Just before the 2017 UK general election, I was introduced to the distinction between the good internet and the bad internet, democratically speaking. First, I had to learn what “civic tech” meant. In the broadest possible terms, it’s using online platforms to do socially useful things, rather than sell things, buy things or whip each other into an unspeakable fury about stuff that we didn’t care about five minutes ago.
The civic tech expert Ed Saperia used as his parable the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook. Jimmy Wales’s big experiment, which started life in 1999 as Nupedia, has created an open-source collection of human knowledge in hundreds of languages that is essentially trustworthy. If a mistake creeps in through the gates of human generosity, it gets corrected in the same way. If malicious actors try to slander their foes, the punishment is not cancellation, but more like lifelong ridicule, which is proportionate, given how long a slanderous person is likely to carry on doing ridiculous things. In other words, it is the best of humanity, all natural desire to help each other with cross-pollinated knowledge concentrated in one place.
Facebook, for brevity, takes the same raw material – all the people in the world – and finds the worst in it. Facebook manages to winkle out things we didn’t know we were capable of – levels of vitriol, gullibility and hysteria – in between a scare ad for dark politics and a mesmerising video of five types of mince baked around a kilo of cheese. (I am paraphrasing a bit; I don’t think civic tech gurus dwell much on the cheese.)
If you could work out how these two projects became so different, you would probably have a blueprint for the next phase of the internet. Regulation sounds fanciful and boring, but socialisation? That would work: corralling the wild west into a functioning global community. I figured that the best contribution I could make was to stop ignoring that “please give us two quid” banner at the top of Wikipedia.
All this was after the phrase “fake news” had been invented and repurposed by Donald Trump to toxify information everywhere. While the right minds are tackling this problem, a lot of the wrong minds have been doing so as well. As the Nobel Peace prize winner Maria Ressa has warned, online misinformation could end democracy as we know it.
So, the sight of Elon Musk charging towards Wikipedia with his trademark guile and delicacy was so predictable that it was almost relaxing. He saw a collective resource that people prized and he wanted to hurt it. Why does Wales even need any money to run Wikipedia in the first place, he wondered on Sunday. You could fit the entire thing on your phone, he claimed. Eleven minutes later, he offered $1bn if it would change its name to Dickipedia.
After Musk’s adventures on X, formerly Twitter, his views on what things cost and the relevance of what you can fit on your phone mostly evoke the thought: “Wow, to think I once took as read that tech bro billionaires knew what they were talking about!” The rest just make you wince. We called Twitter a sink even before Musk bought it, but that misses one fact: there were people making dick jokes that were funny about a thousand times an hour. Of the many points Musk missed when he bought Twitter, one concerned the standard of content he was seeking to govern. It’s like watching a drunk frat boy bowl up and flash Dorothy Parker.
Wincing and scorn aside, Musk is after Wikipedia for a reason. The sight of something created socially that works is an insult to him. I would spend two quid a month, or more, just for that.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
