Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web

Within a 48-hour period this week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them even months earlier. Taken independently, these changes might have felt incremental and isolated — the kind of refereeing and line-drawing that happens every day on social media. But arriving all at once, they felt like something much bigger: a sign that the Wild Wild Web — the tech industry’s decade-long experiment in unregulated growth and laissez-faire platform governance — is coming to an end. In its place, a new culture is taking shape that is more accountable, more self-aware and less willfully naïve than the one that came before it. 

You can glimpse this shift in the words of technologists like Steve Huffman, the chief executive of Reddit. He said he had recently rejected one of the Wild Wild Web’s core values — the idea that private internet platforms exist to provide a forum for all ideas, no matter how toxic. Huffman says he understands that some speech — hate, harassment, bullying — prevents others from speaking, and that a no-limits platform culture often empowers those least committed to civil conversation. It’s a position that reflects a more mature understanding of the dynamics of online communities, and the many ways a powerful platform’s inaction can be weaponized. The internet is no longer a world distinct and apart from the physical world. We all live online, and it’s long past time for the world on our screens to be managed as thoughtfully, and with as much accountability, as our roads and schools and hospitals. The Wild Wild Web may be over, but the real building has just begun.