The play's the thing

The play's the thing

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet II, 2, 599

One of the conventions that has been around ever since classical Greek drama is the three-act structure. In the first act you introduce the characters; in the second act you get them in trouble; in the third act you get them out of the trouble. You might summarize this as boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again. All three acts aren't necessarily the same length. It's common for the second act to be much longer than the third act, for example.

It's a very common pattern. You can see it, for example, in the first three Star Wars movies as they tell the story of the redemption of Anakin Skywalker. In Star Wars (the first act) we meet the main characters. In The Empire Strikes Back (the second act), things don't look good for Anakin. He ends up cutting his son’s hand off and it looks like he’ll be on the side of evil forever. In The Return of the Jedi (the third act), however, he finally overcomes the forces of evil and returns to the side of good.

The three-act structure might even provide a framework for thinking about many information technologies. Let's try to see how well the history of the Internet fits into this structure.

The first act of this play is probably the introduction of the Internet and its adoption by businesses for communications. At that point we know all of the players. The Internet certainly has a role this play. Businesses have another. They’re the good guys. Cyber-criminals have another role, and they’re the bad guys, although at this point we are just starting to understand that they exist.

The next act probably began roughly when spam started to choke the Internet. This was followed by phishing and the more sophisticated types of identity theft that we see today. At this point, the bad guys (the cyber-criminals) seems to have the upper hand over the goog guys (businesses that want to use the Internet for communications). That's probably where we are today. Things don't look good for the good guys at this point, and there doesn't seem to be any way out of their troubles.

The final act probably hasn't started yet. The resolution that we'd like to see, of course, is that the good guys win, but this probably isn't happening yet. Cyber-criminals still seem to be fairly successful. One indication that this is true is the fact that the law of supply and demand continues to reduce the street price of a complete identity. In some cases, a complete identity is worth as little as $1 as the amount of sensitive information disclosed in data breaches makes lots of the sensitive information available. It’s certainly possible for the good guys to win so that we get back on track to the way that the third act is supposed to end, but we don’t seem to be heading in this direction. We’re probably still stuck in the second act. Maybe that's to be expected because the second act typically takes quite a while to finish.