We Need to Rewild the Internet

Metadata

• Author: Maria Farrell
• Full Title: We Need to Rewild the Internet
• Category: articles
• Document Tags: #tech
• URL: https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet

Highlights

• So-called “scientific forestry,” was that century’s growth hacking: it made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare. (View Highlight)
• In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber. (View Highlight)
• Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, ready to extend the boom (View Highlight)
• It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered. (View Highlight)
• The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late. (View Highlight)
• That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests. (View Highlight)
• The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few (View Highlight)
• Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that 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. (View Highlight)
• Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can’t run an open, global “network of networks” where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete. No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.” (View Highlight)
• Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth (View Highlight)
• As Daigle put it: “The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation.” Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one (View Highlight)
• Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it. (View Highlight)
• Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It’s less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole (View Highlight)
• Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.” (View Highlight)
• Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like how do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like (View Highlight)
• As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural. (View Highlight)
• Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. But it’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else? (View Highlight)
• Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or each organization running its own mail server, rather than operating off G-Suite. But shifting baselines mean that everyone using it today needs a shared way to articulate what’s happening, and a collective sense of purpose and possibility. (View Highlight)
• Do new standards protect the network’s “generality,” i.e. its ability to support multiple uses, or is functionality limited to optimize efficiency for the biggest tech firms? The internet is the technological expression of hard-won human wisdom; general-purpose systems are the most resilient, and it’s risky to concentrate information and control. (View Highlight)
• Ecologists also know that complexity is not the enemy, it’s the goal. The story of scientific forestry shows the conflict isn’t just between duopoly platforms and everyone else; it’s between a brittle, command-and-control mentality, and the ability to have faith in complex systems that may produce things you didn’t foresee for people you don’t control. (View Highlight)
• David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who worked on some of the internet’s earliest protocols, wrote an entire book about other network architectures that might have been built, if different values, like security or centralized management, had been prioritized by the internet’s creators. (View Highlight)
• When we interviewed Clark for rewilding project, he told us that “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that’s too simple means lost opportunities.” Or, as Daigle wrote in that 2019 policy brief, “simplicity is not always the best outcome.” Everything worthwhile we collectively make is complex or, honestly, messy. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in. (View Highlight)
• In 1961, Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” argued that mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and more livable than the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s Robert Moses. (View Highlight)
• Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours. (View Highlight)
• As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day. (View Highlight)
• In an ecosystem, everything is infrastructure for everything else. Ecosystems endure because species serve as checks and balances on each other. They have different modes of interaction, not just extraction, but mutualism, commensalism, competition and predation. In flourishing ecosystems, predators are subject to limits. They’re just one part of a complex web that passes calories around, not a one-way ticket to the end of evolution. (View Highlight)
• diversity is resilience (View Highlight)
• On paper, Worldcom had network redundancy. But almost immediately, U.S. internet traffic slowed, and WorldCom’s East Coast and transatlantic phone lines went down. The region’s narrow physical topography had concentrated all those different fiber networks into a single chokepoint, the Howard Street Tunnel. WorldCom’s resilience was, quite literally, incinerated. It had technological redundancy, but not diversity. Sometimes we don’t notice concentration until it’s too late. (View Highlight)
• In today’s internet, much traffic passes through tech firms’ private networks, for example, Google and Meta’s own undersea cables. Much internet traffic is served from a few dominant content distribution networks, like Cloudflare and Akamai, who run their own networks of proxy servers and data centers. Similarly, that traffic goes through an increasingly small number of domain name system (DNS) resolvers, which work like phone books for the internet, linking website names to their numeric address. (View Highlight)
• Centralized service providers say they’re better resourced and skilled at attacks and failures, but they are also large, attractive targets for attackers and possible single points of system failure. (View Highlight)
• On Oct. 21, 2016, dozens of major U.S. websites suddenly stopped working. Domain names belonging to Airbnb, Amazon, PayPal, CNN, The New York Times simply didn’t resolve. All were clients of the commercial DNS service provider, Dyn, which had been hit by a cyberattack. Hackers infected tens of thousands of internet-enabled devices with malicious software, creating a network of hijacked devices, or a botnet, that they used to bombard Dyn with queries until it collapsed. America’s biggest internet brands were brought down, essentially, by a network of baby monitors. Although they all likely had resilience planning and redundancies, they went down because a single chokepoint — in one crucial layer of infrastructure — failed. (View Highlight)
• Widespread outages due to centralized chokepoints have become so common that investors even use them to identify opportunities. When a failure by cloud provider Fastly took high-profile websites offline in 2021, its share price surged. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service. To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit. (View Highlight)
• Instead of tech firms extracting and selling people’s personal data, different payment models will fund the infrastructure we need. Right now, there is little explicit provision for public goods like protocols and browsers, essential to making the internet work. The biggest tech firms subsidize and profoundly influence them. (View Highlight)
• Through extensive research, Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom found that “when individuals are well informed about the problem they face and about who else is involved, and can build settings where trust and reciprocity can emerge, grow, and be sustained over time, costly and positive actions are frequently taken without waiting for an external authority to impose rules, monitor compliance, and assess penalties.” Ostrom found people spontaneously organizing to manage natural resources — from water company cooperation in California to Maine lobster fishermen monitoring each other and repelling outsiders to prevent over-fishing. (View Highlight)
• Self-organization also exists as part of a key internet function: traffic coordination. Internet exchange points (IXPs) are an example of common-pool resource management, where internet service providers (ISPs) collectively agree to carry each other’s data for low or no cost. (View Highlight)
• If they managed this separately through individual contracts, they’d spend much more time and money. Instead, they often form IXPs, typically as independent, not-for-profit associations. As well as managing traffic, IXPs have, in many — and especially developing — countries, formed the backbone of a flourishing technical community that further drives economic development. (View Highlight)
• Rewilding an already built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.” (View Highlight)
• Khan and Kanter have jettisoned narrow and abstruse models of market behavior for real-world experiences of healthcare workers, farmers, writers. They get that shutting off economic opportunity fuels far-right extremism. They’ve made antitrust enforcement and competition policy explicitly about coercion versus choice, power versus democracy. Kanter told a recent conference in Brussels that “excessive concentration of power is a threat … it’s not just about prices or output but it’s about freedom, liberty and opportunity.” (View Highlight)

New highlights added April 28, 2024 at 8:36 PM

• When the writer and activist Cory Doctorow wrote about how to free ourselves from the clutches of Big Tech, he said that though breaking up big companies will likely take decades, providing strong and mandatory interoperability would open up innovative space and slow the flow of money to the largest firms — money they would otherwise use to deepen their moats. (View Highlight)
• Doctorow describes “comcom,” or competitive compatibility, as a kind of “guerrilla interoperability, achieved through reverse engineering, bots, scraping and other permissionless tactics.” Before a thicket of invasive laws sprung up to strangle it, comcom was just how people figured out how to fix cars and tractors or re-write software. Comcom drives the try-every-tactic-until-one-works behavior you see in a flourishing ecosystem. (View Highlight)
• Instead, we need more public-funded tech research with publicly released findings aimed at serving the collective good. Such research should investigate power concentration in the internet ecosystem and practical alternatives to it. We need to recognize that much of the internet’s infrastructure is a de facto utility, that any monopolies are critical public resources that we must regain control of. (View Highlight)
• All this takes money. Governments are starved of tax revenue by the once-in-history windfalls seized by today’s tech giants, so it’s clear where the money is. We need to get it back. We need to stop talking about ethics and hoping the next generation will do a better job and start making demands of power. (View Highlight)