The Wild West of Digitalization - Tim Cole

The Wild West is not as great as one might think.

If we want to consider the young history of the internet, it might be good to first remember the history of the American "Wild West." Back then, just like today, a new world was being opened up, and in the beginning, there was raw violence and the "law of the Colt." It was only gradually that the land was settled, cultivated, and eventually civilized (although given Donald Trump's election victory, one might doubt whether this process is truly complete...). The Wild West, as we know it, began in 1804 with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the West Coast, where the West was first mapped, and it was already over by 1869 when the symbolic last railroad spike of the first transcontinental railroad was driven. This was somewhat like the nail in the coffin of an era. Three years later, it was deemed necessary to protect the last untouched remnants of the West by creating Yellowstone National Park. So, that was the Wild West! It lasted only 65 years. In this short period, barely a blink in human history, lies everything we know from Karl May and countless Western movies: bearded trappers and tough settlers, train and stagecoach robberies, Indian wars, and the slaughter of the once vast buffalo herds, the Pony Express riders, and the first telegraph lines. In 1962, the greatest directors of their time, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, and Richard Thorpe, celebrated the memory of a special era in the epic film "The Wild Wild West" (released in German as "Das war der Wilde Westen"), which had long since become a myth through the lens of romanticization and glorification (thereby also ending another era, that of the epic Hollywood historical film). Will we one day look back on the first decades of the internet in the same way? And what will become of it? Because we know what came after the Wild West: first, the farmers who cleared and fenced the land (in 1867, Lucien B. Smith from Ohio received the patent for barbed wire, which was probably more important for the development of the West than the Colt). Then came the traders and saloon owners, the telegraph stations and prisons, the sheriffs and judges, the schools and churches, the surveyors and land registries, the railroads and highways. Eventually, the land was "civilized" in the sense that law and order prevailed, along with growth and prosperity, progress and diversity. All of this lies ahead of us in the internet age. We are roughly where the first settlers stood when they set out for the Promised Land beyond the great river. We have all the hard work ahead of us to turn the wilderness into a flourishing garden. But first, we must clean up, establish order, enact and enforce laws, trim excesses, put villains behind bars, rein in the robber barons, make the land arable, and make life worth living.

The great feast must finally stop!

This will be a tough job, and the odds seem to be against us. The opponents are too powerful, the Googles, Apples, Facebooks, and Amazons (collectively referred to as the "Big 4"). The regulations for protecting citizens and consumers are too lax - or non-existent. Despite all assurances, the internet is still largely a lawless space, and Günter Oettinger, the "Digital Commissioner" of the EU, rightly calls for a "digital civil code," a European Civil Code that establishes order and clarifies, for example, who owns data in the first place. Oettinger is concerned about the economy because, for example, it is still unclear to whom the data of a CAD file belong, which a manufacturer sends to his customer, who then uses it on his 3D printer to produce the spare part needed to get his broken production machine running again. I believe that in a proper digital civil code, which should not only apply to Europe but worldwide, it must also state who owns my data: me - or some behemoth from Silicon Valley? Large internet companies and tiny startups: they are all accustomed to feasting at the trough filled with our information, data, most intimate secrets, and deepest dreams. And of course, the feast is free for them! They will not vacate the trough without a fight. The Big 4 and all the others have too much to lose, and they will not yield easily. They are indeed the new robber barons of the 21st century, with deep pockets and powerful allies. They have grown used to exploiting and using us, stealing our data and identities, marketing our information, and addicting us with their platforms and apps. They now consider it their right - excuse me, I took the liberty. And the worst part is: we allow it! There is a parallel to the era of the so-called "Robber Barons," the robber capitalists - the "Gilded Age," as Mark Twain called it. Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the Wild West was tamed, and the first great greedy capitalists like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and J. Pierport Morgan built huge empires and powerful monopolies, ruthlessly exploiting people. Over time, people rebelled, went on strike, burned down factories, fought soldiers sent against them by the robber barons and their friends in the highest echelons of politics. There were deaths, injuries, unrest, destruction, hardship. And eventually, reason prevailed: Theodore Roosevelt went down in history as the "Trust Buster" because in 1902, with the help of the Sherman Act, he successfully took 45 monopoly operators to court. Laws against child labor and for workers' protection were enacted. The Progressive Era followed the Gilded Age - and that is what we need today - the Progressive Era of the Internet.

The Gilded Age of the Internet

Historians may one day speak of the "Gilded Age of the Internet," a hectic time without fixed rules and clear oversight functions, which was slowly guided into orderly paths by regulations, but mainly by the market itself, and where men like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Page created similar empires as their ancestors did a century earlier. It may seem to us that the internet has been around forever, but in reality, we are still at the very beginning. Today, the claims are being staked. It is about the domination of key industries like video, music streaming, navigation, or cloud services: these are some of the areas where the battle between the Big 4, but also between them and us, will be fought out. The cards are still being shuffled, and it is not yet clear who will ultimately win the game. But one thing is clear: if we continue as before, it will remain the Wild West. We citizens and consumers will not only have to demand our right: we will have to litigate for it - and even fight for it if necessary. The path to a civilized online world will not happen without a revolution from below. We can only hope that this revolution will shed only virtual blood. I am a fundamentally optimistic person, and I believe we can do it. I am confident that we will achieve a peaceful transition into a digital age where things are fair and orderly, where fundamental rights to freedom of information on the one hand and informational self-determination on the other are respected, where profits are distributed fairly, and effort is rewarded. I do not want to live in the Wild West like my ancestors, and you, ladies and gentlemen, probably don't either. We can watch it in the cinema or on television if we want. The Wild West of digitalization is waiting for you, check out Tim Cole's profile here: http://www.excellente-unternehmer.de/redner/tim-cole.html