What It Is I Do

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.

Meditations on The Human Web

To save the internet, we may have to rebuild it.

Fund Your Internet

Sustain the things you value online.

Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending

Home

A socially motivated website which provides information about protecting your online data privacy and security.

WordPress, Your Way

Create your site. Share your voice. Earn online.

Aside

A browser that gets complex work done across your websites, accounts, and history.

Gathering the Custodians of the Internet: Lessons from the First CivilServant Summit - Citizens and Technology Lab

An agenda for citizen behavioral science to maintain and protect the communities we love online.

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...

Home | Humane by Design

Guidance for designing humane digital products and services focused around digital well-being.

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…

we were online

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

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.

Custodians of the Internet

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...