And yet.

Haven’t we all been living a bit too complacently lately?

Be honest — hasn’t your guard dropped?

Habituation? Overconfidence? A myth of safety?

We went from the 20th century, when we devoured internet information the way surfers ride waves, fully aware of the risk and thrill involved, to the 21st century, where because we encounter it constantly, as a matter of course, drenched in an overwhelming shower of information every day, a trapdoor somehow seems to be opening beneath our feet.

We’ve gone from the back alleys of Southeast Asia, where we traveled tensely and excitedly, keeping our shoulder bags slung to the front, to the street in front of Ginza Mitsukoshi, where people stroll along with their smartphones sticking halfway out of their back pockets.

This might be a good time to tighten things up a little.

Written by Googuttaha Nashimou Tagaekas
(A thinker of the ancient Roman Empire. Dates of birth and death unknown.)

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/01/292/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.