Why I Write (and Care) About the Internet, and What So Many People Get Wrong
| indieweb | 1,793 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Media Criticism, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, Small Web, decentralization, community, activism, optimism
ORIGINAL: https://brennan.day/why-i-write-and-care-about-the-internet-and-what-so-many-people-get-wrong/
Let's begin with a couple books. When Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This and Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts came out in 2021, critics called them "Internet novels." Sally Olds, in her essay United States v. The Internet, counted six reviews covering the two books together, five of those reviews using "internet" or "online" in the headline. She noted that one Washington Post review used six of the same stock, boring keywords in its first six sentences.
Olds argued that neither book is a very good Internet novel--and that neither needs to be read as one. In both, the Internet supplies the scenery, but the central concern is something else. For Olds, Oyler's book is a satire of the American left's moral posture, and Lockwood's is about how shared language takes over private thought, and about a family losing a baby. "All the mysteries are human ones." Brandon Taylor also wrote how "Internet Novel" is a misnomer, because both books are really about Twitter and its effects on a narrow class of media writers.
The mistake is not limited to book reviewers. I see so many writers and journalists misunderstand: the Internet isn't a story. The Internet is a setting.
The best (and really, only) stories about the Internet are really stories about people, and our shared humanity, and how that's interfaced now. The Internet, though it does give specific and unprecedented social interaction, is still merely incidental. The way the parlour cafe was, the way the town square was, the agora, the forum, the bathhouse, the way all commons have always been.
The Internet isn't a story. It isn't a detached, real-life plot device for us to have discourse over. It's far less than that. It's a place where the story happens.
Features, trend pieces, and documentaries treat the Internet as a subject with its own character, motives, and plot, then report on what the Internet is doing to us. As though the Internet is somehow a separate entity from us.
The Internet has no plot. It is a place, and what happens there is what has always happened where people gather. People flirt, argue, vent, love, trade, show off, gossip, grieve, fuck, and look for company. The stories worth telling are about those people.
Nathan Jurgenson coined "digital dualism" to describe our tendency of treating online and offline as wholly separate worlds. In The IRL Fetish, Jurgenson argues that the web is in fact made of real people with bodies, histories, and politics, and that logging off does not return anyone to a separate "real" life. We are always us, and we can run away from everything except ourselves.
Don't get me wrong, the Internet is not a good social setting. There is a fidelity of human connection that is lost when we aren't face-to-face, when we aren't warm biological organisms in the same space. I am not trying to argue that, through the miracle of technology, we've found the most ideal way to connect. Everyone knows that's bullshit.
What I am arguing, though, is that the Internet is the place where we now socialize and understand the world and exist. Our epidemics of isolation and loneliness are mostly self-medicated through the Internet.
I was born an Internet native, and I have always been drawn to technology. Our first home computer was a beige Windows 98 tower and CRT monitor--a hand-me-down from my cousin that I managed to BSOD and brick only a few months later.
The computer is amazing. Our ability to publish whatever we want and host it for $0.01 USD/day is amazing. The fact we can send electronic letters to one another--with a protocol created over five decades ago in the 1970s--is amazing.
But really, I don't care about the Internet as a technological abstraction. I certainly don't understand how it operates beyond being a mysterious series of tubes. What I care about is people, and reckoning with our shared, absurd existence.
And I question if we remember what the Internet has given us.
Have we already forgotten the Arab Spring? Have we already forgotten that we all played and beat Pokemon together? We all cared about saving the Tham Luang Cave Boys. We all dumped ice water on each other and filmed it to raise money for ALS research, and it worked.
I yearn for humanity, and I'm sure you do, too.
"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe." ― Alan Watts
The Internet, more than anything else, peoples.
I will say that the Internet gives us a unique, important opportunity for the everyperson to share themselves freely with the world. That's why I wrote the WEBMASTER@ manifesto, and why I'm certain it will be the most important thing I'll ever write.
Our Digital Enclosures
And this opportunity is unique, for we've already witnessed the increasing suppression and deterioration of our global network. For a place cannot write a plot, but whoever owns the place scripts what happens in it.
Amnesty International has noted how only five corporations (Alphabet [Google], Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple) now function as our digital landlords who "determine the shape and form of our online interaction," and thus we are the digital serfs. Big Tech companies are a threat to human rights, becoming so embedded in our daily life that meaningful participation depends on using their services, giving them "enormous power to influence public discourse and control information flows."
At a U.S. Senate hearing in October 2025, Ranking Member Maria Cantwell's opening statement noted "a handful of opaque algorithms are controlling the majority of discussion online," and that corporate consolidation "amplifies the ability to control content on an unprecedented scale". When a handful of companies control how information spreads, it becomes easier for any administration to abuse that power with political threats to chill speech.
Jessa Lingel's The Gentrification of the Internet argues that "much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it." We see this with the displacement of older communities, with isolation and increasing infrastructure consolidation. The tech industry, too, is "much whiter" and "skews more heavily towards men" than the working population as a whole. Similarly, researcher danah boyd found that when a digital space becomes associated with marginalized populations, it is abandoned and devalued.
Subsequent statistical analyses of the characteristics of users of online social networks by researchers, marketers and bloggers, she notes in her latest work, backed up her claims that white and asian teens who belonged to higher socieconomic strata (and who aspired to college, with which Facebook at the time was associated) were attracted to Facebook, while latino, black and working-class teens tended to opt for MySpace.
The Internet, once hailed as a place where users could escape hierarchical control, is now subject to an enclosure movement, wherein public 'land' is being privatized, and citizens' creative labour is appropriated to profit the corporations that administer these places. Scholars describe this as digital enclosure: "if land enclosure helped produce the spatial conditions for the exploitation of wage labor, digital enclosures enable the exploitation of information generated by users as they go about their daily lives." In "The Algorithmic Leviathan or the Digital Agora?", Aybike Mergen writes how platform capitalism insidiously mobilizes the language of commons--"community," "forum," "sharing"--while deepening control over our digital infrastructures.
Our Digital Resistance
I'm not intelligent enough to know how to truly make the Internet more resilient and durable in the face of systemic forces attempting to confiscate the wild magic it has permitted freely.
I do know that I have been trying to use the tools and services people much smarter than me offer freely. That's why I have redundant backups on NeoCities and the Wayback Machine. That's why I've been learning about the Gemini protocol, and why my work is now available unencrypted and insecure at http://brennan.w10.site and http://135.181.118.12/~brennan/ (IPv4, works without DNS) and http://[2a01:4f9:4b:1e30::3]/~brennan/ (IPv6). That's why I've been investing my time into learning about public, community-driven networks of public-access UNIX* systems and pubnixes.
I don't know how to make the Internet anti-fragile in nature, but I do know how to make things more robust and durable in the meantime.
But I do know my optimism is not capable of being suppressed. My optimism is not for sale. It isn't available to be trained on. But it is freely given here, to my readers, in the most accessible and widespread ways I can possibly share it.
But I do know we can continue to come together while being so far apart. We can keep doing good with the Internet. I keep watching it do so. The small community of omg.lol managed to raise over $8,000 USD for St. Jude's Hospital in a month, thanks to Robb Knight and Adam Newbold.
My advice for being a writer is no different than my advice to those that want to find community. You have to write each day, even if it's bad and only 100 words. You have to take communal action each day, even if it's bad and only 15 minutes of effort. If you want good community, you must make good community. You cannot wait for someone else to.
So, write to one person, not to the infinite void. Reply to a blog post. Send an email. Comment on a forum. Share one link. You, as a person, are enough. You can be weird and quiet and wrong.
Join a human-scale community and stay. Welcome newcomers. Protect the quiet people. Point people to the good stuff. Make introductions. Build webrings and blogrolls and guestbooks. Pay when you can. Support an instance. Fund servers and creators. Show a friend how to make a website. How to use RSS. How to set up a backup.
The Internet is a place. And places are only as good as the people who show up and care and tend. Otherwise, these places will continue to be enclosed, gentrified, and policed. Corporate social media and our digital landlords want you to believe there is no alternative--that their black box algorithm feed is the world. What I have been doing, over and over again, is proving how wrong they are. The fediverse, the pubnixes, the personal websites, the Gemini capsules, the webrings, the Mastodons and omg.lol communities--all prove we still have ownership if we choose to exercise our rights and fight to ensure we continue to have them. Resist like hell to keep the Internet a place open for everyone.