Frank McCourt. Photo: supplied via McCourt Global communications associate
Big tech companies mine data about us and tweak algorithms that can often result in the spread of misinformation, cyberbullying and social division.
Billionaire American businessman Frank McCourt Jr does not want to just complain about it, he wants to fix it.
He is putting millions of dollars towards Project Liberty, which he founded, working towards developing a better web for a better world.
"We believe that we can innovate our way forward here by simply creating an alternative to the existing internet," McCourt told RNZ's Afternoons.
"It's the same fundamental internet in terms of the engineering and how it works but rather than have all of our data scraped and accumulated by a few platforms... [where we] aren't clicking on the terms and conditions of use that they put in front of use and none of us read, let's have an internet where we own and control our data and the new apps are clicking on our terms and conditions of use for our data."
The internet went from being decentralised to the app age - "a highly centralised, autocratic and surveillance-based age".
McCourt said the goal was to keep us all connected to the internet for as long as possible and the tools were designed to addict us.
"It's not a bug in the design, it's a feature of the design."
He wanted people to stop thinking about data as something that did not matter.
When you think about the word data, think about personhood - everything about you that you care about being stripped and taken away from you by large platforms, McCourt said.
"We live lives and we become the choices we make, we become the behaviours we have, we become the emotions we have, the reactions we have to things, the relationships that we have, the people we care and love about. This is what makes us human, this is what makes us who we are.
"Well, all of that is being stripped from us and collected by these large platforms."
The information is then fed back to us in an exploitative way, he said.
"We need to reimagine how the internet works, putting individuals in control of their data. We should own and control ourselves not be owned and controlled by these big platforms."
McCourt, who describes himself as a capitalist, said Project Liberty was a pro-internet, pro-technology project.
"However, we need to draw the line somewhere, I'm not interested in making money at the expense of destroying democracy... in people making money if it's going to rip society's fabric apart and I'm particularly not interested in people making money if it's going to harm children and that's exactly what these platforms are doing and we now know this."
McCourt knows he alone cannot fix the internet.
"I'm getting something going... but eventually this needs millions of us and it needs a lot more financial resources than I can provide because we're up against the biggest companies that have ever been created, literally."
He also knows that fixing the internet will not solve all society's problems.
"This time around, let's, knowing what we know now, let's design an internet that actually includes social scientists and not have a few tech companies decide how to manipulate the brains of young kids... and so we design and build technology for humanity."
McCourt lays out his vision in his new book, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age.
