We Need to Rewild the Internet

In We Need To Rewild The Internet, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make a very compelling and urgent case for aggressively rewilding the internet, as Big Tech monopolies have turned what was once a thriving ecosystem into single-crop plantations: “highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle fee... See more

The first thing I’ve come to learn is that pursuing something as open-ended as internet reform requires intentional scoping and goal-setting. The New Internet was never a single thing. It was fractured and messily connected from the jump. This messiness was used as feedstock to accelerate its consolidation under what became the crypto industry. It ... See more

Going online today is not an invigorating walk through a green woodland—it’s rush-hour traffic alongside a freeway median of diseased trees, littered with the detritus of late capitalism. If we want to repair this damage, we must look to the wisdom of the forest and listen to ecologists like Simard when they tell us just how sustainable, interdepen... See more

If we take the metaphor of the wood wide web seriously, it’s hard not to see an analogy here to the context collapse endemic to social media. A few corporations control the lion’s share of public cloud infrastructure, and monopolistic ISPs exploit everyday users. Tech and social media giants have clear-cut the web, privileging high-value crops—vira... See more

I still believe that there are new forms of connectivity we could forge that aren’t Facebook and aren’t Twitter and that could maybe — maybe — let us see outside of our own filter bubbles. Perhaps we could find or create new kinds of avenues for organizing, or platforms for debate (for those who are level-headed enough to do so). The role of the in

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The online world and its explosion of narratives, data and tribalism presents us with a unique evolutionary problem. The environment we evolved in wasn’t carefully designed to capture our attention, hijack our biases and stoke our outrage. A physical forest doesn’t bombard us with an overwhelming amount of information and narrative warfare every mi... See more

But what if we saw the Internet as a landscape? A rolling valley, a dense forest, a vast ocean. (Maybe that iconic Windows desktop background of a green hill was right all along.) When we see the Internet as a landscape, or even a living being, our perception changes. We become more conscious of how we behave, how we treat it and the things in it. ... See more

There is no reason the world must stay this way, the internet has already rebirthed some informal skill transfer that once existed. This constitutes a beautiful reawakening of meaningful work for anyone interested, and is one of the most significant changes from prior decades. For that matter there might be more tools than ever for clever parents t... See more