Every new medium promises freedom.
A few years later someone tries to build a gate around it.
One of the ways I keep life pleasant for myself is by not weighing a spontaneous idea before executing it.
This mentality was quite common among people who, in the mid-1990s, were inventing projects for what was then still called the World Wide Web. At that time we were used to the idea that anything capable of reaching a large audience automatically came with serious costs. Either you were dealing with high printing expenses, or with investments in radio and television.
Wild ideas therefore tended to slow down long before they were ever executed.
To realise such an idea you usually had to go to a financial institution, often a bank, where your plans would be analysed and recalculated by people who had spent a good portion of their lives without ever having had a single original idea of their own.
It was not pleasant. But it did feel like a kind of balance.
The First Democratisation: Publishing
The arrival of an Internet that was accessible and affordable for consumers wiped away that slow method of creation.
For me personally this meant that I could launch a Dutch-language literary magazine. It was a publication that I would never have been able to realise on paper, because it would almost certainly have gone bankrupt within a year. The printing techniques of that period required large print runs to make a publication financially viable.
Publishing a magazine in an edition of 500 copies for a small audience was simply unthinkable. That would only become possible much later with the arrival of inkjet printing technologies.
In the mid-1990s, if you wanted to start a publication for a large audience, all you really needed was a homepage and an affordable server.
That moment marked the beginning of the democratisation of information.
Newspapers, magazines and book publishers initially looked down their noses at it. In the eyes of my own publisher at the time, the Internet was mainly intended for soccer crowds. That was a remarkable opinion, because he had just launched a literary magazine called Hard Gras. I have no judgement about that publication. It was an ode to soccer and literature, and apparently a successful combination.
It never quite resonated with me, because I am one of the few Dutch people who simply do not care about soccer.
I can still see the publisher of my first novel sitting behind his desk while pointing at a large box placed on top of a cabinet. Inside was the computer that management had forced upon him. He had every intention of resisting that machine for as long as possible.
The Second Democratisation: Advertising
The freedom and democratisation of the Internet lasted in its purest form for roughly five years.
Around the year 2000 the business world discovered the Internet and began selling products and services online. Companies hired expensive developers who built webshops and promotional websites. What surprised them most was how cheaply they could bombard large groups of people with advertising.
In a sense this became the democratisation of advertising, which until then had consisted mainly of expensive printed leaflets that people would immediately throw into the trash.
Soon a new word appeared. Spam.
People did not yet take the Internet with them on vacation. Everyone complained that upon returning to the office there would be, for example, 1,768 messages waiting in their inbox. Each message had to be opened or deleted one by one, just in case something valuable might be hidden among them.
It was not an easy time, because most of us were still fairly digitally illiterate.
The Third Democratisation: Communication
What we did handle very well were the smaller mobile phones, what we would now call burners. Nokia phones in particular were extremely popular. Text messaging exploded almost overnight.
Perhaps I have a filthy mind, but I have always suspected that SMS became so popular because men and women could sit next to each other on the couch watching television while secretly maintaining contact with people offering other pleasures, such as flirting and infidelity.
Just as the early web grew enormously through the presence of pornography, sex also helped elevate the mobile phone to great heights.
People who struggled with programs such as the once popular word processor WordPerfect suddenly found themselves sending messages at astonishing speed, sometimes using nothing more than a single thumb.
I sometimes joke that every large technological expansion in the digital world ultimately comes from humanity’s desire to have sex with strangers.
Let us hope that this is not entirely true.
The Fourth Democratisation: Photography
Although Steve Jobs was rightly praised and still is praised for innovation, it was almost inevitable that the Internet would eventually move into those small phones. Only then could the entire population, including the most stubborn digital illiterates, be brought online.
The first iPhones did not completely solve that problem, but it did not take long before smartphones became powerful and intuitive enough to do exactly that.
With the smartphone came perhaps the most important democratisation of all.
Photography and video.
Whatever terrible thing happens somewhere in the world, there is almost always someone there recording it so that the rest of us can see what happened.
The Fifth Democratisation: Artificial Intelligence
The newest form of democratisation is artificial intelligence.
Most people immediately think of deepfakes, but AI is primarily a tool that can solve complex problems quickly across almost every discipline.
At the same time it represents something of a return to the revolutionary spirit of the early Internet. The resistance is strong. The developments move extremely fast. And for people who cannot see the possibilities, there is very little to experience.
Looking back, these technologies no longer feel separate. They look like successive attempts to remove the distance between an idea and the moment it can reach everyone.
In that sense the present moment is not entirely new. In the eighteenth century political pamphlets and illustrated prints could spread an idea among people who barely read long texts. An image and a single caption were often enough. Today we would probably call that a meme.
It is a perfect parallel with the early Internet.
The One That Never Was
There is one element missing from the list of democratisations that I have described so far.
Social media.
That omission is not accidental.
Social media are often mistaken for a democratic space. In reality they are privately owned broadcasting systems, controlled by a handful of eccentric individuals who attempt to influence society and politics through algorithms and censorship.
That is not democratisation.
It is something else entirely.