Scraping our friends back - a warm space

Please Let the Internet Die

Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.

RIP social media. What comes next is messy.

As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?

My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet

Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.

The year we wanted the internet to be smaller

Why tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017

we were online

Turn the internet into a living, shared space with real-time traces of people browsing.

When, How, and Why to Abandon the Internet

Should we abandon the internet? Voice memos from Douglas Rushkoff, Bridget Todd, Robin Berjon, Janet Vertesi and more on leaving, rebuilding or saving it.

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.

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.

How We Can Make the Internet Helpful Again

Amid an infodemic of misinformation and manipulation, it feels like the Internet uses us more than we use it. Taking back control is possible.

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.

How Graze Social’s Devin Gaffney wants to build a better internet

Graze Social’s Bluesky curation tool, which is poised to expand thanks to a recent Flipboard acquisition, allows users to build (and monetize) their own feeds.

Introducing a network for thoughtful conversations

The quality of conversations on the Internet is terrible. Most platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. optimize for engagement as their key metric. This spawns and rewards behavior that leads to bragging of gameable metrics such as likes and followers, self-feeding thought bubbles, knee-jerk reactions, “if you’re not on our side, you’re on their side” mentality, and thought policing even by people who think they’re fighting for a good cause. Today’s Internet doesn’t incentiviz

Wholesome internet 🌱

I’m watering a “cursed websites” folder in my digital garden shed, but also a “wholesome websites” counterpart, like any reasonably sane person on the internet should do in this day and age. And that's that.