Translator: Gu Yu Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
There is a story in the Quran about a group of Christians
who escaped persecution by taking refuge in a cave.
There they fell into a very long sleep,
which they thought only lasted a day or two.
But it actually had lasted around centuries.
They were obviously very hungry.
It was only when they went down to the city to buy some food
that they realized how many centuries had passed.
When they wanted to pay, nobody accepted their money.
This is what happened to me in 2014
when I was freed from a six-year-long imprisonment in Tehran.
I was a pioneer in tech journalism and also in blogging in Iran,
and for that reason they came to call me "the blogfather".
I had many readers, many friends, and obviously some enemies.
When I was freed, I realized that the currency we all used those days
had become obsolete, useless.
I'm talking about those blue underlined bits of text on web pages
where you could click on and be transferred
to unknown places on other web pages.
They were called hyperlinks, if you remember them.
I understood that most blogs I used to read were abandoned.
The vibrant Persian blogosphere that I dedicated myself to promote
was a graveyard now.
I started searching for bloggers
and surprisingly enough I found them all in a place called Facebook.
In 2008, before I was arrested in Tehran,
I thought of Facebook as a great place to keep in touch with friends,
old and new,
and to maintain a social network with the people I knew personally.
What had happened during my absence
was that Facebook had also become a publishing platform
as well as a social network.
First, most readers of blogs moved to Facebook,
and then authors followed them.
Facebook is a closed publishing platform,
something like a password-protected blog, which I always hated.
It is also a very centralized and limiting one.
You can't host it on your domain name, you can't change how it looks.
But soon I discovered many problems with Facebook.
I soon discovered that the main problem with Facebook is beyond that.
The problem is that it doesn't like hyperlinks.
Let's go back a little bit.
Hyperlink was the foundation of Tim Burners-Lee's invention:
the World Wide Web.
It was what made the web so inherently diverse,
open, non-linear, and decentralized.
It was the biggest achievement of human civilisation
since the emergence of alphabets, writing,
and printing press.
Blogs best illustrated the potentials of hyperlink.
In the era of blogging, we used to read and discuss all the time.
We used to exchange, challenge each other, make arguments,
provide evidence, investigate, and discover.
We used to think quite a lot.
And most of that would have been impossible without hyperlinks.
Those days anyone who had more hyperlinks,
from or to her web page, was considered as wealthy.
Now on Facebook, and increasingly on most social media,
instead of links, we have likes,
and instead of thinking, we have a reality show.
On Facebook,
which to most people on the planet would soon mean the entire Internet,
links are treated as objects, not as relations.
They are not supposed to enrich the text,
they are themselves open to a popularity contest.
Links are less and less encouraged,
because social networks make money only if you stay inside of them.
Instagram, for instance, completely bans hyperlinks for that reason.
And Facebook with its Instant Articles project
has found a way to even further minimize links.
Meanwhile, smartphones that we all have, pose a different threat.
Web pages are filled with advertising and scripts that slow down everything.
So less and less people follow links on mobile web browsers,
or open several tabs on their mobile phones,
because it's just a hassle.
And quality web media lose more and more money because of that,
because people are using ad blockers.
So the result is that with the demise of hyperlink,
we are now experiencing the death of the web.
Now the Internet is comprised of social media apps
more than websites,
and these apps are not even connected.
But the new Internet is also different in other ways.
It's catching up quickly with the offline world
and its dominant social values.
Let's look at algorithms that social networks use now
to show us what we need to know.
What they pick is based on two things:
when they are posted, and how many likes they've received
among the people you follow.
Basically, they only show you what is new and what is popular.
These are the two most dominant social values of our time:
newness and popularity.
Anything else is doomed to silence, to a quiet death,
just like our societies' obsession with young celebrities,
and our increasing negligence or even hatred
towards the elderly and minorities.
Facebook newsfeed algorithms reinforce our views and opinions,
because they work according to our habits.
But at the same time they suppress minorities,
because a minority opinion never gets enough likes
to appear on people's newsfeeds.
It also radicalizes them,
not only by producing a sense of frustration that comes from silence,
but also by depriving them, like all of us, from being challenged.
Facebook, and other social networks,
have put an end to a Utopian vision we were all inspired by a decade ago
when the Internet emerged, the web emerged.
A diverse, open, non-linear, and decentralized space
that promoted dialogue and tolerance.
Now when we log on to Facebook and scroll down
and see all those entertaining pictures and videos,
there is nothing left of that Utopian vision.
This is not the Internet I used to know before I went to jail.
This linear, passive, centralized, homogenous stream
of still and moving images, is nothing but television.
A personalised television, with all its features.
Its business model is based on ads and product placements,
either as videos or as posts.
It has its own prime time even,
when more people are tuned in and can see the stream.
Its heavy dependence on celebrities;
its shallow, rushed, and emotional treatment
of the most serious topics;
its obsession with sound bites and infographics,
and its closeness and self-referentiality.
The new Internet is clearly not a place to think and to debate, as it used to be.
No wonder those so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions
around the world collapsed.
When algorithms replace charismatic leaders,
they divide everyone into numerous separate bubbles,
fragmenting their unity of will and wisdom,
and leading them into fighting each other rather than pushing for their cause.
So where are the points of resistance in all this?
How can we reimagine a space
that nurtures debate and understanding?
The way out of this horrifying tunnel is to reimagine new algorithms
with new kinds of social values,
such as diversity and quality, instead of newness and popularity.
It is possible.
If we have created algorithms that enforce our habits,
we can also get them to challenge those habits.
DJs do this all the time.
Their selection is not based on what is new or what is popular.
They play old tracks that we all loved in the past,
and they surprise us with great stuff we would never have listened to otherwise.
There is something else we can do, as powerless social media users.
We can confuse these algorithms
by liking what we dislike, by liking what we disagree with.
That's another way to resist.
The truth is that our habits are destroying us,
and hyperlink was one powerful brilliant idea to challenge them.
We must revive hyperlinks,
to help save the world from these glowing conflicts.
What we need now more than ever is not to be comforted,
it is to be surprised.
Thank you.
(Applause)