What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
Google Reader was building the wrong future
The app that taught us to directly follow our favorite creators.
We Build On Hope @ PublicSpaces Conference 2026
Keynote by Robin Berjon The current state of tech can feel disheartening. Years of critical analysis and reform efforts have left us with a digital sphere that seems worse than ever. In Europe, our...
Against the dark forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
J. R. Carpenter || A Handmade Web
J. R. Carpenter is an award winning poet, fiction writer and web artist based in South Devon, England.
The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back.
It's time to rekindle the movement.
Todepond dot com
We Need To Rewild The Internet
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.
A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online
How to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.
The Internet Is a Net Negative
I'm usually an optimist about things. That outlook has served me well in life. It's helped me build open source projects that millions of people use. It's...
Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
"For all the informational convenience the internet offers, it is deeply flawed. How can it be improved? Writer Ben Tarnoff proposes one possibility in this intriguing book, which urges the development of 'a public lane on the information superhighway.' It's worth checking out for yourself." – Seth MacFarlane Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.
Scott Galloway - The Four - What To Do
Anil Dash on The Web We Lost
Collection
Updated 28d
A melancholy reflection about what happened to the web mixed with some positive imagination about to do about it.