dreaming of a better internet

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.

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless,... See more