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In what is perhaps the latest sign that we are currently living in a Blade Runner inspired high-tech dystopia, Epic’s latest battle over where fans can access Fortnite has highlighted how hard it is to interact with tech giants on equal footing. Here's an in-depth look at how Fortnite made us rethink our relationship with the internet.
Rights, privileges, laws, and agreements
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To state that societies are generally held together by shared ideas regarding individual and collective rights and privileges is not an especially controversial statement. In turn, most of these rights and privileges are codified into our laws, while others may arise through contractual agreements.
But we have been thinking about the concepts of rights and privileges at least since the Enlightenment, while the silicon valley tech giants have existed in their current form for less than a generation.
And so it is no surprise that our ability to understand and interact meaningfully with these companies is limited, in part because many of the laws which would affect them were written at a time when steam was considered a technological innovation.
Fortnite and its role in solidifying our relationship with tech giants
But the days when heated water could be considered the cutting edge of technology are long behind us. Now, we send information in the form of electrical signals along massive cables laid across the oceans, we’ve created an entire world composed of data that exists only as code throughout the planet, and we’ve all gotten rather used to it.
And that is good. It allows for things like Fortnite to exist, as people can download and install the game on almost any device currently in widespread circulation (with the current notable exception of iOS devices).
But as Epic and Apple prepare their legal cases for why Fortnite should or should not be sold within a certain marketplace, it’s becoming tragically apparent that we simply lack the legal framework to have any meaningful way of interacting with the dispute.
Does Fortnite show the need for government involvement on the internet?
Perhaps nobody, aside from David Bowie, could have predicted exactly what the internet would look like when a generation of people grew up alongside it. In the early days of the net, common refrains were that the internet would allow for an unprecedented level of human interaction, defeat communism, topple authoritarian governments, and unify all humans.
Now, 20 years into the century, it’s painfully obvious that the internet not only won’t do that, but it couldn’t do that, in the same way that the telegraph couldn’t cause political upheaval. When Americans were predicting that the internet would bring democracy to China, China was simply learning how to control the internet, and now China stands, for better or for worse, as one of the only countries with a meaningful legal framework for government involvement in the internet.
But, and this can’t be stressed enough, just because other governments haven’t yet formalized their relationship with the internet doesn’t mean that they should follow the Chinese model.
What works in China shouldn’t even be attempted in the United States. Americans need to develop their own legal model for meaningfully governing the anarchy of the web and to stop the current system of corporate monarchies carving out spaces in the virtual world.
Corporate Monarchies in a Virtual World
Aside from sounding like the setup to a Neal Stephenson novel, this is perhaps one of the easiest ways to conceptualize exactly what many internet based companies are currently like. The giants, such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google, all operate from virtual space as petty kingdoms.
They are notoriously difficult for corporeal governments to interact with, as most attempts to govern them can simply result in them moving their physical location. So long as governments could benefit from these companies while ignoring them, however, there was little reason to attempt to develop the tools necessary to interact with them.
This is where Fortnite comes in. Whether or not you agree with what Fortnite is doing, and whether or not you agree with all of the business practices associated with Fortnite, Fortnite has become the catalyst needed to force governments to decide how they want their relationships with tech giants to go.
Fortnite has forced Americans to come to terms with the fact that they can’t treat virtual space the same as physical space, it has encouraged Koreans to consider regulating virtual markets, and it will incentivize all other internet conscious societies to think about how they want to interact with the web.
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