When, How, and Why to Abandon the Internet

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 de-privatization, anti-monopoly, data colonialism, and post-capitalism. And there are notions about alternative infrastructures from permacomputing and resilience to solar and low-energy networks. There are many death and decay diagnoses from Dead Internet Theory and link rot to enshittification and slopification. 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 Tech Policy Press newsletter 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.

Douglas Rushkoff:

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

Anika Collier Navaroli:

This is Anika Collier Navaroli. 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.

Bridget Todd:

Hi, I'm Bridget Todd. I'm the host of iHeartRadio's award-winning tech podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. I'm the author of the audiobook, Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, and I'm a Harvard University 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.

Konstantinos Komaitis:

Konstantinos Komaitis, Atlantic Council, 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.

Caddie Alford:

My name is Caddie Alford and I'm associate professor of rhetoric at Virginia Commonwealth University. I attended the Life After Data conference 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.

Justin Hendrix:

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.

Janet Vertesi:

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 AI Act 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.

Alice Marwick:

Alice Marwick, director of research, Data & Society. 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.

Liz Orembo:

Hello, Justin. This is Liz Orembo, lead for international and regional engagement at Research ICT Africa and speaking from Nairobi. I still keep fantasizing about the idea of an open internet. 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.

Robin Berjon:

Hi, this is Robin Berjon with the Modal Foundation in Brussels. I think if there's one thing that I would draw attention to in transitioning from the current internet to the next one, it's for lack of a simpler term, what I would call the topology of power in online spaces. If you look at the web, if you look at the old documents like The Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, you can see that a website is basically the admin's personal space. It's like a small shop. It's basically a ‘my house, my rules’ kind of deal, which is perfectly fine so long as you're getting tens or maybe hundreds of visitors, it works well. But the moment you start talking about millions or billions and you don't change how power works in those spaces, then you have an authoritarian system and apps just took the same model and made it even worse.

And so today's private government of the internet and with web and apps as a fascist hellscape work entirely downstream of that structure of power even before you bring in the deranged CEOs. And so to transition to this new world, if you're not paying attention to what's happening around the ATmosphere around ATProto right now, you're missing out. In that space, apps and websites are conveners rather than concentrators. It's sort of an internet, the social internet on which people and not just servers are a key primitive. And so not only is all of your data written only to your own personal space, so that's always yours, but the new spaces aspect of the protocol can really structure private areas for communities of all kinds and with all kinds of governance. And so we're really shifting to a different architecture of online spaces with that. It completely changes the topology of power and needs some governance to defend it, but honestly, this is the most promising architectural change in a generation. So I do think that is where the internet is going.

B Cavello:

I'm B Cavello, director of Emerging Technologies at the Aspen Institute. When I think about the things that make the internet that we have great, it is the ability to connect with people across distance, to find new friends that you might not have otherwise uncovered, and to be able to access information and learn about things. I can't say how many times I've learned a new skill or technique or fixed something in my life from a YouTube video. So that's really, really powerful. And yet we're losing a lot of that because of the way that the internet is going. And so when I think about the things that we value, the things that make the internet good, it is about our attention, but it's about our attention to the things that we actively want to seek out. So much of today's internet is basically, I would say, a tragedy of revealed preferences where we say, "Ah, because we tricked you into clicking on that link, that's what you really wanted," where we don't have an internet that appeals to kind of our "higher selves," the versions of ourselves that we want to be.

And so I think that shifting toward a more pro-democratic internet, shifting toward a better internet future is going to be one in which we have more agency and we're able to articulate more clearly what it is that we actually want when we're in the state of mind to say, "You know what? I don't actually want to spend hours and hours doomscrolling," and be able to filter the internet that way, whether it's through decentralized intermediaries that we can control, whether it's through better community curation and network-based curation, but really to be able to say, this is actually what I affirmatively want my internet experience to be and create more of that for ourselves.

Justin Hendrix:

Thanks to everyone that took the time to send us their ideas. Thanks to Emily Tucker and the Privacy Center at Georgetown Law School for the prompt. And thanks to audio reporter and producer Rebecca Rand for putting this together.