We Need To Rewild The Internet
Powerful metaphors in this piece by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on theWaldsterbenof the internet:
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms lovethat word.They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.