2014 online: Brooks, Crooks and Too Many Cooks

I am making a personal vow to spend less time checking my phone, to re-engage with humanity and the physical world.

Right after I complete Jungle Jewels.

It’s been a funny year online.

January saw pro-Europe Ukrainian protesters become a global internet sensation by playing the piano at Russian military police, proving, perhaps that it is the instrument and not only the cats playing them which make them so popular.

In March a picture posted on twitter which became history’s most shared photograph - and it had nothing to do with Brooks Newmark.

The Oscar selfie starring Bradley Cooper, Ellen DeGeneres and Jennifer Lawrence went viral as it was taken live on the show and retweeted more than 3 million times.

We started debating net neutrality. Will free roaming internet be a thing of the past in 2015 with the paywalls and ISP controlled access on the rise?

It’s been a big year for censorship, with cinemas refusing to play The Interview for fear of hacker’s cyber attacking them and releasing Tom Hanks inside leg measurement to the world. Internet companies have already began locking us out of piracy sites, like Pirate Bay. Although proxy sites still exist.

3-D printers became a reality and started reeling out dresses, tools and (worryingly for society but fantastic for Daily Mail headline writers) guns.

So we will all be pummelling each other with paper bullets next year.

Facebook tinkered with its access rules preventing using pseudonyms and breast feeding pictures and also admitted playing psychological experiments with its users.

Google were forced to take down listings under the new right to be forgotten legislation. A worrying precedent for free press and further highlighting our need to marry the principles of print journalism with the urgency of the web.

In September, a host of celebrities had their iCloud accounts hacked private photos and videos spread like wildfire across the internet.

It shows the internet is something we still don’t understand on an ethical level. The idea that we would replicate and share this kind of violation was a surprise to me, while others, on the more conservative side of the fence blamed the celebrities themselves for taking the pictures in the first place.

A mixed bag all in all.

Most notably there has been an erosion of freedoms online, from hackers seemingly growing influence to corporate management of the web.

Between hackers, ISIS training videos and trolls, the internet has stopped being a harmless sandbox and now seems a fraction more malevolent and scary.

Still, the medium is growing and improving at an hourly rate and is still a seemingly bottomless conduit for art, debate, creativity and communication.

While it lasts let’s embrace what we have instead of using it as a tool for nitpicking and negativity. This time next year our semi-infinite internet landscape may seem a lot smaller than it does right now.

My 2015 predictions:

•  North Korea films a response to The Interview in which they attempt to assassinate Obama.

The world is outraged but admit it is slightly funnier than the American original.

The West and the East react by hacking and re-hacking one another until all decide the winner will be decided with a quick go on MarioKart. North Korea wins.

• The iPhone 7 is released with an app that allows you to upload pictures of your dinner direct to people’s brains. My new business, Skype Tours will take the world by storm. Basically, you pay me to travel the world and save you the hassle by beaming the images back to your bedsit.
•  2015 is also the year in which Back To The Future II is set. So we can all reasonably expect hoverboards and to cook a pizza in 20 seconds.

Happy new year everyone.

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