Minimum Viable Infrastructure

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

Infrastructure

A meticulously careful selection of services to use for everything from securing connections on public WiFi, over storing data to retrieving e-mails. I’ve put together a collection of services that I use for personal and business purposes while on the go.

The one and future internet

The internet has become inextricably entangled into our economies, cultural and social lives. We stand on the brink of the next technological revolution, in which the internet of things transforms ...

Brad Neuberg on Twitter / X

Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization since most of the technology they depend on is already mostly developed. This was true pre-2015 where startups depended on commodity open source software, the smartphone capitalized by Apple and others, cloud…— Brad Neuberg (@bradneuberg) September 16, 2024

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…

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?

Decentralizing My Smartphone With Single Purpose Devices

Lately, I’ve become nostalgic for the days before smartphones, when the internet was a place we went to deliberately, and not a place that lived on all of ou...

After the Feed: Trust, connection, and the next era of social technology | New_ Public | May 2026

After the Feed: Trust, connection, and the next era of social technology By Eli Pariser, Co-Director, Angelica Quicksey, Managing Director, Arnobio Morelix, AI Fellow May 2026 Newpublic.org

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.