Saved by Austin Robey and
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
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
newpublic.org • The word for web is forest
The web isn’t what it used to be. When the editors of Nature compared mycorrhizal fungi to a computer network, the web was still predominantly peer-to-peer, its users sharing their thoughts on personal home pages and homespun message-boards. Online advertising was in its infancy. But as the web has centralized, it has strayed further and further fr... See more
newpublic.org • The word for web is forest
“We emphasize domination and competition in the management of trees in forests… We emphasize factions instead of coalitions,” wrote Simard. It applies to the web, too. Social media companies segment and isolate us in order to package us up in tidy tranches for advertisers, just as big timber clear-cuts healthy, complex ecosystems and replaces them ... See more