The internet was once a land of promise, with few fears about crime or privacy. Thirty years on, scammers, thieves and spies have created a place of chaos

Here are some stories about the world we now inhabit…

• In February this year, Bangladesh Bank was hit by the biggest bank robbery in history when thieves got away with $101m. The heist was accomplished not by tunnels or explosives, but by acquiring the access codes for the Swift global messaging system, which is what banks use to securely pass payment orders to one another. The criminals used Swift to instruct the US Federal Reserve to transfer money to their accounts. Then they cunningly erased their digital fingerprints by modifying the bank’s software.

• In June 2015, the US Office of Personnel Management revealed that its computer systems had been hacked and that the hackers had stolen the social security numbers, names, dates and places of birth, and addresses of 21.5 million people, including some who had undergone background checks for sensitive government posts.

• In October 2015, nearly 157,000 customers of the UK telco TalkTalk had their personal data stolen in a massive intrusion into the company’s computer systems. Police later arrested six teenage boys in connection with this cyber attack.

• In the past two years, hospitals worldwide have found themselves on the receiving end of a vicious type of cyber attack. Medical staff suddenly find that their hospital’s computer systems are locked and inaccessible to them because they have been secretly infiltrated. They then receive a message telling them that their data will be unlocked on payment of a ransom in Bitcoins. The European police agency Europol now reckons that the threat from “ransomware” has eclipsed all other forms of online theft and extortion.

Over the past year, someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet

• Two months ago, a young Italian woman killed herself because she was traumatised by online abuse after an intimate video that she had sent to a friend was widely “shared” across the web. As soon as the images went viral, she was subjected to jeering comments, Photoshopped screenshots and cruel parodies that, in the end, tipped her over the edge.

• In June, it was revealed that two agencies of the Russian government had hacked into the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee. Shortly before the Democratic convention that nominated Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails and attachments stolen during the breach, some of which were distinctly unhelpful to Clinton and useful to Donald Trump.

• On 21 October, a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks caused widespread disruption of internet activity in the US. The attacks involved directing huge amounts of bogus traffic at servers belonging to Dyn, a company that is a major provider of domain name services (DNS) to other companies. For a time this severely affected major websites – including Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast and the PlayStation network. The attack was conducted using a huge botnet of unsecured “internet of things” devices such as home webcams and broadband routers.

• According to Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, over the past year or so, someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet. These probes, Schneier says, “take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.”

Welcome to cyberspace.

It didn’t used to be like this. In the first decade after the internet we use today was switched on, in January 1983, cyberspace was a brave new world – a glorious sandpit for geeks and computer science researchers. There was, in that magical virtual world, no crime, no spam, no commercial activity and little concern about security – largely because “netizens” (for that is what they were called) knew one another, or at least knew what their institutional affiliations were. Discussion groups (then called newsgroups) were formed around every conceivable topic, no matter how arcane. (Early on, there was a vigorous argument about whether there should be a discussion group on sex, and when one finally appeared, someone else insisted that logically there should therefore also be newsgroups on drugs and rock’n’roll. So those were set up too.) Codes of conduct, etiquette and social norms evolved to regulate – or at least moderate – online behaviour, reduce “flame wars”, and so on. It was, in a way, a kind of wonderland, and it gave rise to the techno-utopianism embodied in John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the independence of cyberspace”, which began: “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather...”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In June, Russian agencies hacked into the computers of the Democrat National Committee, accessing emails that damaged Hillary Clinton and helped Donald Trump. Photograph: USA/Rex/Shutterstock

What it came down to was this: in the decade 1983-93, cyberspace and “meatspace” (Barlow’s term for the real, physical world) were effectively parallel universes. They existed side by side, and for the most part the inhabitants of meatspace knew nothing of the virtual world.

But from 1993 onwards, all that began to change. The main catalysts were the world wide web, the Mosaic browser and AOL. The web provided non-geeks with an answer to the question: what is this internet thing for? Mosaic, the first modern browser, showed them what the web could do and, more importantly, what it could become. Demand for access to the internet exploded. AOL met the demand by providing a reliable, easy-to-configure, dial-up service for millions of people, and so brought the “redneck hordes” – ie people unfamiliar with the mores and customs of the netizen era – on to the internet. Scenting profits, companies and pornographers scrambled for a piece of the action, closely followed by scammers and spammers and all kinds of other undesirables.

The result was that the parallel universes gradually merged, and we wound up with the composite networked world we now inhabit – a world that has the affordances of both cyberspace and meatspace. Which helps to explain why we are having such trouble coming to terms with it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In October 2015, nearly 157,000 TalkTalk customers had their personal details stolen by six teenage boys. Photograph: Zmeel Photography/Getty Images

This blended universe is a strange place, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. It provides its users – ordinary citizens – with services, delights and opportunities that were once the prerogative only of the rich and powerful. Wikipedia, the greatest store of knowledge the world has ever seen, is available at the click of a mouse. Google has become the memory prosthesis for humanity. Services such as Skype and FaceTime shrink intercontinental distances for families and lovers. And so on.

But at the same time, everything we do on the network is monitored and surveilled by both governments and the huge corporations that now dominate cyberspace. (If you want to see the commercial side of this in action, install Ghostery in your browser and see who’s snooping on you as you surf.) Internet users are assailed by spam, phishing, malware, fraud and identity theft. Corporate and government databases are routinely hacked and huge troves of personal data, credit card and bank account details are stolen and offered for sale in the shadows of the so-called “dark web”. Companies – and public institutions such as hospitals – are increasingly blackmailed by ransomware attacks, which make their essential IT systems unusable unless they pay a ransom. Cybercrime has already reached alarming levels and, because it largely goes unpunished, will continue to grow – which is why in some societies old-style physical crime is reducing as practitioners move to the much safer and more lucrative online variety.

“All human life is there” was once the advertising slogan for the now-defunct News of the World. It was never true of that particular organ, which specialised mostly in tales of randy vicars, celebrity love triangles, the foolishness of lottery winners and similar dross. But it is definitely true of the internet, which caters for every imaginable human interest, taste and obsession. One way of thinking about the net is as a mirror held up to human nature. Some of what appears in the mirror is inspiring and heart-warming. Much of what goes on online is enjoyable, harmless, frivolous, fun. But some of it is truly repellent: social media, in particular, facilitate firestorms of cruelty, racism, hatred and hypocrisy – as liberals who oppose the Trump campaign in the US have recently discovered. For a crash course in this darker side of human nature, read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and weep.

S o we find ourselves living in this paradoxical world, which is both wonderful and frightening. Social historians will say that there’s nothing new here: the world was always like this. The only difference is that we now experience it 24/7 and on a global scale. But as we thrash around looking for a way to understand it, our public discourse is depressingly Manichean: tech boosters and evangelists at one extreme; angry technophobes at the other; and most of us somewhere in between. Small wonder that Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, once described our condition as that of “informed bewilderment”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest According to IT journalist Sean Gallagher, the internet ‘looks a lot’ like New York of the late 70s: ‘There is a cacophony of hateful speech, vice of every kind… and policemen trying to keep a lid on all of it’. Photograph: Alain Le Garsmeur/Getty Images

One way of combating this bewilderment is to look for metaphors. The idea of the net as a mirror held up to human nature is one. But recently people have been looking for others. Sean Gallagher, the IT editor of Ars Technica, for example, reaches for an urban reference. “In the New York City of the late 1970s,” he writes, “things looked bad. The city government was bankrupt, urban blight was rampant, and crime was high. But people still went to the city every day, because that was where everything was happening. And despite the foreboding feelings hanging over New York at the time, the vast majority of those people had at most minor brushes with crime.”

“Today,” he continues, “we all dabble in some place that looks a lot like 1970s New York City – the internet. (For those needing a more recent simile, think the Baltimore of The Wire.) Low-level crime remains rampant, while increasingly sophisticated crime syndicates go after big scores. There is a cacophony of hateful speech, vice of every kind... and policemen of various sorts trying to keep a lid on all of it – or at least trying to keep the chaos away from most law-abiding citizens. But people still use the internet every day, though the ones who consider themselves street smart do so with varying levels of defences installed. Things sort of work...”

They do. But the weakness of the NYC metaphor is that the city was eventually cleaned up and a kind of order restored. So in that sense, it’s an unrealistic, optimistic scenario for the net. Consequently, those who fear that humanity will struggle to get a grip on cyberspace reach for more alarming metaphors. Could it, for example, become some kind of “failed state” like contemporary Somalia, with, as Gallagher puts it, “warring factions destroying the most fundamental of services, ‘security zones’ reducing or eliminating free movement, and security costs making it prohibitive for anyone but the most well-funded operations to do business without becoming a ‘soft target’ for political or economic gain”?

Our dilemma is that while the future of cyberspace is unknowable, we need to think about it because it affects us all

The Fragile States Index, an annual report published by the US thinktank the Fund for Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy, defines a fragile state as one “whose central government is so weak or ineffective that it has little practical control over much of its territory; non-provision of public services; widespread corruption and criminality; refugees and involuntary movement of populations and sharp economic decline”.

Some, but not all, of this maps neatly on to cyberspace. There is, for example, no central government that has effective control over the network’s “territory” (though the US, for historical reasons, has had more influence over it than any other nation, much to the annoyance of the Russians and the Chinese). In fact, one of the central problems posed by the network is that it is a global system in a Westphalian world of sovereign states and local laws.

Our dilemma is that while the future of cyberspace is unknowable, we need to think about it because it affects us all. The standard method that large corporations and governments use for this purpose is by imagining a set of possible futures or scenarios and assessing the implications of each one. The aim is not to “predict” the future, but to try and sketch the range of possibilities that we might have to deal with.

As far as cyberspace is concerned, the most interesting set of scenarios I’ve seen come from a US thinktank, the Atlantic Council. Its analyst, Jason Healey, sets out five candidates:

• Status quo: a continuation of what we now have. “Cyberspace is generally a safe place in which to do business and to communicate with others, even though criminals continue to engage in multimillion-dollar heists and steal millions of people’s personal details; national foreign intelligence agencies poke and prod for military and industrial secrets.”

• Conflict domain: essentially an extrapolation of the militarisation of cyberspace that we are already seeing – a world in which cyberwarfare becomes common.

• Balkanisation: cyberspace has broken into national fiefdoms: there is no single internet, just a collection of national internets.

• Paradise: cyberspace becomes an overwhelmingly secure place where espionage, warfare and crime are rare.

• Cybergeddon: cyberspace degenerates into a virtual failed state with all that that implies. Think modern-day Mogadishu.

Some of these are more implausible than others. Healey’s “paradise” scenario is pure fantasy. And the power of internet corporations – plus the reach and dominance of national intelligence agencies such as the NSA – suggest that some kind of (possibly repressive) order would be restored long before “cybergeddon” would be reached.

So we’re left with two real possibilities – some blend of Balkanisation and inter-state conflict, both extrapolations of trends that we can already observe.

If this is indeed how things pan out, I know one scholar, a distinguished professor of international relations, who won’t be in the least surprised. Sixteen years ago, in a conversation about the internet, he asked me if I really believed that the internet represented a fundamental challenge to established power structures. I replied vehemently in the affirmative – because, in my techno-utopian fervour, I did believe. He smiled but said nothing, and so eventually I asked him what he thought. “We’ll see, dear boy,” he replied. “We’ll see.”

He’s still around, as wise as ever. And I am a recovering utopian.

John Naughton’s most recent book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, is published by Quercus

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