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A five-month investigation by Investigate Europe in partnership with Tech Policy Press and media partners in eight countries reveals the harsh realities facing some working on the continent's vast AI infrastructure developments.

Sandu Dumitrescu* checked his watch. He was winding down the last 15 minutes of his shift at the Google data center site in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, in March, when the call came in. He had just finished performing electrical checks on the site’s hall fans when his manager communicated a final request: could he run two quick tests right before he left? The 34-year-old electrical tester says he had to make a decision: he had already worked almost 10 hours. Yet in the highly pressurized environment of GBL-6, Google’s sixth data center in the vast €5 billion campus, such last-minute requests were normal.

“I had no choice,” Sandu says. “People have been fired after saying no.” He believed his Estonian-based supervisors on the Google site, where Irish company Dornan Engineering is the main electrical subcontractor, would not take a refusal well. Relying on his week-by-week contract and with hopes to call his wife and young son back in Romania that night, he resigned himself to finish the job.

The task was one he had done many times before and involved a series of tests measuring the safety and integrity of the electrical wiring. It should have taken about an hour. Sandu says the request came to him verbally, via an intermediary. A protective suit was locked away in an equipment room. The trip would have added another 15 minutes to the job, he says, and people were waiting. In the rush, Sandu decided not to retrieve the suit.

Once in the voltage room, Sandu says the managers confirmed the lines had been de-energized. In the first round, everything went as planned. Then, on the second test, while holding insulated tongs, he linked the cables. But this time, the lines were live.

The blast was immediate and catastrophic. In milliseconds, 400 volts and 12,000 amps hit Sandu’s face and across the right side of his body. A colleague who was down below the platform and witnessed the incident told Investigate Europe that he “heard a loud bang, saw a lot of smoke, and saw [Sandu] screaming in pain.”

“I went completely blind,” Sandu recalls. “I told the managers three times that I could not see.” But no managers answered, he claims. According to the witness who called for help, untangling Sandu from his harness in a mass of blackened flesh, the managers had run off, while Sandu writhed in pain on the ground.

Workers rushed to carry Sandu to an ambulance. When doctors received him in the Grand Hôpital de Charleroi, he was placed in an induced coma for five days.

Hospital records seen by Investigate Europe show that the arc flash electrocution had burned 12 percent of Sandu’s body, with second-degree burns to the face and neck as well as third-degree burns across his right shoulder and fingers. Photographs show scorched ears and swollen raw lips, with his arm a mess of hematoma and clotted skin.

When Sandu woke in the intensive care unit a week later after surgery, his wife was at his bedside. He says his entire body felt like a “white-hot blister…. It was so much pain. The human heart cannot comprehend it,” he recalls.

Two days after waking from his coma, the regional director of Google, along with a representative from Dornan and his Dutch recruitment agency, Wanted, came to visit. Sandu says that while he lay bandaged in the hospital bed, Google and Dornan each took a statement from him about the accident. The Google director told him he was lucky to be alive.

Sandu’s electrocution is both brutal and harrowing. Yet to date, no fines or sanctions are known to have been issued. Belgium’s federal labor inspectorate closed its investigation into the accident at the end of October and found no wrongdoing. Sandu says, however, that he was never interviewed directly by the labor authorities.

Despite repeated formal requests for his accident report from Wanted and Google, he has yet to receive it.

A month after his accident, the recruiter messaged Sandu to see how he was. They then asked: “[The company] is recruiting more testers (perhaps you know people?).”

A Google spokesperson told Investigate Europe: “Our supplier code of conduct and contracts require all suppliers to comply with local labor laws and uphold safe, healthy working conditions. We maintain active dialogue with union leaders and trade groups, and are committed to providing transparent information about our workplace."

A Wanted spokesperson said: “As an employer, we can, will and should be held accountable by the proper authorities. Although we agree that freedom of speech and press is a great asset, we cannot comment on the content besides the fact that your statements or claims are not correct.”

 with media partners in eight countries into working conditions on data center sites across Sweden, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands reveals that Sandu’s case is far from unique.

In extensive interviews with migrant workers at flagship sites where large US tech companies are operating, reporters found evidence of debilitating injuries, squalid living conditions, an unreported infectious outbreak, unpaid wages and exploitative employment practices.

Workers at one major Microsoft project described a culture of fear and intimidation where construction managers “rule on mental terror“. The testimonies are supported by dozens of health records, pay slips, phone messages, photographs and videos shared with reporters.

The investigation found a recurring pattern where tech companies and their many Irish construction partners embed US-style working practices, often in defiance of national working norms.

In Italy, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway unions told reporters they had difficulty accessing certain sites to speak with workers and document conditions. One union representative in Denmark said some sites are “more closed than a state prison.”

The European data center industry is experiencing an infrastructure surge the continent has not seen in decades, dispatching tens of thousands of migrant workers to make its vision of tech sovereignty a reality.

A data center construction site can contain up to 2,000 workers and dozens of contractors, with up to a quarter of a million people working on sites across Europe every day.

The industry is one of big budgets and even bigger secrecy. Construction firms are often required to keep their tech clients secret, while contractors and intermediaries are also typically hidden from view.

At the same time, construction continues to rank as the most dangerous economic sector in the European Union. According to 

, the sector recorded 776 deaths in 2024, representing nearly a quarter of all fatal workplace accidents in Europe.

the industry is forecasting €100 billion of investments

 into European data centers. With over 2,300 facilities rapidly altering the physical and energy landscape of Europe, 

and hundreds more planned or in construction

, the industry’s priorities appear abundantly clear: where to build, how fast to build, and which companies are prepared to build under budget.

“I wake up at two in the morning, and I can hear rats eating, moving in the walls. This house is full of rats. When I put pizza in the oven, they are running in the walls near me,” says Adrian*, a 45-year-old construction worker on a Microsoft data center site near Gävle in Sweden.

A video Adrian shared with Investigate Europe shows a large rat scurrying across a hallway and into an electrical storage room. In a string of text messages sent in August, Adrian begs the housing manager to get rid of them. The reply comes back: “Brother, I understand. But I have to wait for these other companies to come in and remove them, I can’t come in alone and just pull them out of the walls…”

If you head northwest out of Gävle, a town two hours from Stockholm, past timber-framed cottages and dense pine forests, a sign points you to a smooth road rolled out specifically for Microsoft. The remote clearing is part of 

a 130-hectare, 33.7 billion Swedish kronor (€3 billion) expansion plan

 started in June 2024 to scale up Microsoft’s AI data center infrastructure in the country.

Signs for Collen Construction line the drive, their banners draped across the large metal perimeter. Collen is among many Irish contractors overseeing data center build-outs across Europe. Hired by big tech clients to deliver projects on a strict timeline, these years-long projects manage a syndicate of other firms.

In the distance, beyond the security fencing, an airport-sized building looms, reflectionless and inscrutable. In the foreground, a bright red turnstile entryway welcomes workers in white lettering: ‘Thank You for Working Safely’.

One of Collen’s subcontractors, the Irish-owned construction company Benbau, employs hundreds of workers across Europe, including in Sweden, to work in areas such as site management, concrete and carpentry.

The workers are housed 20 minutes off-site in modular housing managed by Benbau.

For months, there has been a growing sense of outrage among Adrian and his colleagues working for Benbau on the Microsoft site. They have reported vermin infestations, broken ventilation systems, and lack of heating during the sub-zero Swedish winters, but they claim the problems remain unresolved.

One 50-year-old Romanian worker, who is diabetic, shared images of his toes that had lost circulation after wearing what he claims were poor work boots issued by Benbau. He had to have his toe amputated several months ago.

Adrian says it has been months since he first reported the rat infestation, and the rodents have multiplied inside the 40-room modular housing unit. Another video appears to take the viewer down a narrow hallway into a shared kitchen and lounge, where surveillance cameras are mounted in the corners. Inside the crowded housing, workers say the stress runs high: 24 people to a kitchen, 14 men to a single bathroom, with a boarded-up hole where the rats crawled through and a bathroom window that is sealed shut.

Such crowded confines can make the transmission of disease more likely. In February this year, one Romanian worker on the site became extremely ill. Following several trips to the hospital, it was confirmed he had active tuberculosis, Investigate Europe was shown the individual’s medical record confirming the positive diagnosis. Shortly after, others showed similar symptoms.

After the first worker who contracted the disease had left for hospital, workers in the accommodation became worried about possibly also getting the disease.

One worker who had recently moved into a new room said: “I bought bedding myself, washed the mattress with chlorine, scrubbed the walls, left the window open for a long time - it was very cold.”

Benbau initially informed only a few men who shared close quarters with the first infected worker and then told the men testing was optional, according to seven workers who spoke with Investigate Europe. Freedom of information requests to Sweden’s national work authorities and Public Health Agency revealed no outbreak had been reported.

The county medical officer in Gävle told Investigate Europe that only one case was reported in March and shared with the national health authority, which also confirmed the case. In Sweden, tuberculosis is a 

 that is subject to mandatory contact tracing, which workers claim did not occur.

Eight Benbau workers living in the same housing and union representatives told reporters that they believed at least 10 to 12 men also had the infectious disease.

Mihai*, a 60-year-old worker, also tested positive for tuberculosis, hospital records shared with Investigate Europe reveal. He says that Benbau offered to transfer him to another Microsoft site in Denmark, along with others he claims were also infected. Considering his age, Mihai says he decided against traveling.

Then, in May 2026, witnesses who lived in the housing where some were confirmed positive with latent tuberculosis say a group of vans arrived to relocate workers to the Denmark site. Two of the witnesses say that many of those who left that day had tested positive for tuberculosis. Some men were diagnosed with latent tuberculosis, yet told reporters they experienced symptoms weeks before.

Others who left that day, including an entire crew who worked in concrete for Benbau, had tuberculosis symptoms, the witnesses claim. In total, approximately 40 men left for Denmark that day, according to witnesses.

The Danish construction union 3F Byggegruppen says their records show around 45 posted workers arriving at the Microsoft site in Høje Taastrup around this time. No further record of what happened to any of the men is available, despite efforts from 3F to reach Benbau employees.

The 50-year-old worker who moved into the bedroom says that he had to get tested in Romania. He said that he was scared that if bosses found out he was speaking to the media, “that I would be sent to Denmark too.”

Workers say for the first few years, the working environment at Collen and Benbau wasn’t too difficult. But in the last two years, with the accelerated build-up of AI infrastructure, the mood has shifted. “It now feels like we are in the army service,” one Romanian worker told Investigate Europe in a video call with other colleagues. “They rule on terror, mental terror.”

Workers allege they are subject to a regime of daily harassment and regularly shifting rules. Many say the language barrier creates ongoing problems. To monitor workplace safety, the general contractor, Collen, introduced a football-style violation system. These orders, implemented by Benbau, consist of ‘yellow cards’ and ‘red cards’ for perceived infractions.

‘Carded’ workers describe being interrogated by managers for hours, then made to write letters admitting wrongdoing to workplace incidents even if they feel they have not done anything wrong.

“We are forced to sit in a room and confess to things we had not done,” one worker claims. Following a violation, they are then sent to attend a ‘reinduction’ training in English, and not their native Romanian.

Under another program, called ‘Goodsaves’, workers are required to report site or worker issues twice a week. Failure to do so results in threats of further pay deductions and extra training, texts seen by Investigate Europe show.

“These are control mechanisms,” insists one worker who asked not to be named.

“On Friday there’s the first message: ‘You have by 12 o’clock to finish your [reports]’. Then after 12 the threats begin: ‘You need to do your [report], do you want to work on Saturday?’ Then the last threat is: ‘We are going to cut the [missing report] out of your wages.’”

A former manager from Romania who worked for Benbau, who had decent housing and a wife and young child on site, told Investigate Europe he “refused to participate in the interrogation sessions” as a translator. He believes the written confessions were “designed to humiliate” other colleagues.

“In that atmosphere, I couldn’t continue seeing people working like this,“ he says. “I did not want to be afraid of someone who is forcing men to work 13 hours a day. I talked with my wife and I said: ‘This is the moment we need to go back to our country.’”

European unionization encounters US Big Tech

The living conditions and working climate form only part of the story. 

Over 30 workers shared hundreds of pay slips with Investigate Europe, many show them working up to 60-hour weeks with no overtime pay, in an apparent violation of Swedish labor law. Some workers claim they have received no paid holiday as required under Swedish law for five years.

Solidariska byggare (Workers in Solidarity), a union group, has tried to recover years of backpay for migrant workers at the Gävle site, who have been paid up to 30 per cent less than their Swedish counterparts.

Historically, Sweden has operated under a self-regulated labor market system where trade unions and employer organizations set wages and working conditions through collective agreements rather than state-mandated laws. Unions now say that over the years this model is beginning to not only erode, but crack wide open.

As data center sites expand, the ever-lengthening chain of subcontractors involved becomes more challenging to track.

Documents obtained from a freedom of information request to Sweden’s Work Environment Authority reveal 148 firms working under Collen at the Gävle site, including 28 direct subcontractors. One subcontractor can have more than a dozen firms beneath them.

In Sweden, it is customary, though not legally required, for clients to demand a collective agreement clause in their public procurement calls for tender. Yet when Collen broke ground in 2019 for the Microsoft Gävle site, no such agreement was in place. Soon after, many of its subcontractors, including Benbau, also passed over collective agreements with unions.

With the accelerated influx of US multinationals building in Europe, many companies working under them are willing to forgo collective agreements entirely, according to unions. With foreign workers unfamiliar with the laws, and the contractors setting the terms, inequity can arise quickly.

“It is a very clear picture,” says Pelle Sunvisson, a union leader at Solidariksa byggare. He describes what he sees when handing out leaflets outside the Microsoft site in Gävle.

“At 4 o’clock there is a wave of Swedish workers. They are typically electricians working with Swedish companies that have Swedish collective agreements. If you wait an hour, then there is a smaller group of white-collar Irish workers leaving, and then around six you get some Polish, Romanian, Serbian workers. Then at seven or eight o’clock, all the workers [from outside Europe].”

Over the past several months, dozens of Romanian workers at Benbau have begun joining Solidariskans byggare. Negotiations with Benbau to obtain unpaid wages recently stalled, and the union considered holding a blockade at the site, accusing the company of withholding nearly 10 million Swedish kronor (€900,000) in wages and back pay for 78 men.

“Since migrant workers don’t know the system, there is a big black hole in the Swedish model, where it becomes like a lawless territory,” says Sunvisson. 

“We have people cheated, who don’t get their salaries, even the low salary that has been promised. Some people [in the construction industry] are working five months for €500, with physical and verbal violence.”

Data obtained from freedom of information requests to the Swedish Work Environment Authority show that since 2019, the Irish company Winthrop has been fined 12 times for failing to meet core reporting requirements for foreign workers at its Swedish data center sites. In one unannounced inspection in 2021, authorities noted 15 different nationalities working at Winthrop on the Microsoft site in Sandviken.

Since 2021, the Work Environment Authority has opened 50 cases into data center sites involving Microsoft and Irish firms Winthrop, Collen and Mercury. The records, dating from 2021 to 2026, show a number of risks identified, including a serious danger of workers being struck by passing vehicles and machines falling into excavations.

Other inspections noted a lack of fixed fall protection, including suitable guardrails and platforms. One inspection of Collen in 2024 resulted in an immediate stop-work order and a conditional fine for failing to take adequate measures around fall protection. It stated the company’s lack of protection posed an immediate and serious danger of personal injury.

In October 2021, a forklift ran over the foot of a supervisor working for Collen in Gävle. The worker subsequently needed surgery. An incident report submitted by Collen to work authorities found the wrong machine had been used, the driver had no formal certificate for it and the lift plan was incomplete. Still, it had been signed off. In its accident report, the subcontractor listed both the injured man and the driver as self-employed.

The Work Environment Authority saw no grounds to report the employer to prosecutors.

When approached for comment, Collen declined to address specific issues raised but a spokesperson said the allegations were “wholly inconsistent with Collen’s values, policies and the standards to which we hold ourselves and those with whom we work.”

“We are committed to ensuring that every Collen site is a safe, healthy and respectful place to work, where everyone is treated with dignity and their fundamental human rights are protected,” the spokesperson added. “We expect the same throughout our supply chain and have zero tolerance for any conduct inconsistent with these principles.”

‘Beyond this gate, it is not the Netherlands’

It is not just in Sweden that workers have reported problems. Pyotr Zaitsev*, an engineering manager, worked on data center sites for another Irish construction firm in Germany until 2019.

Pyotr was highly experienced, and his daily tasks involved managing electrical installations while supervising groups of subcontractors. But he would regularly work beyond his contracted hours, he claims. He had “a contract for 40 hours a week on paper,” but in reality, “I was actually working 60 hours minimum, up to 80 hours from time to time.”

Hearing that the working conditions were better in the Netherlands, he found a job at a number of large Winthrop sites there.

Yet after 18 months, the pressure at Winthrop began to match that of his former employer, he claims, saying he had “severe burnout.” One day in 2021, after working a full shift, Pyotr says he fainted on site from overexertion. In an email to Winthrop’s HR department sent the following week, he informed the company he had gone to the hospital without specifying why.

Winthrop said they had no record of such an incident. "It is company policy that all adverse events must be reported, investigated and comprehensively recorded.”

He also said he had growing concerns for workplace safety. There was once a serious incident with a Romanian subcontractor, he claims: “There was a [mobile elevated working platform],” he describes, “the [the worker] was distracted and he was using the remote control and he drove over his [own] leg.”

Winthrop said they conducted an analysis and that the employee returned to work the next day, adding that it adhered to all applicable laws. “Winthrop is committed to maintaining the highest standards of health and safety across their projects, ensuring our people, partners and clients can operate in a safe and supportive environment,” a spokesperson said. “We place safety at the heart of project delivery.”

Pyotr has been on sick leave from the company since 2023. In May 2025, a Dutch government employment body ordered Winthrop to give Pyotr extended sick pay until May 2026, after finding the company had not fulfilled their obligations in helping him return to work. Winthrop stopped paying him in September 2025.

A Winthrop spokesperson said: “Despite repeated efforts to re-integrate the employee since he left in 2023 following a non-work-related accident outside the workplace, no progress was made in terms of the employee resuming work.”

Accessing data center sites to inspect worker conditions can be challenging, according to FNV, the Netherlands’ largest trade union.

Its representatives claim they attempted to access the Winthrop site in Schiphol-Rijk in September to speak to workers. At the gate, a Winthrop employee refused them entry, reportedly telling them, “Beyond this gate, it’s not the Netherlands… I am not allowed to let you in by upper management.”

FNV claims it has made several unsuccessful attempts, including an email request in summer 2026, to visit the Winthrop-Microsoft site in the past year.

A spokesperson for Winthrop said that union representatives were granted access through “pre-arranged protocols” across their data center sites.

“Any suggestion that unions are denied access to sites is false and misleading,” the spokesperson said.

The vast majority of Dutch construction companies are bound by a collective labor agreement that allows unions access to the sites. Foreign companies are not automatically covered by those agreements.

‘Sites are more closed than a state prison’

Belgian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Italian unions all told this investigation that they have had trouble accessing data center sites or have been shut out entirely.

Lotta Sjölander, a representative at the national trade union Byggnads in Sweden, the largest in the country, says representatives have been unable to access the Microsoft sites in Gävle and nearby Sandviken “from the very beginning.”

The Danish construction union 3F Byggegruppen, comprising 56,000 members, is proud of its success in getting worker parity. Yet Christian Foli Jensen, a 3F union consultant

 says gaining access to sites is a growing challenge. The problem, he says, is that “the clients don’t follow the normal way to do things, like on construction sites in Denmark. The sites are more closed than a state prison.”

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

On October 6, the Privacy Center at Georgetown Law School hosted an event titled 

Life After Data: The Conference on De-datafication

. The prompt for the event asked us to, "Imagine a future in which digital data is no longer the currency mediating all of our social, economic, and political systems, structures and practices. How might we get there from here?" One of the topics offered as a provocation concerned the internet itself and whether it might make sense now or at some point in the future to abandon it.

Now, there are many communities I travel in where the knee-jerk reaction would be to consider that suggestion a heresy. And yet there are many others where some flavor of the idea has been discussed before. There's a great deal of writing and thought that considers the idea of the personal choice to abandon the internet or some of the platforms that have come to define it. Logging off, digital minimalism, refusal to participate in social media. There are ideas about retreat to smaller or more private spaces from the small web and closed networks to group chats. There's nearly an entire internet's worth of content devoted to the idea of rebuilding the internet on protocols, federation, public digital infrastructure on community networks.

There are ideas on how to effect a political or an economic rupture that would return the internet to some prior state. These use terms like 

. And there are notions about alternative infrastructures from 

. There are many death and decay diagnoses from 

. These diagnoses seem particularly compelling given the increasingly believable or perhaps likely prospect that AI agents and other automata may overrun the internet and thus leave little room for people anyway. 

To get reader ideas on this subject, I put a call in the 

 for two-minute voice memos from readers, inviting riffs on the topic generally, or responses to one of these questions:

What would have to break, or be built, before people would be willing to leave today's internet behind?

Who would lead such an effort, and who might stand in its way?

What from today’s internet and the platforms that define it is worth saving, and what should be left behind?

What would a better, healthier, more sustainable and pro-democratic network look like, and how would we build it?

What you'll hear next is a selection of the responses we received.

All right, this is Rushkoff. What am I supposed to say? Hey, I'm 

 and I write books about media, technology and society. The prompt actually reminds me of a moment way back when, early, early, early internet when the internet wasn't even the net yet. It was this place where weird people from the counterculture went to have strange discussions.

And I got a call from, I'm pretty sure it was Citibank, asking if I was interested in taking a job, a zillion dollar job to help the bank go online. They wanted to do online banking. "Can you help us get Citibank online?" And I remember saying to the guy on the phone, "Are you fucking crazy? You're going to take a bank online? Do you know what the internet is? Do you know what we are on there? Nobody's themselves. We're like dogs and cats and other things and the internet's not safe for that. Every computer is so promiscuous. Every computer is saying the whole time, 'Hi, hi, I'm me, what do you have for me? Here's what I have for you.'" That you can't put a bank there. But they did. They put the banks there and then everything else followed, the whole straight world of money and security and all that stuff went online. And what I'm thinking now is they're all online, they're all there. The whole straight, horrible world we were escaping is online.

So let's us go offline and take back the real world from them. So that's my thing. Leave it. Just leave it be and do democracy, do the pro-democratic healthy world, just do that here.

. So what would have to break or build before people would be willing to leave behind today's internet? And really, I think that it's our egos. I think that so many of us have spent so much time in these places and have become VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE and that has created ... It's done something to our brains. And I think that we have to kill that in order for us to leave this entire thing.

Who would lead that? I really think it's got to be the next generation. They have a completely different relationship with the internet, especially having grown up with it and having been on it since a very, very, very early age and don't have the same sort of connection to ego and sort of connection to self that a lot of us who didn't have that very early connection or a lot of folks who created these technologies simply because they had no connection with self and were very unpopular in middle school.

What would a better, healthier, more sustainable and pro-democratic network look like and how would we build it? Some of us tried to do this, so we know that it's possible to do something that is not what is currently there. And so what does it look like? It looks safer. It looks happier. It looks healthier. And how do we build it? Again, I don't know that we do. I think that it might be time to pass on the baton, take our lessons that we have learned and give them to folks who don't have those same egos, the same desires for clout that has developed in so many folks, especially in the tech policy space.

And so then what from today's internet and the platforms is worth saving? It's always the people. The people are the very, very best thing about society, about the internet. It is the humans. It is the laughter. It is the joy. It is the imagination. It is the ability and the alchemy of taking some of the most horrific things happening on this planet in the form of news and turning them into purely jokes and shits and giggles. And that's a humanity that I think is worth fighting for. So those are my thoughts. Thanks. Bye.

Hi, I'm Bridget Todd. I'm the host of iHeartRadio's award-winning tech podcast, 

Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy

Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

 affiliate. And when I think about abandoning the internet, my first thought is that I actually do not want to abandon it, but I do kind of want to abandon this version of it because so much of what makes the internet beautiful to me, I think is still worth saving. The ability to find your people, to find your folks, the ability to make something and share it with the world without asking for permission, and then actually have people find it and connect with it and love it. The ability to learn from somebody that you might not have met otherwise, to build communities that aren't limited by geography or other limitations.

So what I want to leave behind is the bargain that we've been told is necessary to have all of that, that in order to participate online, we have to be constantly tracked, manipulated, quantified, profiled, and ultimately turned into data for someone else to profit off of. That is what I want to leave behind. And now with AI, that bargain, it seems kind of even more extreme. Our conversations, our labor, our creative work, our relationships, even our most intimate and human and sensitive interactions can just become more raw material for systems that we don't control. So to me, the real question is what would make people realize that the internet that we have now is not inevitable? I would like an internet where everyone can participate fully and equally without being legible to a corporation at all times, where privacy doesn't feel like some kind of a luxury item that you have to earn by opting out of 20 different things, where being a person online does not automatically mean becoming a data point, a target or training material. So I want an internet that asks less of us in exchange for being there.

, senior resident fellow. I don't think that our conversation should focus on whether we need to leave the internet. I don't believe we need to leave the internet. The internet is, for me, the most human technology. There's something profoundly human with this idea of still being autonomous and act autonomously yet participate in something that is truly global.

But I do think that we need to save and remind ourselves of what the internet actually was originally built for and try to resist anything that seeks to change its properties and its characters. And by that, I mean concentration that platforms have created. I mean the idea that they can measure our behaviors and define how we operate within the internet. Decentralization of course is not panacea and it shouldn't be viewed as that, but also the idea that currently we're operating within closed gardens and our internet experience is defined by privatized networks that offer efficiency but take away the agency that the internet originally gave to users is something that we need to go back to. Agency is the currency of the internet. It is also the thing that distinguishes the internet from AI. So we should not allow our agency to disappear simply because some big companies have decided that it is better for users to become just consumers and not contributors to the internet.

My name is Caddie Alford and I'm associate professor of rhetoric at 

 and saw Justin's talk, snagged a couple of the printouts and decided to pose these questions to my digital rhetoric class. There's about 22 students ranging in age from about 19 to 31, many advanced English majors, but also mass communication majors, psychology, criminal justice, film production, et cetera. Right from the get-go, some of these questions were questioned. The ideal seemed kind of unrealistic to many students and they were wary of the hint of utopia because they understand where those rhetorics and promises have taken us and how you can tell a history of the internet from looking at those promises. So they don't see a mass exodus as likely.

In terms of who would lead an effort to abandon the internet, again, they had issues with the question. We're not leaving and a lot of them see the material constraints in trying to leave. But it was interesting to see a lot of their responses assumed that whoever would lead this effort would be kind of random and would be kind of unforeseen, that they would kind of emerge and all of a sudden create a mobilizing toward some other space or some other paradigm. In the blueprint model, they were thinking about the next network being owned by some kind of independent unaffiliated group. They thought about fanbases and equally distributed shares as well as periodic crowdfunding, but they also just kind of assumed there would be silent donors involved.

In terms of what they never want to see from some other model of the internet, there was a laundry list. They don't want to see users' data stored. They don't want to see political funding. They hate parasociality being rewarded and incentivized as well as just artificial intelligence problems, surveillance. They hate popups, they hate subscription models, pay-to-play.

In terms of what's standing in the way, it just came down to billionaires for them and paid off politicians as well as shareholders. Then the tipping point as the last set of questions, what would have to break or be built? Students said they'll leave the internet once they really feel like it is completely AI-generated and it is completely Dead Internet Theory come to life. Someone mentioned when the all-in-one super app finally gets built, they also talked about how they feel like they can opt out of certain types of surveillance now, but if they feel like they can't in the future, that'll be kind of a deal breaker as well as they don't want to be asked for ID or verification in terms of age. They stay because they have a hard time keeping track and staying in touch with old friends, but also niche interests. I have a lot of students who are in hobbyist communities and in communities with small artists. So yeah, that's what 22 young folks are thinking about.

Thanks to Caddie Alford for sharing those thoughts from her students at Virginia Commonwealth University. Next we'll hear from Janet Vertesi, 

an associate professor of sociology at Princeton

So here's the thing, an alternative internet is already here. People are already working on this. There's communities like the Veilid organization that are literally building an alternative underlayer for the internet in opposition to TCP/IP. There are people who are building alternative tech, decentralized tools, federated tools, operating systems that don't have Google or Apple in them. We already have all of the technology we need. What we need is more attention on those alternatives and more financing for those alternatives and more support for those alternatives.

So in terms of what we need for people to move over, we need to shift the idea of what constitutes innovation. Currently, we've decided that innovation means that a bunch of people who used to make a lot of money on Wall Street who couldn't make that money anymore because the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff shut down and they weren't allowed to trade credit default swaps, moved over to Silicon Valley and started betting like horses on young men with hoodies. And the whole thing that came out of that was this massive swirling "innovation economy" in which the creation of "value" was associated with some kind of pie in the sky idea of a technology that would eventually come and in the meanwhile grow and grow investment funds at the same time. That's not the same thing as building tools that are valuable for people or tools that create the internet that we want. But what they've done is run completely amok and created an information ecosystem and an innovation ecosystem that are completely distorted.

So in terms of what we need in order to have an alternative internet, we already have what we need. We're already building those tools, people in the hacking community and the making community, people in the EU where technologies are already being shaped by regulatory frameworks like the 

 or the data privacy regulations in Europe, they're already building the tools for the internet that we need and the internet that we want. What needs to change is the way that we stimulate innovation, where we see innovation happening, where we put our support, particularly in small communities and open source communities and small businesses, in any kind of organization that's taking on the mega eight billion ton gorilla that is Big Tech. And once we can sort that out, then I think we'll have more of the internet that we want.

. If we imagine a future in which data is unlinked from profit, then we have to dismantle the entire business of buying and selling data. This means that things like targeted advertising would have to change, data brokers would have to be abolished, and the ability of the government to buy data that it can't legally collect would have to be curbed. The problem is that most of the social media that we have today depends on this kind of business. So we would need to be looking for other forms of social media or online communication technologies that weren't profit-driven. This means they might be run by communities. Every college used to have some kind of internal electronic bulletin board and those have mostly been replaced by Facebook, which has really meant a lot of loss of community overall. Can we imagine ones that were funded as public technologies, technologies that allowed for community engagement?

The problem is that in order for any online communication technology to work, for it to really create community and bring people together, it has to be heavily moderated to avoid harassment, hate, disinformation, and somebody has to pay for that. So I think that the current social platforms would stand in this way. I think this current infrastructures would stand in the way. There's been a sort of capture of a lot of online communication by telcos, ISPs, things like that. What I would like to see is something that is more user-centered, that is built from the ground up and that is not janky. We do have things like that now, but they tend to be small or they don't tend to be very fun to use. We need technologies that are really fun to use and bring value to people's lives, but are also beautifully designed and community-centered and emphasize bringing people together rather than tearing people apart.

Hello, Justin. This is Liz Orembo, lead for international and regional engagement at 

 and speaking from Nairobi. I still keep fantasizing about the idea of an 

. Maybe at that time, the political climate was not as high because we didn't realize what the internet had to offer politically and economically, but it did give us access to knowledge, markets, independent media, and a voice in democracy. And I think this openness is one thing that has to stay. But today with everything running on data and AI, openness has to go deeper. It has to be a new environment. I don't think that the current power distribution frameworks are enough to tackle what the information environment will look like even in the next five years. So during the campaigns for open internet, there was a lot of effort going into internet access and private sector government-built connectivity infrastructure to connect people, and we just need to build this data and AI infrastructure the same way so that everyone can keep innovating.

Now on top of this, I'm looking at algorithms as lenses through which people view the data sphere. People need to have a choice. People need to have a choice there in the market, but also need to also custom make theirs. I'll also say that with a caveat, because someone will choose one that has harms. But right now the platforms that we are using pick the lenses for us. Imagine picking your own, you install it like an app and you choose it on your social media, one, a lens for your personal life, a lens for your community, one for management of community resources, even at a national level, democratic decisions. And for public life, they have to be public interest algorithms, explainable, transparent, and accountable.

Of course, the choice only works if people understand what they're choosing. So AI literacy is our first line of defense. But being honest also, the harms that we are seeing growing online now, they are because of deeper societal problems, inequality, corruption, poverty, race to power and to accumulate resources and also authoritarianism. Those same forces will stand in the way along with the platforms and data brokers profiteering from today's internet model. So we need institutions built for this new information age.

Who leads? Philanthropies will have to start us on that one, funding AI literacy in communities and grassroots groups building their own AI, connecting to their own records, adapting small and open model languages for their community and testing whether it actually works for them. And I think this is an internet I'd be happy to move to.

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