Cyberspace and Internet, Blessing or Curse to the Human Civilization in the Long Run

In February 2016 hackers used the SWIFT messaging system to try to move about a billion dollars from the account of Bangladesh's central bank at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Most of the transfers were blocked, but about eighty one million dollars was sent to accounts in the Philippines and was lost. The theft was carried out across borders in a few hours, by people who may never have entered the country. In the same year more than three billion people used the internet, to learn, to trade, to talk to those they loved and to organise protests. The two facts together state the topic, that cyberspace and the internet are a blessing and a curse at once, and the question concerns the long run.

The word cyberspace was coined by the novelist William Gibson in a short story of 1982 and made famous by his novel Neuromancer in 1984. It describes the space of information and communication that exists in networks of computers. The internet, which grew from the American defence research network ARPANET of 1969 and was opened to the public in the 1990s with the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners Lee, is its physical and logical body. In under three decades it has changed almost every part of human life.

The blessings are immense. Knowledge, once locked in libraries and universities, is now available to anyone with a connection. Wikipedia holds millions of articles in hundreds of languages, written by volunteers. Free online courses allow a student in a small town to hear a lecture from a leading university. In health, telemedicine reaches remote villages. In commerce, small producers can sell to the world, and payment systems like the Unified Payments Interface, launched in India in 2016, move money instantly. In 2015 the Digital India programme set out to connect villages by broadband and bring government services online.

The internet has also given a voice to the voiceless. During the Arab Spring of 2010 and 2011, social media helped activists organise protests that toppled governments. Citizens have used it to expose corruption and abuse, and videos recorded on mobile phones have shown police violence that would otherwise have gone unseen. Isolated people, whether patients of rare diseases or members of minorities, find communities of support online. The cost of communication has fallen to nearly nothing, and distance has lost much of its meaning.

The cost of communication has fallen to nearly nothing, and distance has lost much of its meaning.

The curses are as real. Cybercrime costs the world hundreds of billions of dollars a year by common estimates, in fraud, identity theft and ransom. States have turned the network into a battlefield. The Stuxnet worm, discovered in 2010, damaged Iranian nuclear centrifuges and showed that code can destroy physical machinery. In October 2016 an attack using infected household devices disrupted major websites across the United States. Critical systems, such as power grids, hospitals and banks, are connected and thus vulnerable. A war in cyberspace needs no soldiers and leaves no obvious aggressor. Attribution is slow and uncertain, so deterrence, the old basis of security, works poorly. Small states and private groups can inflict damage that once required armies, and the law of war has not caught up with this.

Privacy is the next casualty. In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed that the American National Security Agency collected telephone and internet data on a vast scale. Companies track what people read, buy and say, and sell the profile to advertisers. The Supreme Court of India in the Shreya Singhal case of 2015 struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which had criminalised offensive online speech, as a violation of free speech, but the state's powers of surveillance remain wide. A person who is watched all the time behaves differently, and a society of such people is less free.

Perhaps the deepest concern is the effect on the mind and on public life. Platforms are designed to capture attention, and critics such as Nicholas Carr argue in The Shallows that constant skimming weakens the capacity for sustained thought. Rumours and hatred spread faster than corrections, and algorithms tend to show people what they already believe, which hardens divisions. Online abuse and bullying have driven some young people to despair. Misinformation has led to mob violence, and elections have been shaped by manipulated campaigns. The openness that makes the network valuable also makes it a tool for the malicious.

Inequality marks the network too. In 2016 about half the world's people had no access, and in India fewer than three in ten used the internet, with women, the poor and rural people far behind. In February 2016 the telecom regulator TRAI rejected the Free Basics scheme which offered limited free access, on the ground that it breached the neutrality of the net. The decision showed the tension between spreading access fast and keeping the network open to all on equal terms. A technology that lifts those already ahead can widen the gap.

The long run is the heart of the topic, and the judgement depends on choices yet to be made. The printing press also brought both knowledge and religious wars, and it was centuries before societies learned to use it well through laws, schools and norms. The internet is a few decades old. Tools for governing it, such as strong encryption, data protection laws, rules for platforms and education in digital literacy, are still being built. India has no comprehensive law on privacy yet, and the international community has no agreed code of conduct for cyber conflict.

The choice is not between embracing and rejecting the network, which is no longer possible. A technology does not carry a moral. It amplifies what people bring to it, their curiosity and cruelty alike, and it does so at a scale and speed that no earlier tool allowed. Whether the network ends as a commons that enlarges human understanding or as a machine of surveillance and distraction will be settled by decisions in legislatures, in companies and in homes. Which of them will matter most is not yet visible, and by the time it is, the choice may have been made.