We Need to Rewild the Internet
This is long but it’s such a good read. It talks about the monopolization of multiple layers of the internet, from the browsers and app stores down to the switches and cables that transmit data around the globe–and how that’s making the internet not only less diverse and fun, but also less safe for users and, for that matter, less sturdy in the face of natural disasters and accidents.
It takes a look at how this can be done effectively through the lens of ecology–where rewilding is an approach to habitat restoration through initial work to restore complexity that provides space for nature to flood in and take it from there.
It doesn’t claim we’ll ever get back to where we were in the early days, or that we should even try. It’s not a nostalgia-based argument. But it is compelling, and also very informative about various corners of how the entire structure of the internet works, where it’s being undercut and some very interesting tidbits of history by way of examples here and there.
The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.
That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
