Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it until a crisis is already here. However, small groups of volunteers with a little bit of time and money can provide crucial initial leadership to bootstrap recovery.
Building resilient social media
Next week I’ll be in Berlin, speaking at a Franco-German “Summit on European Digital Sovereignty” satellite event to help launch…
The Internet Transition
The Internet is allowing us to build a richer, more complex society but the way in which we Internet today is failing to support the governance systems that a more complex world requires. I take a look at why these issues are related, try to develop an intuition for a way forward, and point at the emerging field that is coming together to build that future.
The Cyber Resilience Act: A Five Alarm Fire
On October 21, 2016, CNN’s website was knocked offline. So was the BBC and Guardian’s. Amazon, Etsy and Shopify too, along with Quora, Reddit, and Twitter – among others. Huge swaths of the internet were taken down by a series of attacks on the DNS provider Dyn. These Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were
Nicky Case: The Attractors Behind Disasters
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.
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.
Eaten by the Internet
This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
Why Anthropic’s new model has cybersecurity experts rattled
The company says it has built its most dangerous model yet. Can its coalition of internet companies fix the internet before others catch up?
Filling the potholes of the web.
People with the power to fix our inaccessible web have failed to do it for long enough. Isn’t it time to imagine ways we can repair the web without waiting for them?
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.
About Us
Around the world, building the internet’s operating system—and a better way to work. In a world of tech companies fighting for growth at any cost, imagine one that gives away its most successful pr…
new from me, on network resilience and protocol eschatology connectedplaces.online/reports/fr160-everyone-wants-…
FR#160 – Everyone Wants Servers And Nobody Wants Servers
connectedplaces.onlineFix the internet, save democracy
The internet has evolved into a state that is actively hostile towards global democracy. A thesis is emerging that to save global democracy, you must fix the internet.
The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto
The Retweeting Class
Funding The Web: From Cartel to Covenant
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
