dreaming of a better internet

ore often than not, the digital gardens of today are botanic—privately owned online spaces made for visitors to fawn over while a “do not touch” sign looms in view. These private gardens are generative for our personal learning, but they are far from the communal gardens I grew up in that valued collective work and knowledge. Where are the digital

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When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David... See more

I’m personally hopeful for a “de-globalized” internet of the future—one where we’re all a bit more siloed off from each other, like we are in real life. Think of little internet neighborhoods. This is my hope, if for no other reason than our mental health. We just can’t seem to handle an internet more broad than that, spiritually speaking.

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

people still carve out community in the most hostile of places and subvert platforms to create space for human-first desires. We create solidarity infrastructure out of text chains, subvert government control through form submissions, and carve intimate sanctuaries in the comment sections and profiles of algorithmically controlled wastelands. We... See more