The Internet is a Place
It is increasingly fenced, gated, paywalled and surveilled, but it is still a place.
by Ali Rahman
In its long, slow infancy, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, we conceptualized the internet as a place; a realm, distinct from and adjunctive to the real world. At any given moment you could be online or offline, but you could not be in both worlds simultaneously. There were chat rooms and homepages, bulletin boards and directories. We browsed. We surfed. We stumbled upon things. We explored, we discovered and we built outposts that sometimes became villages, destinations.
Today, the spatial metaphor has largely been replaced by that of the network. We are each and all nodes, connected to one another via channels, along fixed pathways owned by platforms. These pathways are littered with tolls, which we pay in the form of behavioral data and attention. In the network metaphor, the nodes are static. They don’t move. We don’t move. We send messages along wires, but we stay still. When the internet ceases to be a place and becomes instead a tangle of circuits, we lose the ability to move through it, to explore it and to build it. We become passive consumers of information entirely dependent on private platforms to facilitate one of our most basic human rights: the right to communicate with one another.
Reclaiming the spatial metaphor will also help us understand and resist the growing threat of what Yannis Varoufakis calls Technofeudalism, where big tech monopolies become the landlords of the digital world, extracting rent from users for every morsel of data sent through their pipes. In technofeudalism, big tech leverages its outsize power to collude with governments to eliminate competitors, while simultaneously rendering itself essential for personal economic survival. These platforms then leverage our dependence on them to extract more and more from us, while simultaneously using their growing influence over regulators to further consolidate their power. The spatial metaphor can help us see that happening, because we can conceive of the internet as a kind of landscape, once fertile and belonging to the commons, now enclosed, gated, fenced and paywalled.
Terra Nullius means “no one’s land”. Historically, the doctrine of Terra Nullius was the patently false racist idea that the “new world” was , an idea used to justify the colonial conquest of Indigenous lands.
The early internet by contrast was arguably actually uninhabited. It was an open space, defined by its users. Its boundaries were not set. It expanded every time a new user logged on for the first time. Rules and norms were community specific and community defined. There was no single dominant culture, no dominant corporate stakeholders. The technology we used to navigate and develop it was open-source, largely managed cooperatively. The result was a weird hodgepodge of spaces. There were message boards for all manner of niche subcultures. There were pioneering commercial spaces for independent retailers. There were tomes of unstructured databases, scientific projects and art experiments. Prior to corporate capture, the early internet functioned as a kind of massive third-place.
It was not without baggage of course. Access was uneven. The same socioeconomic divisions that stratified society into haves and have-nots became manifest online as the digital divide. Still, for me, a person of colour and child of immigrants, never quite finding unconditional acceptance and belonging in Canadian society, the early internet became a kind of refuge: a place for people like myself, people who felt they didn’t quite fit in, to find belonging. I could join subcultures, based on common interests; places where race, status and gender didn’t really seem to matter.
I’m idealizing surely, but you get the idea. There was a sense of wonder and possibility about the early internet, which is why so many people regarded it with such resounding optimism. We were going to connect, information and knowledge would become universally accessible, we would all find our people. That was the promise. That was the dream.
The openness of the early internet is exactly what made it vulnerable to corporate capture. There were no real rules. No legislation to protect what initially resembled communal property. The cooperative ethos of the early internet enabled rapid experimentation and collaborative innovation. Everything happened out in the open. The diverse patchwork of technologies, protocols, tools and programming languages that made the internet function were public goods that anyone could adopt and adapt to suit their purposes.
This situation was too attractive for venture capital to resist. Venture funded firms were able to take shared infrastructure, build proprietary layers on top of it, and scale rapidly without bearing the costs of maintaining the commons they relied on. They hired top talent from open-source communities and shackled them with ironclad non-compete & non-disclosure clauses in contracts. They leveraged preexisting clout with businesses and legislators to capture the enterprise market, and once their products were fully embedded into operating systems and hardware, they sealed off the consumer market. What had been collectively developed was enclosed through ownership, branding, advertising and control over distribution.
Innovative competitors were quickly swallowed up or squeezed out. Capital concentrated. Small community projects could not compete with the reach and polish of commercial platforms, and soon essential services consolidated under the banners of a handful of firms. Search is the quintessential case study in corporate enclosure. Before Google, search engines operated using a variety of algorithms and ranking systems. Google’s ascension to the only game in town means that they effectively gate access to almost all web content. If you are not searchable by Google you are not findable. You are invisible. This is an aside, but think about the effect this has had on how we conceive of web content. Do we write it for our audiences or do we write it for Google’s algorithm? Over the span of decades, what impact does this have on how we read and write online or offline? Does it homogenize writing standards under the pretense of best practices? I wonder.
Flash forward to today and the internet is far from an open place. It is a series of walled-gardens and closed ecosystems. There are apps, and subscription models. There are closed social networks. Visibility is increasingly shifting towards pay-to-play models, and big-tech fights any legislation proposing interoperability, the right to repair or in defence of privacy. The massive, expanding shared space that was the early internet is replaced by a densifying network of closed spaces. We’re drawn inwards towards our echo chambers, rather than outwards, towards the fringes, the edges of the map, the places where innovation happened.
Remember, once they become successful, big tech platforms are not interested in genuine innovation or disruption. Innovation is dangerous to big tech, because it threatens their dominance. Diversity and variety are problematic for big tech because scaling demands sameness. And so, in the same way that private equity is turning Main Street into interchangeable rows of vacant housing and generic chains, the internet is reshaped into a uniform, predictable environment.
As the landscape of the internet stops growing it homogenizes. It freezes. Experimentation is replaced by corporate governance. It becomes what David Graeber might call a utopia of rules; an increasingly bureaucratic experience, where users are rewarded for certain behaviours and penalized for engaging in others. The result is we end up performing for algorithms, rather than engaging with one another. Think about that for a moment. The way we speak to our peers, friends, and audiences is no longer shaped by social context, but by the invisible demands of big tech platforms.
The key point I want you to understand is that big tech platforms do not facilitate the free flow of information between people, they obstruct it. All of the value these platforms leverage comes from their users, in the form of content, information and relationships with other users.
The most important reason to reclaim the spatial metaphor is that places can be entered and exited. If the internet is a network in which we are static nodes, then we have no agency within it. We bring it with us wherever we go, and it begins to subsume the real world. I don’t mean this as hyperbole or metaphor, it is really happening. The real-world is becoming enclosed by big tech, through surveillance technology and the datafication of everyday life (think biometrics). All of that to say nothing of the literal destruction of natural environments to house data centres, with their ever growing hunger for power and fresh water.
If the internet is a place, it becomes bounded, limited in its scope. If, by contrast, we are the internet, we cannot escape it.
All of this is very conceptual, I know. But so is the internet itself. It is a site of human communication and exchange. It exists only because we use it. It was generated by human to human interaction and innovation.
What I want you to consider is that the internet is still a place. We’re just stuck inside the enclosed part of it. But there are ways out. For users, there are federated social network technologies like mastodon, there are open-source search, email, map and LLM services that don’t engage in predatory surveillance. There are countless creativity tools and code engines that are still being developed, maintained and distributed by the open source community. All of these user-owned spaces are increasingly being pushed to the margins, and so the margins are where we must go. The margins are free of enclosure. We need to reclaim the internet as a place, move right to the edges of it, and then beyond, to invent it anew so it serves us, rather than venture capital.
What does this mean for mission-driven organizations, or even for private sector companies that simply want to lessen their dependence on platforms they do not own and have no control over?
First, it means renewing efforts to build your own marketing infrastructure. That can and probably should mean email lists, because you own your list and it represents your most engaged users. But it should not stop there. It can also mean investing in web properties that you control, whether that is a robust blog, a resource hub, a member portal, a podcast feed, a forum, or even something as simple as a well-maintained events calendar that becomes a habitual destination. The specifics will vary by organization, but the principle is the same: build spaces where the rules are yours, where distribution is not subject to sudden algorithmic shifts, and where relationships can deepen over time.
Above and beyond that, mission-driven organizations need to find ways to re-engage their stakeholders, donors, and service users more directly. The walled gardens of the social media platforms are increasingly optimized for their own growth and monetization, not for the sustained value creation that these kinds of organizations require. As those ecosystems become more constrained and more expensive, the painstaking work of building up your ground game will become increasingly important. That might mean investing more seriously in events, in partnerships, in volunteer networks, in listening and co-creation sessions, or in other forms of direct engagement that are slower, more expensive to create and run, but which provide much more durable value.
Digital tactics should not disappear. They remain powerful tools for discovery and amplification. But they should be treated as secondary to your own infrastructure and your own relationships, used judiciously to move people into spaces you own and communities you can actually steward. The objective is not to accumulate reach, but to cultivate community and reciprocity, in all the forms that can take.
Let’s make the internet a place again: a place for people.
Have a difficult communications problem? Reach out, we’re always happy to chat.
