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    <h1>We Need To Rewild The Internet</h1>
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  <p class="has-text-align-left"><em><mark style="background-color:#bce39b" class="has-inline-color has-primary-color">“The word for world is forest” —&nbsp;Ursula K. Le Guin</mark></em></p>

 <p>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.</p>

 <p>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.</p>

 <p>Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. 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. Readers of the American political anthropologist of <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-two-cheers-for-anarchism" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">anarchy</a> and order, James C. Scott, know <a href="https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">what happened</a> next.</p>

 <p>It was a disaster so bad that a new word, <em>Waldsterben</em>, 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.</p>

 <p>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.</p>

 <p>That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2386849" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">call</a> the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/internet-aging-gen-z.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">same fate</a> as the ravaged forests.</p>

 <p>The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning <a href="https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/data-shared-sold-whats-done/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">data-extraction</a> engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.</p>

 <p>Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">that word</a>. 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.</p>

 <p>We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.</p>

 <p>They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies: For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">captured</a> almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over<a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-share-held-by-operating-systems-since-2009/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer"> 80%</a>. Google <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-host-market-share" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">runs</a> 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">come from</a> Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">run on</a> Google or Apple software.<sup> </sup>Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure <a href="https://www.hava.io/blog/2024-cloud-market-share-analysis-decoding-industry-leaders-and-trends#:~:text=Amazon%20Web%20Services%20(AWS)%20maintains,in%20the%20Asia%2DPacific%20market." data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">make up</a> over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients <a href="https://www.litmus.com/email-client-market-share" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">manage</a> nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.</p>

 <p>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 <a href="https://www.thinkingcat.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2019-InvariantsUpdated.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">termed</a> the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-walled-gardens-have-deep-roots"><strong>Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots</strong></h2>

 <p>The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency it also ensures the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.</p>

 <p>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.</p>

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 <p>Taken together,&nbsp;the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design; key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.</p>

 <p><a href="https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/distributed-computing/html/history.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Initially</a> funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct “<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-cnsldtn-effects/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">players” and “layers</a>” is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using the roads and living in many towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, <a href="https://www.thinkingcat.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2019-InvariantsUpdated.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.” Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services. </p>

 <p>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.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Since then, standards development organizations (SDOs) started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of <a href="https://archive.org/details/whatengineerskno0000vinc" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">simplification and control</a>, most internet engineers simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Hyperobjects.html?id=qu5zDwAAQBAJ&amp;source=kp_book_description" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">hyperobject</a>,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?&nbsp;</p>

 <p>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.&nbsp;</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-is-rewilding"><strong>What Is Rewilding?</strong></h2>

 <p>Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” <a href="https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/benefits-and-risks-rewilding" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">according</a> 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. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262046763/rewilding/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">their book</a> “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.”</p>

 <p>It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command-and-control.</p>

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 <p>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?</p>

 <p>Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock. And embodied in rewilding’s ecological tools is the collective wisdom of an entire discipline already tackling humanity’s toughest, systemic problems.</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-ecology-knows"><strong>What Ecology Knows</strong></h2>

 <p>Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from learning. First, it knows that <a href="https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.1794" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer"><strong>shifting baselines</strong></a><strong> are real.</strong></p>

 <p>If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own; global land-dwelling insect populations are <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">dropping</a> about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-spent-six-years-scouring-billions-of-links-and-found-the-web-is-both-expanding-and-shrinking-159215" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">same five</a> websites. You may have even written your own blog.</p>

 <p>But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole <em>web</em>) is normal. 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.</p>

 <p>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 <em>the internet</em>. 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?</p>

 <p>The answer isn’t to make everyone learn about how the original protocols were designed to separate key functions and the power that goes with them (though that’s certainly good to <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4216/Designing-an-Internet" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">know</a>). It’s to change how we feel and react to living inside a complex system that needs our care. Tech toxicity stems from there being only one business model for <em>how to internet</em>: concentration, surveillance, control. Further centralizing and managing this broken system will only make it worse.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet. For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok <em>are</em> the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world. Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. Rewilding is a way to collectively see the counterintuitive truth; today’s internet isn’t <em>too wild</em>, even if it feels like that. It’s simply not wild <em>enough.</em>&nbsp;</p>

 <p>It’s important to share that ecological rewilding is a work in progress. What do you rewild <em>to</em>? Humans have shaped and cultivated landscapes for tens of thousands of years, so what does “wild” even mean? Just as there’s no ecosystem on Earth untouched by human actions, there’s no “true” wildness to return habitats to. And what scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It’s one thing to <a href="https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">reintroduce</a> wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a reclaimed polder near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but the small Dutch reserve known as Oostvaardersplassen has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/21/pioneering-dutch-rewilding-project-oostvaardersplassen-works-to-rebuild-controversial-reputation-aoe" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">struggled</a>.</p>

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 <p>In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the <a href="https://www.popsci.com/nazi-bred-cows-are-too-ferocious-farm/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">famously bad-tempered</a> German Heck cattle, and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.</p>

 <p>Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/dutch-rewilding-experiment-backfires-as-thousands-of-animals-starve" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">horrified</a> by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling or removals.</p>

 <p>Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Its effectively landlocked status made over-grazing and collapse inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right. &nbsp;</p>

 <p>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.</p>

 <p>Some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the <a href="https://www.theverge.com/24063290/fediverse-explained-activitypub-social-media-open-protocol" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Fediverse</a> with its federated islands, or Bluesky with <a href="https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">algorithmic choice</a> and <a href="https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">composable moderation</a>.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>We don’t know what the future holds. Our job is to keep open as much opportunity as we can, trusting that those who come later will use it. Rewilding gets this. Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design.&nbsp; 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.</p>

 <p>Ecologists also know that <strong>complexity is not the enemy, it’s the goal. </strong>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.</p>

 <p>As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780125545204/the-ecology-of-natural-disturbance-and-patch-dynamics#book-info" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> in “The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,” that “[an] essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.” Some internet engineers know this. David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who worked on some of the internet’s earliest protocols, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547703/designing-an-internet/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> 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.</p>

 <p>But our internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone. Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. 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.”<sup> </sup>Or, as Daigle wrote in that 2019 <a href="https://www.thinkingcat.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2019-InvariantsUpdated.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">policy brief</a>, “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.</p>

 <p>Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its complexity and unpredictability make it generative, worthwhile and deeply human. In 1961, Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/86058/the-death-and-life-of-great-american-cities-by-jane-jacobs/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">argued</a> that mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and <a href="https://savingplaces.org/stories/a-tale-of-two-planners-jane-jacobs-and-robert-moses" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">more livable than</a> the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s Robert Moses.</p>

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 <p>Both Jacobs and the anthropologist Scott showed that top-down planning is often disastrous because instead of setting the stage for generative interactions it tries to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">control</a> what people will do. 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.</p>

 <p>As Jacobs wrote: “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.”<sup> </sup>As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>In an ecosystem, everything <a href="https://berjon.com/internet-transition/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">is infrastructure for</a> 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 <a href="https://www.livingwithwolves.org/wolf-science-weekly/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">limits</a>. They’re just one part of a complex web that passes calories around, not a one-way ticket to the end of evolution.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Ecologists know that <strong>diversity is resilience</strong>.</p>

 <p>On July 18, 2001, 11 carriages of a 60-car freight train <a href="https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/RAB0408.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">derailed</a> in the Howard Street Tunnel under Mid-Town Belvedere, a neighborhood just north of downtown Baltimore. Within minutes one carriage containing a highly flammable chemical was punctured. The escaping chemical ignited and soon adjacent carriages were alight in a fire that took about five days to put out. The disaster multiplied and spread. Thick, brick tunnel walls <a href="https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=900095" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">acted like</a> an oven, and temperatures rose to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A more than three-foot-wide water main above the tunnels burst, flooding the tunnel with millions of gallons within hours. It only cooled a little. Three weeks later, an explosion <a href="https://mde.maryland.gov/programs/pressroom/Pages/436.aspx" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">linked</a> to the combustible chemical <a href="https://www.bullsheet.com/bullsheet.com/tunnelfire.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">blew out</a> manhole covers located as far as two miles away.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>WorldCom, then the second largest long-distance phone company in the U.S., had fiber-optic cables in the tunnel carrying high volumes of phone and internet traffic. However, according to&nbsp; Clark, WorldCom’s resilience planning meant traffic was spread over different fiber networks in anticipation of just this kind of event.</p>

 <p>On paper, WorldCom had network redundancy. But almost immediately, U.S. internet traffic <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/20/us/fire-in-baltimore-snarls-internet-traffic-too.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">slowed</a>, 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.
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 <p>Clark tells the story of the Howard Street Tunnel fire to show that bottlenecks aren’t always obvious, especially at the operational level, and huge systems that seem secure due to their size and resources, can unexpectedly crumble.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>In today’s internet, much traffic <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-weave-a-fiber-optic-web-of-power-11642222824" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">passes</a> 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.</p>

 <p>All of this improves network speed and efficiency but creates new and non-obvious bottlenecks like the Howard Street Tunnel. Centralized service providers say they’re better resourced and skilled at attacks and failures, but they are also large, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2020.1728355" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">attractive targets</a> for attackers and possible single points of system failure.</p>

 <p>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 <a href="https://coverlink.com/case-study/mirai-ddos-attack-on-dyn/#:~:text=Impacted%20internet%20platforms%20included%20PayPal,platforms%20in%20approximately%20two%20hours" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">tens of thousands</a> 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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-day-of-the-zombie-baby-monitors-when-hackers-weaponized-the-internet-of-things/2016/10/25/167fdf42-9a1b-11e6-b3c9-f662adaa0048_story.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer"> baby monitors</a>. Although they all likely had resilience planning and redundancies, they went down because a single chokepoint — in one crucial layer of infrastructure — failed.</p>

 <p>Consolidation drives fragility. It imposes narrowness. Arranging deliberately varied networks and services into centralized stovepipes means we repeatedly fail to think of the internet as a complex system. Just like the train crash that caused a chemical leak that resulted in burst water pipes, melted fiber-optic cables and blown up manholes, single points of failure in complex critical systems have wide, unpredictable and devastating effects.</p>

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 <div class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style" data-a2a-url="https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet" data-a2a-title="&quot;Just imagine what the future possibilities for internet innovation could be if “capitalism without competition” was rooted out all the way up and down the stack.&quot;">
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 <p>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 <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/4c68df91-98d1-4942-87cf-f734ea2cdd73" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">surged</a>. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service.<sup> </sup>To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit.</p>

 <p>The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge, and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies. Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest —&nbsp;and we can make better ones.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-look-feel-of-a-rewilded-internet"><strong>The Look &amp; Feel Of A Rewilded Internet</strong></h2>

 <p>A rewilded internet will have many more service choices. Some services like search and social media will be broken up, <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/what-att-breakup-teaches-us-about-big-tech-breakup" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">as AT&amp;T eventually was</a>. 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.</p>

 <p>Part of rewilding means taking what’s been pulled inside the big tech stack out of it, and paying for the true costs of connectivity. Some things like basic connectivity we will continue to pay for directly, and others like browsers we will support indirectly but transparently, as described below. The rewilded internet will have an abundance of ways to connect and relate to each other. There won’t be just one or two numbers to call if leaders of a political coup decide to shut the internet down in the middle of the night, as has happened in places like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/technology/internet/29cutoff.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Egypt</a> and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/MYANMAR-POLITICS/INTERNET-RESTRICTION/rlgpdbreepo/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Myanmar</a>. No one entity will permanently be on top. A rewilded internet will be a more interesting, usable, stable and enjoyable place to be.</p>

 <p>Through extensive research, Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378010000634" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">found</a> 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 <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2021/08/11/the-commons-lobster-maine-elinor-ostrom" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">found</a> people spontaneously organizing to manage natural resources —&nbsp;from water company cooperation in California to Maine lobster fishermen monitoring each other and repelling outsiders to prevent over-fishing.</p>

 <p>Self-organization also exists as part of a key internet function: traffic coordination. Internet exchange points (<a href="https://www.internetsociety.org/issues/ixps/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">IXPs</a>) 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. Network operators of all kinds — telecoms companies, large tech firms, universities, governments and broadcasters — all need to send large amounts of data through other ISPs’ networks so that it gets to its destination.</p>

 <p>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.</p>

 <p>Both between people and on the internet, connections are generative. From technical standards to common-pool resource management and even to more localized broadband networks known as “altnets,” internet rewilding already has a deep toolbox of collective action ready to be deployed.</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-road-to-rewilding"><strong>The Road To Rewilding</strong></h2>

 <p>The list of infrastructures to be diversified is long; as well as pipes and protocols, there are operating systems, browsers, search engines, DNS, social media, advertising, cloud providers, app stores, AI companies and more. Not only are the technologies involved complex, but they’re also intertwined. But freedoms are additive. Showing what can be done in one area creates opportunities in others. First, let’s start with regulation.</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-new-drive-for-antitrust-competition"><strong>The New Drive For Antitrust &amp; Competition</strong></h2>

 <p>You don’t always need a big new idea like rewilding to frame and motivate major structural change. Sometimes reviving an old idea will do. President Biden’s 2021 “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Executive Order</a> on Promoting Competition in the American Economy” revived the original, pro-worker, trust-busting scope and urgency of the early 20th-century legal activist and Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, along with rules and framings that date back to before the 1930s New Deal.</p>

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 <p>U.S. antitrust law was <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/how-gilded-age-lawmakers-saved-america-from-plutocracy/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">created</a> to break the power of oligarchs in oil, steel and railroads who threatened America’s young democracy. It gave workers basic protections and saw equal economic opportunity as essential to freedom. This expansive and interdependent view of competition and antitrust as essential for fairness and democracy was <a href="https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/BFI_WP_2022-104.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">whittled away</a> by Chicago School economists’ policies in the 1970s and Regan-era judges’ court rulings over the decades and <a href="https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/chicago-school-and-forgotten-political-dimension-antitrust-law" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">sidelined</a> by the narrow economic doctrine that intervention is only permitted when monopoly power causes consumer prices to rise. The intellectual monoculture of the consumer harm threshold has since spread globally.</p>

 <p>It’s why governments just stood aside as 21st-century tech firms romped to oligopoly. If a regulator’s sole criterion for action is to make sure consumers don’t pay a penny more, then the free or data-subsidized services of tech platforms don’t even register. (Of course, consumers pay in other ways, as these tech giants exploit their personal information for profit.) This laissez-faire approach allowed the biggest firms to choke off competition by <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-27/big-tech-goes-on-shopping-spree-brushing-off-antitrust-scrutiny" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">acquiring</a> their competitors and vertically integrating service providers, creating the problems we have today.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Regulators and enforcers in Washington and Brussels now say they have learned that lesson and won’t allow AI dominance to happen as internet concentration did. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and U.S. Department of Justice antitrust <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/jonathan-kanter-apple-antitrust.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">enforcer</a>, Jonathan Kanter, are <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23660101/ai-competition-ftc-doj-lina-khan-jonathan-kanter-antitrust-summit" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">identifying</a> chokepoints in the AI “<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-22nd-international" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">stack</a>” —&nbsp;concentration in control of processing chips, datasets, computing capacity, algorithm innovation, distribution platforms and user interfaces —&nbsp;and analyzing each potential bottleneck to see if it affects systemic competition. This is potentially good news for people who want to prevent the current dominance of tech giants being grandfathered into our AI future.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>In his 2021 signing of the executive order on competition, President Biden <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/09/remarks-by-president-biden-at-signing-of-an-executive-order-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">said</a>, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.” Biden’s enforcers are changing the kinds of cases they take up and widening the applicable legal theories on harm that they bring to judges. Instead of the traditionally narrow focus on consumer prices, today’s cases argue that the economic harms perpetrated by dominant firms include those suffered by their workers, small companies and the market as a whole.</p>

 <p>Khan and Kanter have jettisoned narrow and abstruse models of market behavior for real-world experiences of healthcare workers, farmers, writers. They <em>get</em> 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 <a href="https://bruxconference2024.clevercast.com/webcast/w-qodbzp/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">told</a> 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.”&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Enforcers in Washington and Brussels are starting to preemptively block tech firms from using dominance in one realm to take over another. After scrutiny by the U.S. FTC and European Commission, Amazon recently <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68131819" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">abandoned</a> its plan to acquire the home appliance manufacturer, iRobot. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have also moved to stop Apple from using its iPhone platform dominance to squeeze app store competition and dominate future markets through, for example, pushing the usage of CarPlay on automakers and limiting access to its tap-to-pay digital wallet in the financial services sector.</p>

 <p>Still, so far, their <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/technology/europe-apple-meta-google-microsoft.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">enforcement actions</a> have focused on the consumer-facing, highly visible parts of the tech giants’ exploitative and proprietary internet. The few, narrow measures of the 2021 executive order that aim to reduce infrastructure-based monopolies, only prevent <em>future </em>abuses like radio spectrum-hogging, not those already <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbjpjb/a-short-history-of-wireless-spectrum-the-most-complicated-puzzle-youve-ever-seen" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">locked in</a>. Sure, the best way to deal with monopolies is to stop them from happening in the first place. But unless regulators and enforcers eradicate the existing dominance of these giants now, we’ll be living in today’s infrastructure monopoly for decades, perhaps even a century.</p>

 <p>Just imagine applying Khan and Kanter’s chokepoint identification and whole-system harms investigation to the internet’s <em>invisible</em> layers —&nbsp;and doing so today. Just imagine what the future possibilities for internet innovation could be if “capitalism without competition” was rooted out all the way up and down the stack.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>The recent return to more muscular competition enforcement still isn’t radical enough. So far, even activist regulators have shied away from applying the toughest remedies for concentration in long-consolidated markets, such as non-discrimination requirements, functional interoperability and structural separations, i.e. breaking companies up. And talk of declaring the so-called “<a href="https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/big-tech-s-natural-monopoly-tough-to-self-regulate-malone-says-1.1679411" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">natural monopolies</a>” in search and social media to be <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/no-facebook-google-not-public-utilities/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">public utilities</a> — and forcing them to act as common carriers open to all — is still too extreme for most.</p>

 <p>But taken together, these are some of the most powerful tools we have to rewild the internet’s silent and existing vertical integrations; its deliberately moated fiefdoms squatting on bottlenecks of critical national and global infrastructure. 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.</p>

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 <p>When the writer and activist Cory Doctorow <a href="https://www.noemamag.com/freeing-ourselves-from-the-clutches-of-big-tech/" data-wpel-link="internal">wrote</a> 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. </p>

 <p>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.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>In an ecosystem, diversity of species is another way of saying “diversity of tactics,” as each successful new tactic creates a new niche to occupy. Whether it’s an octopus camouflaging itself as a sea snake, a cuckoo smuggling her chicks into another bird’s nest, orchids producing flowers that look just like a female bee, or parasites influencing rodent hosts to take life-ending risks, each evolutionary micro-niche is created by a successful tactic. Comcom is simply tactical diversity; it’s how organisms interact in complex, dynamic systems. And humans have demonstrated the epitome of short-term thinking by enabling the oligarchs who are trying to end it.</p>

 <p>Efforts are underway. The EU already has several years of experience with interoperability mandates and precious insight into how determined firms work to circumvent such laws. The U.S., however, is still in its early days of ensuring software interoperability, for example, for <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/8/24119268/wyden-secure-interoperable-goverment-collaboration-technology-act-encryption" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">videoconferencing</a>.”</p>

 <p>Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.&nbsp;</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-next-steps"><strong>Next Steps</strong></h2>

 <p>Much of what we need is already here. Beyond regulators digging deep for courage, vision and bold new litigation strategies, we need vigorous, pro-competitive government policies around procurement, investments and physical infrastructure, that require interoperability at every level and the resources to make it happen. Universities must reject research <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academic-research-meta-google-university-influence/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">funding from tech firms</a> because it always comes with conditions, both spoken <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/04/tech/facebook-disinformation-whistleblower/index.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">and</a> <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2019/06/how-big-tech-funds-debate-ai-ethics" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">unspoken</a>.</p>

 <p>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.</p>

 <p>We must ensure regulatory and financial incentives and support for alternatives including common-pool resource management, community networks, and the myriad other collaborative mechanisms people have always used to provide essential public goods like clean water, roads and defense.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>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 <em>power</em>.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>We know all this, but still find it so hard to collectively act. Why?&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Herded into rigid tech plantations rather than functioning, diverse ecosystems, it’s tough to imagine alternatives. Even those who can see clearly may feel helpless and alone. Rewilding unites everything we know we need to do and brings with it a whole new toolbox and vision.</p>

 <p>Ecologists face the same systems of exploitation and are organizing urgently, at scale and across domains. They <a href="https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/12/08/inside-the-rewilding-movement" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">see clearly</a> that the issues aren’t isolated but are instances of the same pathology of command and control, extraction and domination that political anthropologist Scott first noticed in scientific forestry. The solutions are the same in ecology and technology; aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-keep-the-internet-the-internet"><strong>Keep The Internet, The Internet</strong></h2>

 <p>Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and theorist of infrastructure and networks, wrote in her 1999 influential paper, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”:</p>

 <p>“Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.”</p>

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 <p>The technical protocols and standards that underlie the internet’s infrastructure are ostensibly developed in open, collaborative SDOs, but are also increasingly under the control of a few companies; so what appear to be “voluntary” standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.</p>

 <p>The dominance of SDOs by big firms also shapes what does <em>not</em> get standardized — for example, search, which is effectively a global monopoly. While efforts to directly <a href="https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-nottingham-avoiding-internet-centralization-02.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">address</a> internet consolidation have been raised <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/pdf/draft-mcfadden-cnsldtn-effects-01" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">repeatedly</a> within SDOs, little progress has been made. This is <a href="https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/investigation-into-googles-privacy-sandbox-browser-changes" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">damaging</a> SDOs’ credibility, especially outside the U.S. SDOs must radically change or they will lose their implicit global mandate to steward the future of the internet.</p>

 <p>We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They’re the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance. We need them to work. As internet engineer Jari Arkko <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2020.1740753?scroll=top&amp;needAccess=true" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">put it</a> in 2020, for the health of the network and all our security, SDOs must “ensure that key aspects of the evolving internet stay open, e.g. through open, standardized interfaces and that open source continues to be an important building block.” If fundamental internet protocols don’t maximize the values of interoperability, generality and openness, then they’re simply not the internet.</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-make-laws-standards-work-together"><strong><strong>Make Laws &amp; Standards Work Together</strong></strong></h2>

 <p>In 2018, a small group of Californians <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/california-data-privacy-ballot-measure.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">maneuvered</a> the California Legislature into passing the <a href="https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#:~:text=The%20California%20Consumer%20Privacy%20Act,how%20to%20implement%20the%20law." data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">California Consumer Privacy Act</a> (CCPA). Nested in the statute was an unassuming provision, the “right to opt out of sale or sharing” your personal information via a “user-enabled global privacy control” or GPC signal that would create an automated method for doing so. The law didn’t define how GPC might work. As a technical standard was required for browsers, businesses and providers to speak the same language, the signal’s details were delegated to a group of experts.</p>

 <p>In July 2021, California’s Attorney General <a href="https://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2021/07/15/california-attorney-general-updates-ccpa-faqs-indicating-mandatory-compliance-with-global-privacy-control/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">mandated</a> that all businesses use the newly created GPC for California-based consumers visiting their websites. The group of experts is now <a href="https://w3cping.github.io/administrivia/2023/charter.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">shepherding</a> the technical specification through global web standards development at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For California residents, GPC automates the request to “accept” or “reject” sales of your data, such as cookie-based tracking,&nbsp; on its websites; however, it isn’t yet supported by major default browsers like Chrome and Safari. Broad adoption will take time, but it’s a small step in changing real-world outcomes by driving antimonopoly practices deep into the standards stack — and it’s already being <a href="https://usercentrics.com/knowledge-hub/what-is-global-privacy-control/#:~:text=United%20States%20and%20state%2Dlevel%20laws%20and%20GPC,-Six%20new%20data&amp;text=The%20laws%20in%20California%2C%20Connecticut,to%20respect%20Global%20Privacy%20Control." data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">adopted</a> elsewhere.</p>

 <p>GPC is not the first legally mandated open standard, but it was deliberately designed from day one to bridge policymaking and standards-setting. The standard provides a mechanism and the law makes it mandatory. It’s a powerful dynamic where all play to their strengths. The idea is gaining ground. A recent United Nations Human Rights Council <a href="https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g23/117/05/pdf/g2311705.pdf?token=2yMgO0WoPF6QcYggQX&amp;fe=true" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">report</a> recommends that states delegate “regulatory functions to standard-setting organizations.” Our technical standards can be crossbred with institutions to produce protocols for governance that let people shape their online world.</p>

 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-make-service-providers-not-users-transparent"><strong>Make Service-Providers — Not Users — Transparent</strong></h2>

 <p>Today’s internet offers minimal transparency of key internet infrastructure providers. For example, browsers are highly complex pieces of infrastructure that determine how billions of people use the web, yet they are provided for free. That’s because the most commonly used search engines enter into opaque financial deals with browsers, paying them to be set as the default. Since few people change their default search engine, browsers like Safari and Firefox <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/08/27/google-estimated-to-be-paying-15-billion-to-remain-default-search-engine-on-safari/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">make money</a> by defaulting the search bar to Google, locking in its dominance even as the search engine’s quality of output <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">declines</a>.</p>

 <p>This creates a quandary. If antitrust enforcers were to impose competition, browsers would lose their main source of income. Infrastructure requires money, but the planetary nature of the internet challenges our public funding model, leaving the door open to private capture. However, if we see the current opaque system as what it is, a kind of non-state taxation, then we can craft an alternative.</p>

 <p>Search engines are a logical place for governments to mandate the collection of a levy that supports browsers and other key internet infrastructure, which could be financed transparently, under open, transnational, multistakeholder oversight. &nbsp;Imagining new institutional methods to solve old problems at a global scale is one way to rewild the web.</p>

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 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-make-space-to-grow"><strong>Make Space To Grow</strong></h2>

 <p>We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2016.1235908" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> in 2016 that the internet was becoming “the infrastructure of all infrastructure.”<sup> </sup>It’s how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even — perhaps — planetary intelligence. Right now, it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Ecologists have re-oriented their field as a “<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1600-0498.12149" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">crisis discipline</a>,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.&nbsp;</p>

 <p>Just as a diverse “<a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/09/tiny-urban-forests-miyawaki-biodiversity-carbon-capture/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">pocket forest</a>” is the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354231796_Between_Pocket_Forest_Wilderness_and_Restored_Rural_Arcadia_Optimizing_the_Use_of_a_Feral_Woodland_Enclave_in_Urban_Environment" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">surest</a> way to regenerate urban vegetation, a global network with multiple different ways “to internet” is the best insurance policy for future innovation and resilience. We need to rewild the internet for the future, for our freedom to build tools and spaces, and to share knowledge, ideas and stories that haven’t been anticipated by the internet’s current overlords and cannot be contained.</p>
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 title: We Need To Rewild The Internet
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 <p class="has-text-align-left"><em><mark style="background-color:#bce39b" class="has-inline-color has-primary-color">“The word for world is forest” —&nbsp;Ursula K. Le Guin</mark></em></p>



 <p>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.</p>



 <p>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.</p>



 <p>Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. 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. Readers of the American political anthropologist of <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-two-cheers-for-anarchism" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">anarchy</a> and order, James C. Scott, know <a href="https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">what happened</a> next.</p>



 <p>It was a disaster so bad that a new word, <em>Waldsterben</em>, 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.</p>



 <p>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.</p>



 <p>That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2386849" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">call</a> the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/internet-aging-gen-z.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">same fate</a> as the ravaged forests.</p>



 <p>The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning <a href="https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/data-shared-sold-whats-done/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">data-extraction</a> engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.</p>



 <p>Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">that word</a>. 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.</p>



 <p>We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.</p>



 <p>They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies: For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">captured</a> almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over<a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-share-held-by-operating-systems-since-2009/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer"> 80%</a>. Google <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-host-market-share" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">runs</a> 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">come from</a> Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">run on</a> Google or Apple software.<sup> </sup>Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure <a href="https://www.hava.io/blog/2024-cloud-market-share-analysis-decoding-industry-leaders-and-trends#:~:text=Amazon%20Web%20Services%20(AWS)%20maintains,in%20the%20Asia%2DPacific%20market." data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">make up</a> over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients <a href="https://www.litmus.com/email-client-market-share" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">manage</a> nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.</p>



 <p>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 <a href="https://www.thinkingcat.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2019-InvariantsUpdated.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">termed</a> the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-walled-gardens-have-deep-roots"><strong>Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots</strong></h2>



 <p>The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency it also ensures the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.</p>



 <p>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.</p>


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 <p>Taken together,&nbsp;the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design; key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.</p>



 <p><a href="https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/distributed-computing/html/history.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Initially</a> funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct “<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-cnsldtn-effects/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">players” and “layers</a>” is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using the roads and living in many towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, <a href="https://www.thinkingcat.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2019-InvariantsUpdated.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.” Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services. </p>



 <p>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.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Since then, standards development organizations (SDOs) started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of <a href="https://archive.org/details/whatengineerskno0000vinc" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">simplification and control</a>, most internet engineers simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Hyperobjects.html?id=qu5zDwAAQBAJ&amp;source=kp_book_description" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">hyperobject</a>,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?&nbsp;</p>



 <p>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.&nbsp;</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-is-rewilding"><strong>What Is Rewilding?</strong></h2>



 <p>Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” <a href="https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/benefits-and-risks-rewilding" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">according</a> 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. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262046763/rewilding/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">their book</a> “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.”</p>



 <p>It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command-and-control.</p>


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 <p>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?</p>



 <p>Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock. And embodied in rewilding’s ecological tools is the collective wisdom of an entire discipline already tackling humanity’s toughest, systemic problems.</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-ecology-knows"><strong>What Ecology Knows</strong></h2>



 <p>Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from learning. First, it knows that <a href="https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.1794" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer"><strong>shifting baselines</strong></a><strong> are real.</strong></p>



 <p>If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own; global land-dwelling insect populations are <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">dropping</a> about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-spent-six-years-scouring-billions-of-links-and-found-the-web-is-both-expanding-and-shrinking-159215" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">same five</a> websites. You may have even written your own blog.</p>



 <p>But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole <em>web</em>) is normal. 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.</p>



 <p>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 <em>the internet</em>. 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?</p>



 <p>The answer isn’t to make everyone learn about how the original protocols were designed to separate key functions and the power that goes with them (though that’s certainly good to <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4216/Designing-an-Internet" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">know</a>). It’s to change how we feel and react to living inside a complex system that needs our care. Tech toxicity stems from there being only one business model for <em>how to internet</em>: concentration, surveillance, control. Further centralizing and managing this broken system will only make it worse.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet. For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok <em>are</em> the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world. Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. Rewilding is a way to collectively see the counterintuitive truth; today’s internet isn’t <em>too wild</em>, even if it feels like that. It’s simply not wild <em>enough.</em>&nbsp;</p>



 <p>It’s important to share that ecological rewilding is a work in progress. What do you rewild <em>to</em>? Humans have shaped and cultivated landscapes for tens of thousands of years, so what does “wild” even mean? Just as there’s no ecosystem on Earth untouched by human actions, there’s no “true” wildness to return habitats to. And what scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It’s one thing to <a href="https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">reintroduce</a> wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a reclaimed polder near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but the small Dutch reserve known as Oostvaardersplassen has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/21/pioneering-dutch-rewilding-project-oostvaardersplassen-works-to-rebuild-controversial-reputation-aoe" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">struggled</a>.</p>


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 <p>In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the <a href="https://www.popsci.com/nazi-bred-cows-are-too-ferocious-farm/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">famously bad-tempered</a> German Heck cattle, and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.</p>



 <p>Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/dutch-rewilding-experiment-backfires-as-thousands-of-animals-starve" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">horrified</a> by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling or removals.</p>



 <p>Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Its effectively landlocked status made over-grazing and collapse inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right. &nbsp;</p>



 <p>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.</p>



 <p>Some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the <a href="https://www.theverge.com/24063290/fediverse-explained-activitypub-social-media-open-protocol" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Fediverse</a> with its federated islands, or Bluesky with <a href="https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">algorithmic choice</a> and <a href="https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">composable moderation</a>.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>We don’t know what the future holds. Our job is to keep open as much opportunity as we can, trusting that those who come later will use it. Rewilding gets this. Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design.&nbsp; 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.</p>



 <p>Ecologists also know that <strong>complexity is not the enemy, it’s the goal. </strong>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.</p>



 <p>As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780125545204/the-ecology-of-natural-disturbance-and-patch-dynamics#book-info" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> in “The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,” that “[an] essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.” Some internet engineers know this. David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who worked on some of the internet’s earliest protocols, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547703/designing-an-internet/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> 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.</p>



 <p>But our internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone. Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. 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.”<sup> </sup>Or, as Daigle wrote in that 2019 <a href="https://www.thinkingcat.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2019-InvariantsUpdated.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">policy brief</a>, “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.</p>



 <p>Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its complexity and unpredictability make it generative, worthwhile and deeply human. In 1961, Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/86058/the-death-and-life-of-great-american-cities-by-jane-jacobs/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">argued</a> that mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and <a href="https://savingplaces.org/stories/a-tale-of-two-planners-jane-jacobs-and-robert-moses" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">more livable than</a> the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s Robert Moses.</p>


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 <p>Both Jacobs and the anthropologist Scott showed that top-down planning is often disastrous because instead of setting the stage for generative interactions it tries to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">control</a> what people will do. 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.</p>



 <p>As Jacobs wrote: “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.”<sup> </sup>As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>In an ecosystem, everything <a href="https://berjon.com/internet-transition/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">is infrastructure for</a> 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 <a href="https://www.livingwithwolves.org/wolf-science-weekly/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">limits</a>. They’re just one part of a complex web that passes calories around, not a one-way ticket to the end of evolution.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Ecologists know that <strong>diversity is resilience</strong>.</p>



 <p>On July 18, 2001, 11 carriages of a 60-car freight train <a href="https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/RAB0408.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">derailed</a> in the Howard Street Tunnel under Mid-Town Belvedere, a neighborhood just north of downtown Baltimore. Within minutes one carriage containing a highly flammable chemical was punctured. The escaping chemical ignited and soon adjacent carriages were alight in a fire that took about five days to put out. The disaster multiplied and spread. Thick, brick tunnel walls <a href="https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=900095" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">acted like</a> an oven, and temperatures rose to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A more than three-foot-wide water main above the tunnels burst, flooding the tunnel with millions of gallons within hours. It only cooled a little. Three weeks later, an explosion <a href="https://mde.maryland.gov/programs/pressroom/Pages/436.aspx" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">linked</a> to the combustible chemical <a href="https://www.bullsheet.com/bullsheet.com/tunnelfire.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">blew out</a> manhole covers located as far as two miles away.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>WorldCom, then the second largest long-distance phone company in the U.S., had fiber-optic cables in the tunnel carrying high volumes of phone and internet traffic. However, according to&nbsp; Clark, WorldCom’s resilience planning meant traffic was spread over different fiber networks in anticipation of just this kind of event.</p>



 <p>On paper, WorldCom had network redundancy. But almost immediately, U.S. internet traffic <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/20/us/fire-in-baltimore-snarls-internet-traffic-too.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">slowed</a>, 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.
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 <p>Clark tells the story of the Howard Street Tunnel fire to show that bottlenecks aren’t always obvious, especially at the operational level, and huge systems that seem secure due to their size and resources, can unexpectedly crumble.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>In today’s internet, much traffic <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-weave-a-fiber-optic-web-of-power-11642222824" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">passes</a> 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.</p>



 <p>All of this improves network speed and efficiency but creates new and non-obvious bottlenecks like the Howard Street Tunnel. Centralized service providers say they’re better resourced and skilled at attacks and failures, but they are also large, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2020.1728355" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">attractive targets</a> for attackers and possible single points of system failure.</p>



 <p>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 <a href="https://coverlink.com/case-study/mirai-ddos-attack-on-dyn/#:~:text=Impacted%20internet%20platforms%20included%20PayPal,platforms%20in%20approximately%20two%20hours" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">tens of thousands</a> 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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-day-of-the-zombie-baby-monitors-when-hackers-weaponized-the-internet-of-things/2016/10/25/167fdf42-9a1b-11e6-b3c9-f662adaa0048_story.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer"> baby monitors</a>. Although they all likely had resilience planning and redundancies, they went down because a single chokepoint — in one crucial layer of infrastructure — failed.</p>



 <p>Consolidation drives fragility. It imposes narrowness. Arranging deliberately varied networks and services into centralized stovepipes means we repeatedly fail to think of the internet as a complex system. Just like the train crash that caused a chemical leak that resulted in burst water pipes, melted fiber-optic cables and blown up manholes, single points of failure in complex critical systems have wide, unpredictable and devastating effects.</p>


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 <p>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 <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/4c68df91-98d1-4942-87cf-f734ea2cdd73" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">surged</a>. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service.<sup> </sup>To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit.</p>



 <p>The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge, and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies. Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest —&nbsp;and we can make better ones.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-look-feel-of-a-rewilded-internet"><strong>The Look &amp; Feel Of A Rewilded Internet</strong></h2>



 <p>A rewilded internet will have many more service choices. Some services like search and social media will be broken up, <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/what-att-breakup-teaches-us-about-big-tech-breakup" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">as AT&amp;T eventually was</a>. 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.</p>



 <p>Part of rewilding means taking what’s been pulled inside the big tech stack out of it, and paying for the true costs of connectivity. Some things like basic connectivity we will continue to pay for directly, and others like browsers we will support indirectly but transparently, as described below. The rewilded internet will have an abundance of ways to connect and relate to each other. There won’t be just one or two numbers to call if leaders of a political coup decide to shut the internet down in the middle of the night, as has happened in places like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/technology/internet/29cutoff.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Egypt</a> and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/MYANMAR-POLITICS/INTERNET-RESTRICTION/rlgpdbreepo/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Myanmar</a>. No one entity will permanently be on top. A rewilded internet will be a more interesting, usable, stable and enjoyable place to be.</p>



 <p>Through extensive research, Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378010000634" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">found</a> 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 <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2021/08/11/the-commons-lobster-maine-elinor-ostrom" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">found</a> people spontaneously organizing to manage natural resources —&nbsp;from water company cooperation in California to Maine lobster fishermen monitoring each other and repelling outsiders to prevent over-fishing.</p>



 <p>Self-organization also exists as part of a key internet function: traffic coordination. Internet exchange points (<a href="https://www.internetsociety.org/issues/ixps/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">IXPs</a>) 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. Network operators of all kinds — telecoms companies, large tech firms, universities, governments and broadcasters — all need to send large amounts of data through other ISPs’ networks so that it gets to its destination.</p>



 <p>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.</p>



 <p>Both between people and on the internet, connections are generative. From technical standards to common-pool resource management and even to more localized broadband networks known as “altnets,” internet rewilding already has a deep toolbox of collective action ready to be deployed.</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-road-to-rewilding"><strong>The Road To Rewilding</strong></h2>



 <p>The list of infrastructures to be diversified is long; as well as pipes and protocols, there are operating systems, browsers, search engines, DNS, social media, advertising, cloud providers, app stores, AI companies and more. Not only are the technologies involved complex, but they’re also intertwined. But freedoms are additive. Showing what can be done in one area creates opportunities in others. First, let’s start with regulation.</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-new-drive-for-antitrust-competition"><strong>The New Drive For Antitrust &amp; Competition</strong></h2>



 <p>You don’t always need a big new idea like rewilding to frame and motivate major structural change. Sometimes reviving an old idea will do. President Biden’s 2021 “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Executive Order</a> on Promoting Competition in the American Economy” revived the original, pro-worker, trust-busting scope and urgency of the early 20th-century legal activist and Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, along with rules and framings that date back to before the 1930s New Deal.</p>


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 <p>U.S. antitrust law was <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/how-gilded-age-lawmakers-saved-america-from-plutocracy/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">created</a> to break the power of oligarchs in oil, steel and railroads who threatened America’s young democracy. It gave workers basic protections and saw equal economic opportunity as essential to freedom. This expansive and interdependent view of competition and antitrust as essential for fairness and democracy was <a href="https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/BFI_WP_2022-104.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">whittled away</a> by Chicago School economists’ policies in the 1970s and Regan-era judges’ court rulings over the decades and <a href="https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/chicago-school-and-forgotten-political-dimension-antitrust-law" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">sidelined</a> by the narrow economic doctrine that intervention is only permitted when monopoly power causes consumer prices to rise. The intellectual monoculture of the consumer harm threshold has since spread globally.</p>



 <p>It’s why governments just stood aside as 21st-century tech firms romped to oligopoly. If a regulator’s sole criterion for action is to make sure consumers don’t pay a penny more, then the free or data-subsidized services of tech platforms don’t even register. (Of course, consumers pay in other ways, as these tech giants exploit their personal information for profit.) This laissez-faire approach allowed the biggest firms to choke off competition by <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-27/big-tech-goes-on-shopping-spree-brushing-off-antitrust-scrutiny" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">acquiring</a> their competitors and vertically integrating service providers, creating the problems we have today.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Regulators and enforcers in Washington and Brussels now say they have learned that lesson and won’t allow AI dominance to happen as internet concentration did. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and U.S. Department of Justice antitrust <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/jonathan-kanter-apple-antitrust.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">enforcer</a>, Jonathan Kanter, are <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23660101/ai-competition-ftc-doj-lina-khan-jonathan-kanter-antitrust-summit" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">identifying</a> chokepoints in the AI “<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-22nd-international" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">stack</a>” —&nbsp;concentration in control of processing chips, datasets, computing capacity, algorithm innovation, distribution platforms and user interfaces —&nbsp;and analyzing each potential bottleneck to see if it affects systemic competition. This is potentially good news for people who want to prevent the current dominance of tech giants being grandfathered into our AI future.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>In his 2021 signing of the executive order on competition, President Biden <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/09/remarks-by-president-biden-at-signing-of-an-executive-order-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">said</a>, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.” Biden’s enforcers are changing the kinds of cases they take up and widening the applicable legal theories on harm that they bring to judges. Instead of the traditionally narrow focus on consumer prices, today’s cases argue that the economic harms perpetrated by dominant firms include those suffered by their workers, small companies and the market as a whole.</p>



 <p>Khan and Kanter have jettisoned narrow and abstruse models of market behavior for real-world experiences of healthcare workers, farmers, writers. They <em>get</em> 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 <a href="https://bruxconference2024.clevercast.com/webcast/w-qodbzp/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">told</a> 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.”&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Enforcers in Washington and Brussels are starting to preemptively block tech firms from using dominance in one realm to take over another. After scrutiny by the U.S. FTC and European Commission, Amazon recently <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68131819" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">abandoned</a> its plan to acquire the home appliance manufacturer, iRobot. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have also moved to stop Apple from using its iPhone platform dominance to squeeze app store competition and dominate future markets through, for example, pushing the usage of CarPlay on automakers and limiting access to its tap-to-pay digital wallet in the financial services sector.</p>



 <p>Still, so far, their <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/technology/europe-apple-meta-google-microsoft.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">enforcement actions</a> have focused on the consumer-facing, highly visible parts of the tech giants’ exploitative and proprietary internet. The few, narrow measures of the 2021 executive order that aim to reduce infrastructure-based monopolies, only prevent <em>future </em>abuses like radio spectrum-hogging, not those already <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbjpjb/a-short-history-of-wireless-spectrum-the-most-complicated-puzzle-youve-ever-seen" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">locked in</a>. Sure, the best way to deal with monopolies is to stop them from happening in the first place. But unless regulators and enforcers eradicate the existing dominance of these giants now, we’ll be living in today’s infrastructure monopoly for decades, perhaps even a century.</p>



 <p>Just imagine applying Khan and Kanter’s chokepoint identification and whole-system harms investigation to the internet’s <em>invisible</em> layers —&nbsp;and doing so today. Just imagine what the future possibilities for internet innovation could be if “capitalism without competition” was rooted out all the way up and down the stack.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>The recent return to more muscular competition enforcement still isn’t radical enough. So far, even activist regulators have shied away from applying the toughest remedies for concentration in long-consolidated markets, such as non-discrimination requirements, functional interoperability and structural separations, i.e. breaking companies up. And talk of declaring the so-called “<a href="https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/big-tech-s-natural-monopoly-tough-to-self-regulate-malone-says-1.1679411" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">natural monopolies</a>” in search and social media to be <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/no-facebook-google-not-public-utilities/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">public utilities</a> — and forcing them to act as common carriers open to all — is still too extreme for most.</p>



 <p>But taken together, these are some of the most powerful tools we have to rewild the internet’s silent and existing vertical integrations; its deliberately moated fiefdoms squatting on bottlenecks of critical national and global infrastructure. 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.</p>


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 <p>When the writer and activist Cory Doctorow <a href="https://www.noemamag.com/freeing-ourselves-from-the-clutches-of-big-tech/" data-wpel-link="internal">wrote</a> 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. </p>



 <p>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.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>In an ecosystem, diversity of species is another way of saying “diversity of tactics,” as each successful new tactic creates a new niche to occupy. Whether it’s an octopus camouflaging itself as a sea snake, a cuckoo smuggling her chicks into another bird’s nest, orchids producing flowers that look just like a female bee, or parasites influencing rodent hosts to take life-ending risks, each evolutionary micro-niche is created by a successful tactic. Comcom is simply tactical diversity; it’s how organisms interact in complex, dynamic systems. And humans have demonstrated the epitome of short-term thinking by enabling the oligarchs who are trying to end it.</p>



 <p>Efforts are underway. The EU already has several years of experience with interoperability mandates and precious insight into how determined firms work to circumvent such laws. The U.S., however, is still in its early days of ensuring software interoperability, for example, for <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/8/24119268/wyden-secure-interoperable-goverment-collaboration-technology-act-encryption" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">videoconferencing</a>.”</p>



 <p>Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.&nbsp;</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-next-steps"><strong>Next Steps</strong></h2>



 <p>Much of what we need is already here. Beyond regulators digging deep for courage, vision and bold new litigation strategies, we need vigorous, pro-competitive government policies around procurement, investments and physical infrastructure, that require interoperability at every level and the resources to make it happen. Universities must reject research <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academic-research-meta-google-university-influence/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">funding from tech firms</a> because it always comes with conditions, both spoken <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/04/tech/facebook-disinformation-whistleblower/index.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">and</a> <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2019/06/how-big-tech-funds-debate-ai-ethics" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">unspoken</a>.</p>



 <p>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.</p>



 <p>We must ensure regulatory and financial incentives and support for alternatives including common-pool resource management, community networks, and the myriad other collaborative mechanisms people have always used to provide essential public goods like clean water, roads and defense.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>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 <em>power</em>.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>We know all this, but still find it so hard to collectively act. Why?&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Herded into rigid tech plantations rather than functioning, diverse ecosystems, it’s tough to imagine alternatives. Even those who can see clearly may feel helpless and alone. Rewilding unites everything we know we need to do and brings with it a whole new toolbox and vision.</p>



 <p>Ecologists face the same systems of exploitation and are organizing urgently, at scale and across domains. They <a href="https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/12/08/inside-the-rewilding-movement" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">see clearly</a> that the issues aren’t isolated but are instances of the same pathology of command and control, extraction and domination that political anthropologist Scott first noticed in scientific forestry. The solutions are the same in ecology and technology; aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-keep-the-internet-the-internet"><strong>Keep The Internet, The Internet</strong></h2>



 <p>Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and theorist of infrastructure and networks, wrote in her 1999 influential paper, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”:</p>



 <p>“Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.”</p>


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 <p>The technical protocols and standards that underlie the internet’s infrastructure are ostensibly developed in open, collaborative SDOs, but are also increasingly under the control of a few companies; so what appear to be “voluntary” standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.</p>



 <p>The dominance of SDOs by big firms also shapes what does <em>not</em> get standardized — for example, search, which is effectively a global monopoly. While efforts to directly <a href="https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-nottingham-avoiding-internet-centralization-02.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">address</a> internet consolidation have been raised <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/pdf/draft-mcfadden-cnsldtn-effects-01" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">repeatedly</a> within SDOs, little progress has been made. This is <a href="https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/investigation-into-googles-privacy-sandbox-browser-changes" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">damaging</a> SDOs’ credibility, especially outside the U.S. SDOs must radically change or they will lose their implicit global mandate to steward the future of the internet.</p>



 <p>We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They’re the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance. We need them to work. As internet engineer Jari Arkko <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2020.1740753?scroll=top&amp;needAccess=true" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">put it</a> in 2020, for the health of the network and all our security, SDOs must “ensure that key aspects of the evolving internet stay open, e.g. through open, standardized interfaces and that open source continues to be an important building block.” If fundamental internet protocols don’t maximize the values of interoperability, generality and openness, then they’re simply not the internet.</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-make-laws-standards-work-together"><strong><strong>Make Laws &amp; Standards Work Together</strong></strong></h2>



 <p>In 2018, a small group of Californians <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/california-data-privacy-ballot-measure.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">maneuvered</a> the California Legislature into passing the <a href="https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#:~:text=The%20California%20Consumer%20Privacy%20Act,how%20to%20implement%20the%20law." data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">California Consumer Privacy Act</a> (CCPA). Nested in the statute was an unassuming provision, the “right to opt out of sale or sharing” your personal information via a “user-enabled global privacy control” or GPC signal that would create an automated method for doing so. The law didn’t define how GPC might work. As a technical standard was required for browsers, businesses and providers to speak the same language, the signal’s details were delegated to a group of experts.</p>



 <p>In July 2021, California’s Attorney General <a href="https://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2021/07/15/california-attorney-general-updates-ccpa-faqs-indicating-mandatory-compliance-with-global-privacy-control/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">mandated</a> that all businesses use the newly created GPC for California-based consumers visiting their websites. The group of experts is now <a href="https://w3cping.github.io/administrivia/2023/charter.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">shepherding</a> the technical specification through global web standards development at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For California residents, GPC automates the request to “accept” or “reject” sales of your data, such as cookie-based tracking,&nbsp; on its websites; however, it isn’t yet supported by major default browsers like Chrome and Safari. Broad adoption will take time, but it’s a small step in changing real-world outcomes by driving antimonopoly practices deep into the standards stack — and it’s already being <a href="https://usercentrics.com/knowledge-hub/what-is-global-privacy-control/#:~:text=United%20States%20and%20state%2Dlevel%20laws%20and%20GPC,-Six%20new%20data&amp;text=The%20laws%20in%20California%2C%20Connecticut,to%20respect%20Global%20Privacy%20Control." data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">adopted</a> elsewhere.</p>



 <p>GPC is not the first legally mandated open standard, but it was deliberately designed from day one to bridge policymaking and standards-setting. The standard provides a mechanism and the law makes it mandatory. It’s a powerful dynamic where all play to their strengths. The idea is gaining ground. A recent United Nations Human Rights Council <a href="https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g23/117/05/pdf/g2311705.pdf?token=2yMgO0WoPF6QcYggQX&amp;fe=true" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">report</a> recommends that states delegate “regulatory functions to standard-setting organizations.” Our technical standards can be crossbred with institutions to produce protocols for governance that let people shape their online world.</p>



 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-make-service-providers-not-users-transparent"><strong>Make Service-Providers — Not Users — Transparent</strong></h2>



 <p>Today’s internet offers minimal transparency of key internet infrastructure providers. For example, browsers are highly complex pieces of infrastructure that determine how billions of people use the web, yet they are provided for free. That’s because the most commonly used search engines enter into opaque financial deals with browsers, paying them to be set as the default. Since few people change their default search engine, browsers like Safari and Firefox <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/08/27/google-estimated-to-be-paying-15-billion-to-remain-default-search-engine-on-safari/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">make money</a> by defaulting the search bar to Google, locking in its dominance even as the search engine’s quality of output <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">declines</a>.</p>



 <p>This creates a quandary. If antitrust enforcers were to impose competition, browsers would lose their main source of income. Infrastructure requires money, but the planetary nature of the internet challenges our public funding model, leaving the door open to private capture. However, if we see the current opaque system as what it is, a kind of non-state taxation, then we can craft an alternative.</p>



 <p>Search engines are a logical place for governments to mandate the collection of a levy that supports browsers and other key internet infrastructure, which could be financed transparently, under open, transnational, multistakeholder oversight. &nbsp;Imagining new institutional methods to solve old problems at a global scale is one way to rewild the web.</p>


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 <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-make-space-to-grow"><strong>Make Space To Grow</strong></h2>



 <p>We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2016.1235908" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">wrote</a> in 2016 that the internet was becoming “the infrastructure of all infrastructure.”<sup> </sup>It’s how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even — perhaps — planetary intelligence. Right now, it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Ecologists have re-oriented their field as a “<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1600-0498.12149" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">crisis discipline</a>,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.&nbsp;</p>



 <p>Just as a diverse “<a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/09/tiny-urban-forests-miyawaki-biodiversity-carbon-capture/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">pocket forest</a>” is the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354231796_Between_Pocket_Forest_Wilderness_and_Restored_Rural_Arcadia_Optimizing_the_Use_of_a_Feral_Woodland_Enclave_in_Urban_Environment" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">surest</a> way to regenerate urban vegetation, a global network with multiple different ways “to internet” is the best insurance policy for future innovation and resilience. We need to rewild the internet for the future, for our freedom to build tools and spaces, and to share knowledge, ideas and stories that haven’t been anticipated by the internet’s current overlords and cannot be contained.</p>
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    <h1>Your app is not a product</h1>
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  <div class="introduction" data-astro-cid-u43ozx4m><p>It’s common to refer to the app or website we’re creating as <em>the product</em>. In digital agencies it can be tempting to have that umbrella term for websites, apps and other computer programs. Especially now UX design is going through an inflationary phase, with the term being abused for over a decade and there are more newcomers to the field than job openings. It’s understandable that some are like, I’m calling myself <em>product designer</em> from now on—people with that role get higher salaries, right?</p></div>
 <p>I think it’s wrong to refer to the digital results of our work as ‘products’ though. It’s nothing <em>like</em> real products. For instance, none of the software I’ve been involved in was ever really finished. Not because I didn’t deliver, but because as long as the projects had funding, people were working on redesigns and updates.</p>
 <p><img src="https://www.kooslooijesteijn.net/_astro/factory.DDLi6irg_12k5lP.webp" alt="Simple illustration of a factory with a box-shaped object inside it" loading="lazy" sizes="2em" class="image image--fleuron" data-astro-cid-bj3fsypb decoding="async"></p>
 <p>Using the word <em>product</em> for websites and apps can set wrong expectations for clients and business owners. Physical product development needs to be completed before products can be produced and sold, whereas digital services and outlets are regularly developed iteratively, gradually getting better functionality. Until business owners no longer ask what it costs to create a website, their understanding of what a website is and can do is still based on the old notion of buying a physical asset.</p>
 <p>Calling software ‘a product’ also contributed to bad parts of programming culture. After all, of people believe code can be ‘shipped’ and the ‘product’ is finished after that. But that leads to engineers shuffling off responsibility and writing code that ‘works on my computer’ and is incomprehensible to future maintainers. I don’t think offending any programmers here, because many I worked with complained about this problem. This attitude of shipping code that only superficially works to pass abstract tests is pervasive though. So pervasive, that despite many countries and the European Union legally requiring accessibility, nearly <a href="https://webaim.org/projects/million/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">all homepages have accessibility errors</a>.</p>
 <p>Treating software as a product hasn’t helped the design profession either. Beside industrial designers getting annoyed by UI designers appropriating their job titles, our product-based design processes don’t work well with agile software teams. Methods that require big design up front without considering the value of engineers during that phase are the legacy of physical product development. Designers hanging on to that could be a reason for design struggling to compete with product management and that its influence in organizations <span class="sidenote" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <input aria-label="Show sidenote" type="checkbox" id="sidenote-1__checkbox" class="sidenote__checkbox" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <label tabindex="0" aria-describedby="sidenote-1" for="sidenote-1__checkbox" class="sidenote__button sidenote__button--number-1" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> declined </label> <small id="sidenote-1" class="sidenote__content sidenote__content--number-1" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> (sidenote: </span> I hope this is just my subjective experience, but I checked a few companies, just to be sure. Neither Figma, Adobe, Apple nor Spotify have a someone dedicated to design on their boards, while do do have execs for engineering and 'product'. <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> )</span> </span> </small> </span>  as a result.</p>
 <p>Lastly, treating software like a product is misleading to end users. Nowadays consumers rarely buy a piece of software anymore. If they have the option to pay for a life-long license, it’s often just that: a <em>license</em> to use the software, not the software itself. They can’t sell it to someone else or pass it on to a friend. Even songs and books are ‘sold’ that way: as <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/digital-assets-and-death-who-owns-music-video-e-books-after-you-die.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">nontransferable rights</a>. There’s something to say for selling software as a subscription service. Users likely want and expect updates, so that the software works on their new hardware and matches the looks of their updated operating systems. But especially in such a contract, there’s no <em>product</em>; it’s the service of getting regular improvements that customers pay for.</p>
 <h2 id="if-product-is-the-wrong-word-then-why-do-we-use-it-so-much">If <em>product</em> is the wrong word, then why do we use it so much?</h2>
 <p>From the day I first stepped into the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of the Delft University of Technology, I loved design. The sheer notion that I could draw something on a piece of paper (I loved that already), turn that into a technical drawing with a computer (imagine using computers! for creative! work!), that people in factories would then make with high tech machines, so people could use the things—so exciting!</p>
 <p>A few years later I found it <em>even more</em> exciting that I could skip the part where drawings were taken to factories. Anyone could use the internet to bring digital ideas straight to where ever on earth people would be interested in them. And the methods, skills and mindset I developed by studying design would be <em>so</em> useful to get programmers to work on those ideas with me!</p>
 <p>I must be one of millions who went through such a process. Because the internet was so new and growing so fast, barely anyone was trained to create on/with/for it. At the same time, everybody creative and excited enough believed that whatever proficiency they had, was just what was needed to make things online.</p>
 <p>As a result, the way I feel about making websites is still influenced by how I learned to think about designing physical products. And that is not unique to industrial design. Graphic design also had, and still has an ultimately linear process. Once the printing press runs, graphic design is finished.</p>
 <p>Software development used to be mainly about systems embedded in physical products. Calculators, music players, even computer games were distributed as physical objects. Until phones and other personal computers replaced many of them, most digital electronics had embedded programs that couldn’t be updated. So software developers referring to their ‘product’ were in fact referring to something that existed physically, once it left the factory to be distributed.</p>
 <p>Of course, that type of software still exists. But most designers and developers work on websites and mobile apps. Some of them do desktop apps. I don’t have precise numbers, but looking at Stack Overflow and <a href="https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">their surveys</a>, it’s clear that relatively few people work on embedded systems.</p>
 <p><img src="https://www.kooslooijesteijn.net/_astro/factory-with-box.Bsj4uCM9_1MmnpI.webp" alt="Simple illustration of a factory" loading="lazy" sizes="2em" class="image image--fleuron" data-astro-cid-bj3fsypb decoding="async"></p>
 <p>Referring to software as a product is an artifact of yesteryears. Almost all software today needs updates. At the very least for security and bug fixes, but also for hardware support and to run well on the systems that they’re created for.</p>
 <p>The nice thing about the web is that a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19961231235847/http://www.nasa.gov/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">website made in 1996</a> could still work in your freshly updated browser. But it would look old-fashioned, broken even. But for all intents and purposes, the website ceases to exist if the bills aren’t paid for the servers hosting it or the domain name referring to it. Or, in the case of such very old websites, if they don’t have SSL, which make browsers show a big scary dialog that only daring <em>web surfers</em> dare and know how to circumvent. And even if that is taken care of, but the site’s backend software didn’t get updates, we can be pretty certain the original pages will be replaced with SEO spam, links to malware, crypto miners and e-mail spam bots.</p>
 <p>With apps it’s not much better. If you’re not updating your app for a while, Apple <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/29/apple-outdated-apps-extension/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">will remove it</a> from the App Store. After that, even users who paid for your ‘product’ won’t be able to reinstall it anymore. Not even when restoring a ‘backup’ from iCloud, or when they get a new device. That means that every app maker has to be frank about this: either you commit to working on updates indefinitely, or consider it more like the broadcast of a pilot episode of a series that may or may not be continued.</p>
 <p>Committing to long term supports includes overhead like writing release notes, changing app store images and paying the annual Apple Developer Program fee. Made a nice app? Even have many passionate users, but no revenue? Keeping the app alive for 10 more years is going to cost you nearly a <a href="https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">thousand US dollars</a>.</p>
 <p>Longevity of apps in the Google Play Store isn’t any better. Just like the Apple App Store’s, its terms are regularly changed. An app that has been through the tedious approval process can be removed after such changes, unless the creators file complaints, provide documentation and change the app’s code or its description.</p>
 <p>You could argue these ‘products’ just need ‘maintenance’. But where tangible products may need a drop of lube or a replacement for a worn-out part, software needs to gets different changes each time. Where most cyclists can maintain their own bicycles, software ‘maintenance’ requires the same type of people who created the software. They’re not maintaining it, they’re <em>changing</em> it.</p>
 <h2 id="maybe-instead-of-products-we-she-should-speak-of-events">Maybe instead of <em>products</em>, we she should speak of <em>events</em>?</h2>
 <p>I don’t think we <em>need</em> new metaphors for the things we do with computers. But I like thinking about creating software as organizing an event. Here are some reasons why I think <em>event</em> is a better metaphor than <em>product</em>:</p>
 <ul>
 <li>An event can be long and big, like a music festival. It can also be a short presentation. Everybody understands intuitively that differently sized events have different requirements. Whereas with software <em>products</em> today, lots of people tend to believe they need the same planet-encompassing solutions that silicon valley giants have chosen.</li>
 <li>Events have an opening date and a closing date. Considering both should lead to a plan for making sure the event is attracting an audience and is safe until it’s closing.</li>
 <li>Such a closing date also helps to consider what’s supposed to happen what remains after the event. What happens to the URLs on your site that others linked to? How can app users still access the works they created with your app?</li>
 <li>Everybody knows events don’t run on their own. When the organizers and staff leave, things can and will get out of hand. This is why Designer News was and Twitter is made unusable by fascists and spam.</li>
 <li>Of course events need to be accessible to wheelchair users and other people with physical and cognitive attributes that are different from the organizer’s. I mean, your users’ need more color contrast in your UIs than your young eyes.</li>
 <li>If an event is supposed to happen for longer than an hour or two, you need an efficient, long-term energy supply solution and plans for when and how new visitors arrive and leave, and supplies are delivered. The hosting and updates thing I mentioned earlier.</li>
 <li>Technology is required for events to happen, but it’s not the main attraction. Rarely does an event need completely new solutions, so if technicians or designers propose such a thing, one has to verify how the event visitors and organizers would benefit from it.</li>
 <li>Events are only successful if enough people come, if these people get along well, and have some diversity as not to bore each other.</li>
 </ul>
 <h2 id="just-call-it-software">Just call it software!</h2>
 <p>I hope you enjoyed considering using <em>event</em> as an alternative for <em>product</em>. Maybe you have an even better metaphor?</p>
 <p>I think the simplest, clearest word we can use is <em>software</em>. Even if that word is based on two metaphors (softness and hardware). That doesn’t matter, because software always refers to the programs and files created for computers. And every language is eventually a recursive set of <span class="sidenote" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <input aria-label="Show sidenote" type="checkbox" id="sidenote-2__checkbox" class="sidenote__checkbox" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <label tabindex="0" aria-describedby="sidenote-2" for="sidenote-2__checkbox" class="sidenote__button sidenote__button--number-2" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> metaphors and abstractions </label> <small id="sidenote-2" class="sidenote__content sidenote__content--number-2" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> (sidenote: </span> George Lakoff's book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34459.Metaphors_We_Live_By?from_search=true&amp;from_srp=true&amp;qid=zajIIra2ZM&amp;rank=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">Metaphors We Live By</a> convinced me of that. <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> )</span> </span> </small> </span>  based on metaphors.</p>
 <p><img src="https://www.kooslooijesteijn.net/_astro/box.CeljjyXU_1J4WRb.webp" alt="Simple illustration of a box-shaped object" loading="lazy" sizes="2em" class="image image--fleuron" data-astro-cid-bj3fsypb decoding="async"></p>
 <p>Of course, sometimes it can be helpful to be <em>more</em> specific. For that we can use the good words we have already, like <em>algorithm</em>, <em>application</em> and <em>website</em>. Not sure I’m on board with terms like <em>library</em>, <em>extension</em> and <em>plugin</em>, but that’s for another time.</p>
 <h2 id="now-what">Now what?</h2>
 <p>Of course I don’t think this one blog post will change the language that we use to refer to what we create at work. But I hope that it helps refine our thinking about creating software and the processes we use for that.</p>
 <p>I want to end with a prediction: future generations of programmers, designers, managers and people in other, new roles in software creation won’t like to use the p-word for what they create. We won’t only have software engineers, but also <span class="sidenote" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <input aria-label="Show sidenote" type="checkbox" id="sidenote-3__checkbox" class="sidenote__checkbox" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <label tabindex="0" aria-describedby="sidenote-3" for="sidenote-3__checkbox" class="sidenote__button sidenote__button--number-3" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> software designers </label> <small id="sidenote-3" class="sidenote__content sidenote__content--number-3" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> (sidenote: </span> Obviously, design and product management encompasses much more: user experience, service, business development, customer acquisition—these areas are exactly what most projects need more of. But by referring to all those things as <em>product</em> or <em>UI</em> like we do today, doesn't do them justice either. <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> )</span> </span> </small> </span>  and software managers.</p>
 <p>True digital natives grow up without the mental bias towards <em>products</em>. When we’re old, remind me to be patient with them kids inventing seemingly arbitrary roles for themselves.</p>
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 title: Your app is not a product
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 <div class="introduction" data-astro-cid-u43ozx4m><p>It’s common to refer to the app or website we’re creating as <em>the product</em>. In digital agencies it can be tempting to have that umbrella term for websites, apps and other computer programs. Especially now UX design is going through an inflationary phase, with the term being abused for over a decade and there are more newcomers to the field than job openings. It’s understandable that some are like, I’m calling myself <em>product designer</em> from now on—people with that role get higher salaries, right?</p></div>
 <p>I think it’s wrong to refer to the digital results of our work as ‘products’ though. It’s nothing <em>like</em> real products. For instance, none of the software I’ve been involved in was ever really finished. Not because I didn’t deliver, but because as long as the projects had funding, people were working on redesigns and updates.</p>
 <img src="https://www.kooslooijesteijn.net/_astro/factory.DDLi6irg_12k5lP.webp" alt="Simple illustration of a factory with a box-shaped object inside it" loading="lazy" sizes="2em" class="image image--fleuron" data-astro-cid-bj3fsypb decoding="async">
 <p>Using the word <em>product</em> for websites and apps can set wrong expectations for clients and business owners. Physical product development needs to be completed before products can be produced and sold, whereas digital services and outlets are regularly developed iteratively, gradually getting better functionality. Until business owners no longer ask what it costs to create a website, their understanding of what a website is and can do is still based on the old notion of buying a physical asset.</p>
 <p>Calling software ‘a product’ also contributed to bad parts of programming culture. After all, of people believe code can be ‘shipped’ and the ‘product’ is finished after that. But that leads to engineers shuffling off responsibility and writing code that ‘works on my computer’ and is incomprehensible to future maintainers. I don’t think offending any programmers here, because many I worked with complained about this problem. This attitude of shipping code that only superficially works to pass abstract tests is pervasive though. So pervasive, that despite many countries and the European Union legally requiring accessibility, nearly <a href="https://webaim.org/projects/million/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">all homepages have accessibility errors</a>.</p>
 <p>Treating software as a product hasn’t helped the design profession either. Beside industrial designers getting annoyed by UI designers appropriating their job titles, our product-based design processes don’t work well with agile software teams. Methods that require big design up front without considering the value of engineers during that phase are the legacy of physical product development. Designers hanging on to that could be a reason for design struggling to compete with product management and that its influence in organizations <span class="sidenote" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <input aria-label="Show sidenote" type="checkbox" id="sidenote-1__checkbox" class="sidenote__checkbox" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <label tabindex="0" aria-describedby="sidenote-1" for="sidenote-1__checkbox" class="sidenote__button sidenote__button--number-1" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> declined </label> <small id="sidenote-1" class="sidenote__content sidenote__content--number-1" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> (sidenote: </span> I hope this is just my subjective experience, but I checked a few companies, just to be sure. Neither Figma, Adobe, Apple nor Spotify have a someone dedicated to design on their boards, while do do have execs for engineering and 'product'. <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> )</span> </span> </small> </span>  as a result.</p>
 <p>Lastly, treating software like a product is misleading to end users. Nowadays consumers rarely buy a piece of software anymore. If they have the option to pay for a life-long license, it’s often just that: a <em>license</em> to use the software, not the software itself. They can’t sell it to someone else or pass it on to a friend. Even songs and books are ‘sold’ that way: as <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/digital-assets-and-death-who-owns-music-video-e-books-after-you-die.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">nontransferable rights</a>. There’s something to say for selling software as a subscription service. Users likely want and expect updates, so that the software works on their new hardware and matches the looks of their updated operating systems. But especially in such a contract, there’s no <em>product</em>; it’s the service of getting regular improvements that customers pay for.</p>
 <h2 id="if-product-is-the-wrong-word-then-why-do-we-use-it-so-much">If <em>product</em> is the wrong word, then why do we use it so much?</h2>
 <p>From the day I first stepped into the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of the Delft University of Technology, I loved design. The sheer notion that I could draw something on a piece of paper (I loved that already), turn that into a technical drawing with a computer (imagine using computers! for creative! work!), that people in factories would then make with high tech machines, so people could use the things—so exciting!</p>
 <p>A few years later I found it <em>even more</em> exciting that I could skip the part where drawings were taken to factories. Anyone could use the internet to bring digital ideas straight to where ever on earth people would be interested in them. And the methods, skills and mindset I developed by studying design would be <em>so</em> useful to get programmers to work on those ideas with me!</p>
 <p>I must be one of millions who went through such a process. Because the internet was so new and growing so fast, barely anyone was trained to create on/with/for it. At the same time, everybody creative and excited enough believed that whatever proficiency they had, was just what was needed to make things online.</p>
 <p>As a result, the way I feel about making websites is still influenced by how I learned to think about designing physical products. And that is not unique to industrial design. Graphic design also had, and still has an ultimately linear process. Once the printing press runs, graphic design is finished.</p>
 <p>Software development used to be mainly about systems embedded in physical products. Calculators, music players, even computer games were distributed as physical objects. Until phones and other personal computers replaced many of them, most digital electronics had embedded programs that couldn’t be updated. So software developers referring to their ‘product’ were in fact referring to something that existed physically, once it left the factory to be distributed.</p>
 <p>Of course, that type of software still exists. But most designers and developers work on websites and mobile apps. Some of them do desktop apps. I don’t have precise numbers, but looking at Stack Overflow and <a href="https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">their surveys</a>, it’s clear that relatively few people work on embedded systems.</p>
 <img src="https://www.kooslooijesteijn.net/_astro/factory-with-box.Bsj4uCM9_1MmnpI.webp" alt="Simple illustration of a factory" loading="lazy" sizes="2em" class="image image--fleuron" data-astro-cid-bj3fsypb decoding="async">
 <p>Referring to software as a product is an artifact of yesteryears. Almost all software today needs updates. At the very least for security and bug fixes, but also for hardware support and to run well on the systems that they’re created for.</p>
 <p>The nice thing about the web is that a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19961231235847/http://www.nasa.gov/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">website made in 1996</a> could still work in your freshly updated browser. But it would look old-fashioned, broken even. But for all intents and purposes, the website ceases to exist if the bills aren’t paid for the servers hosting it or the domain name referring to it. Or, in the case of such very old websites, if they don’t have SSL, which make browsers show a big scary dialog that only daring <em>web surfers</em> dare and know how to circumvent. And even if that is taken care of, but the site’s backend software didn’t get updates, we can be pretty certain the original pages will be replaced with SEO spam, links to malware, crypto miners and e-mail spam bots.</p>
 <p>With apps it’s not much better. If you’re not updating your app for a while, Apple <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/29/apple-outdated-apps-extension/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">will remove it</a> from the App Store. After that, even users who paid for your ‘product’ won’t be able to reinstall it anymore. Not even when restoring a ‘backup’ from iCloud, or when they get a new device. That means that every app maker has to be frank about this: either you commit to working on updates indefinitely, or consider it more like the broadcast of a pilot episode of a series that may or may not be continued.</p>
 <p>Committing to long term supports includes overhead like writing release notes, changing app store images and paying the annual Apple Developer Program fee. Made a nice app? Even have many passionate users, but no revenue? Keeping the app alive for 10 more years is going to cost you nearly a <a href="https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">thousand US dollars</a>.</p>
 <p>Longevity of apps in the Google Play Store isn’t any better. Just like the Apple App Store’s, its terms are regularly changed. An app that has been through the tedious approval process can be removed after such changes, unless the creators file complaints, provide documentation and change the app’s code or its description.</p>
 <p>You could argue these ‘products’ just need ‘maintenance’. But where tangible products may need a drop of lube or a replacement for a worn-out part, software needs to gets different changes each time. Where most cyclists can maintain their own bicycles, software ‘maintenance’ requires the same type of people who created the software. They’re not maintaining it, they’re <em>changing</em> it.</p>
 <h2 id="maybe-instead-of-products-we-she-should-speak-of-events">Maybe instead of <em>products</em>, we she should speak of <em>events</em>?</h2>
 <p>I don’t think we <em>need</em> new metaphors for the things we do with computers. But I like thinking about creating software as organizing an event. Here are some reasons why I think <em>event</em> is a better metaphor than <em>product</em>:</p>
 <ul>
 <li>An event can be long and big, like a music festival. It can also be a short presentation. Everybody understands intuitively that differently sized events have different requirements. Whereas with software <em>products</em> today, lots of people tend to believe they need the same planet-encompassing solutions that silicon valley giants have chosen.</li>
 <li>Events have an opening date and a closing date. Considering both should lead to a plan for making sure the event is attracting an audience and is safe until it’s closing.</li>
 <li>Such a closing date also helps to consider what’s supposed to happen what remains after the event. What happens to the URLs on your site that others linked to? How can app users still access the works they created with your app?</li>
 <li>Everybody knows events don’t run on their own. When the organizers and staff leave, things can and will get out of hand. This is why Designer News was and Twitter is made unusable by fascists and spam.</li>
 <li>Of course events need to be accessible to wheelchair users and other people with physical and cognitive attributes that are different from the organizer’s. I mean, your users’ need more color contrast in your UIs than your young eyes.</li>
 <li>If an event is supposed to happen for longer than an hour or two, you need an efficient, long-term energy supply solution and plans for when and how new visitors arrive and leave, and supplies are delivered. The hosting and updates thing I mentioned earlier.</li>
 <li>Technology is required for events to happen, but it’s not the main attraction. Rarely does an event need completely new solutions, so if technicians or designers propose such a thing, one has to verify how the event visitors and organizers would benefit from it.</li>
 <li>Events are only successful if enough people come, if these people get along well, and have some diversity as not to bore each other.</li>
 </ul>
 <h2 id="just-call-it-software">Just call it software!</h2>
 <p>I hope you enjoyed considering using <em>event</em> as an alternative for <em>product</em>. Maybe you have an even better metaphor?</p>
 <p>I think the simplest, clearest word we can use is <em>software</em>. Even if that word is based on two metaphors (softness and hardware). That doesn’t matter, because software always refers to the programs and files created for computers. And every language is eventually a recursive set of <span class="sidenote" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <input aria-label="Show sidenote" type="checkbox" id="sidenote-2__checkbox" class="sidenote__checkbox" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <label tabindex="0" aria-describedby="sidenote-2" for="sidenote-2__checkbox" class="sidenote__button sidenote__button--number-2" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> metaphors and abstractions </label> <small id="sidenote-2" class="sidenote__content sidenote__content--number-2" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> (sidenote: </span> George Lakoff's book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34459.Metaphors_We_Live_By?from_search=true&amp;from_srp=true&amp;qid=zajIIra2ZM&amp;rank=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer" target="_blank">Metaphors We Live By</a> convinced me of that. <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> )</span> </span> </small> </span>  based on metaphors.</p>
 <img src="https://www.kooslooijesteijn.net/_astro/box.CeljjyXU_1J4WRb.webp" alt="Simple illustration of a box-shaped object" loading="lazy" sizes="2em" class="image image--fleuron" data-astro-cid-bj3fsypb decoding="async">
 <p>Of course, sometimes it can be helpful to be <em>more</em> specific. For that we can use the good words we have already, like <em>algorithm</em>, <em>application</em> and <em>website</em>. Not sure I’m on board with terms like <em>library</em>, <em>extension</em> and <em>plugin</em>, but that’s for another time.</p>
 <h2 id="now-what">Now what?</h2>
 <p>Of course I don’t think this one blog post will change the language that we use to refer to what we create at work. But I hope that it helps refine our thinking about creating software and the processes we use for that.</p>
 <p>I want to end with a prediction: future generations of programmers, designers, managers and people in other, new roles in software creation won’t like to use the p-word for what they create. We won’t only have software engineers, but also <span class="sidenote" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <input aria-label="Show sidenote" type="checkbox" id="sidenote-3__checkbox" class="sidenote__checkbox" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <label tabindex="0" aria-describedby="sidenote-3" for="sidenote-3__checkbox" class="sidenote__button sidenote__button--number-3" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> software designers </label> <small id="sidenote-3" class="sidenote__content sidenote__content--number-3" data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> (sidenote: </span> Obviously, design and product management encompasses much more: user experience, service, business development, customer acquisition—these areas are exactly what most projects need more of. But by referring to all those things as <em>product</em> or <em>UI</em> like we do today, doesn't do them justice either. <span class="screen-reader-only " data-astro-cid-ic4jgs3n> )</span> </span> </small> </span>  and software managers.</p>
 <p>True digital natives grow up without the mental bias towards <em>products</em>. When we’re old, remind me to be patient with them kids inventing seemingly arbitrary roles for themselves.</p>
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    <h1>Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns</h1>
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  <p>This post is probably too long, but I need someplace that I can refer to. As is often the case, I am writing this to sort my thoughts, primarily. But I am hoping to give voice to what I am observing in other people in our field but is rarely spoken about. I am not attempting to postulate a solution to a complex problem; instead, I am trying to provide words in the hopes that they resonate with what other people are experiencing, if nothing else just to let them know that they are not alone with it.</p>
 <hr>
 <p>Every good post starts with a quote, right?</p>
 <blockquote>
 <p>[Industry means] something that is produced or is available in large quantities and makes a lot of money.</p>
 </blockquote>
 <p><small>(Quote from the <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/industry" target="_blank" rel="noreferer noopener">Cambridge Dictonary</a>)</small></p>
 <p>We have long referred to our niche on the web as the "web industry," but never has the term been more congruent than it is right now. I believe this throws us into some conflicts that we are left to deal with alone. Because what we've learned in the decades before, what mattered to the craft of making websites, seems to sometimes not be compatible with what is asked of us from our jobs. This throws us into significant conflict, and resolution seems to be left to our own devices. In this post, I am trying to tackle this conflict that has been on my mind for so long.</p>
 <p>I think it is very clear for most of us to see that our little corner of the world has reached the age of industrialization. With this "little corner", I am referring to the community of people who make websites. Designers, developers, and everything in between and beyond alike</p>
 <p>There are many signs that we have irreversibly entered a new era, one that is determined by industrial practices. We constantly hear that we're not supposed to reinvent the wheel; websites are now being derogatorily called MPAs (multi-page apps), and we're generally referring to websites as software. UI is now coming in the form of self-contained, composable pieces of single sources of truth, "components", and the question "Will it scale?" is the number one differentiator for "maturity" in the tooling surrounding our craft.</p>
 <p>A single difference that allows us to sort something into a dichotomy—that is what a "Leitdifferenz" refers to (I am using the German word directly here to refer to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann">Niklas Luhmann's</a> concept, because I cannot find a semantically fitting translation). We have been obsessed with this scalability as the single differentiating factor that will tell us how well something will adapt to the changing requirements of an organization and increasing, diverse technical demand. But for businesses, scaling means that output remains the same or only slightly degrades while production costs lower.</p>
 <p>Scalability has become the leading differentiator, the Leitdifferenz, of almost everything in our industry. From the tech we develop with, for, and on to what, how, and who we design for It's almost like a trance that we keep repeating to ourselves."But will it scale?" is first and foremost a matter of business. But in development and design, it also refers to other factors. Yet when it comes to matters of industrialization, these factors remain secondary.</p>
 <p>For example, a course is a scaling product. Because you are investing time into its production, and then all you have to do is maybe every now and then generate a promotional advertisement for it, but the price remains the same while your initial expense disappears entirely. Your margin has increased; your product value has scaled. The purpose of industry in general is to achieve scale by reducing production costs. Create a "streamlined" (another term that we have become very familiar with) manufacturing process and automate it as much as possible to generate a product that will sell to as many consumers as possible.</p>
 <p>We can consider design systems themselves as an <a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/scale-design-systems/">answer to the question of scalability for design</a>. And even here, scaling is still the leitdifferenz by which we categorize. Design work is being compartmentalized into "components", small, self-contained deliverables that can then be composed together by someone who is not a designer. The idea is that this will allow for a more efficient and scalable design process. But obviously, design is more than just that. And design is still happening by the person who puts components together, just without the skills necessary. So the reaction is to create an even more restrictive set of rules, so that instead of applying systemic principles to design work in order to enable design work, it is being reduced to a set of consumable components and rules.</p>
 <p>That is not the premise of design systems as a way of working, but it is what some designers are postulating because that is what sells them to industry. The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing <a href="https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/design-systems-agile-and-industrialization/">similar concerns</a>. In the words of <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/16369">Jeremy Keith</a>:</p>
 <blockquote>
 <p>[...] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.</p>
 </blockquote>
 <p>So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality. And it is also reflected in the way that people are entering the industry. Lately, we've seen a lot of <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/the-good-bad-and-the-ugly-of-web-dev-coding-bootcamps-e82d2715eabf">bootcamps</a> popping up that, for the most part, educate people just enough so that they can <a href="https://cult.honeypot.io/reads/the-ugly-truth-about-coding-bootcamps/">get a job</a>, at least that is the premise. But they rarely know the principles, values, and philosophies that constitute the web platform. But they can create a fully functioning "web app" with Next. JS in React! Of course, they don't learn how to manage CSS for this type of site; instead, they just use Tailwind. But at least they know how to specify TypeScript interfaces!</p>
 <p>And of course, they learn that design comes from UI libraries. Gone are the days where we used to tell people that bootstrapping was just for prototyping and otherwise would quickly turn into technical debt! Nowadays, designers are sometimes even told to start with one of these libraries. Just, they're not called bootstraps. Instead, they're called Material UI, Headless UI," or Chakra UI. But they bear every necessary resemblance. But it's fine, because it's just the components, right?</p>
 <p>What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the "output" is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce "free" iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!</p>
 <p>The larger premise of design has degraded over the years, in my opinion. As it got more embraced into the industrial process, it did so by devaluing the perspective of the people for whom the discipline used to design and replacing it with the perspective of companies. This is the price that design continues to pay for its seat at the capitalist table. In my opinion, the cost is too high to be worth it. This was also one of the reasons why <a href="/blog/2022/leaving-design#what-it-is">I decided to not pursue it as a career any longer, in 2022</a>.</p>
 <p>When we referred to ourselves as Web designers, we were constantly struggling to find companies that took our profession seriously enough to integrate us into their processes. But design was not considered valuable. So we started to call ourselves UX designers because we were designing experiences, not websites. And slowly but surely, we got our oh-so-desired seat at the table. But only if we demonstrated our worth by demonstrating a number-go-up linear-causal relationship to our work, which would necessitate extensive monitoring of our users.And thus, companies have successfully forced us to degrade the merit of our work to quantifiable markers of increased conversions and clicks and the firing of whatever other random KPI we could somehow pull off our asses—all to appeal to the growth-at-any-cost mindset.</p>
 <p>This often happens with important values in our craft. The recent increase in attention on accessibility is already taking a similar path. Accessibility advocates and experts are often forced to "sell" (see what I did there?) accessibility work to companies by showing them how much more revenue, conversions, or users they could be having by making their sites accessible. But our craft, on the other hand, clearly dictates this as a primary focus—a Leitdifferenz to judge the merit of our work. If what we do isn't accessible, it's to a certain degree broken or incomplete at best.</p>
 <p>The problem with this angle is that, inevitably, industry will respond industriously. And now we're having to explain to companies why they cannot just install an overlay and see it done. But that is the price of putting a number on marginalized groups. Unfortunately, that is the language that businesses speak, so experts and advocates are not to blame. They are doing the best that they can because they know that, in the end, the removal of barriers for people who rely on them is what matters. They are, in their own way, navigating ambivalence and finding their way through the conflict of craft vs. industry.</p>
 <p>UX Design used to stand for "User Experience", but in order to get our seat at the table, we had to degrade it so much that it has long since shifted its meaning to "User Exploitation", as <a href="https://creativegood.com/blog/21/losing-faith-in-ux.html">Mark Hurst writes</a>. The practice of UX, removed so far from its subject that it now considers the company itself the subject of their work, is now being used for bad-faith manipulation to increase capitalist numbers.</p>
 <p>This is reflected in another marker in language. Just as we were once web designers and then UX designers, we now call ourselves "product designers." As designers, our relationship to what we design and for whom we design it has changed. We used to design websites for people, then experiences for users, and now we are designing products for companies.</p>
 <p>This coincides with the fact that we are now broadly regarding websites as software, but we're not calling them websites. We're calling them "Apps". And it makes sense—we have entirely normalized the practice of having our websites controlled by JavaScript from server to client because JavaScript is mature now and thus appealing to traditional programmers, who used to shun it fiercely.</p>
 <p>This change in the demographics of those who write code has made it easier to hire for these positions. A website entirely rendered in JavaScript can be worked on by someone with a University Degree, in which they are rarely taught about the special relationship between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but are instead told that CSS and HTML are not real programming languages. And with these capital-P programmers, their language is long, as are their world view and their heuristics.</p>
 <p>People who make websites and are also working in what we refer to as "the web industry" are often forced into a difficult conflict. In their position as an employee or freelancer, they sometimes have to work on technology that they know isn't compatible with the values that they learned to hold dear in their craft. Designers are asked to implement <a href="https://www.deceptive.design/">dark patterns</a>, even though they know that it is unethical. Developers are asked to work with React, even though they are aware that it is maintained by Facebook, a company <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/">profiting and and enabling genocide</a>. And the list goes on.</p>
 <p>It is also expressed in what I think is best summarized as "Industry Fomo". Developers know full well that using next.js to create a relatively simple website is overkill, inappropriate at best, but they see themselves required to use industry-grade technology because job requirements are not listing skills anymore, instead they are listing tools and frameworks.</p>
 <p>I consider this a conflict between two identities: the craftsperson and the factory worker. The craftsperson wants to do what honors the values of the craft, but the factory worker needs to do what will keep them employed or employable. A conflict that we are being left alone with, often lacking the words to conceptualize what is really happening here.</p>
 <p>Postulating to know a solution to what I consider would be hubris on so many levels. But what I can do is access a little trick from my work as a <a href="https://sonstnichts.com/">systemic counsellor</a>. Systemic counseling operates on many different principles, one of them being <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics">second-order cybernetics</a>, in which cybernetic principles are applied to cybernetics itself—recursive cybernetics. We know a thing or two about recursion, right? We can apply some of the principles that we usually use as a guide in our craft to our own situation: <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#separation-of-concerns">Separation of Concerns</a>.</p>
 <p>While this integer design principle of HTML is usually referred to in order to justify the separation of concerns for content (markup, HTML), presentation (styles, CSS), and behavior (scripting, JavaScript), it is also a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns">general design principle in computer science</a>, and we can also use it to separate the concerns of the craftsperson and the factory worker.</p>
 <p>If we separate the demand into independent concerns, made by independent parties, we get the chance, instead of having to decide, to hold the ambivalence and complexity of the situation. Industry of course would force us to reduce complexity, another religious mantra of programming. But complexity means possibility, and with possibility comes the ability to decide. Do we go with what the industry demands, or do we go with what the craft demands? The conflict is the oscillation between both possible decisions. Not only can we not decide, but we are also uneasy with the fact that we cannot decide. Fritz B. Simon calls this a "double negation,", and it becomes the constitutive marker of conflict, described systemically.</p>
 <p>But what if, instead of oscillating between both positions in an attempt to make a decision, we just stay in this ambiguity for a while?A room emerges that we are holding. In this room, both positions aren't changed, but it may allow us to not experience them in conflict with each other. If we understand them as a conflict of concerns and not a conflict of identity, we may even see where both concerns align. Or we can give voices to both parts.</p>
 <p>At the very least, it may help us to not experience this as a personal conflict but instead leave it to the job, which has to find a way to utilize craft in a way that makes it compatible enough with industrial processes—another different concern reveals itself here, the concern of the business, not the concern of the employee.</p>
 <p>This isn't always possible, though. And sometimes, people may decide to leave not only the industry but also the craft all together to protect themselves from this conflict. Not because they couldn't hold the ambivalence of the craftsperson and the factory worker as is, but because they don't want to degrade themselves or their view of the craft—or maybe because they weren't able to see two separate concerns but instead saw a personal conflict that they were left to deal with on their own.</p>
 <p>But if we somehow manage to conciliate those two competing identities, we may find some personal relief from trying to find a common ground between two competing sides within ourselves. I have to work with technology that I find deeply offensive and politically abhorrent all day. But at some point, I found great relief in understanding myself as an employer who works with this technology, not as a craftsperson working on the web. I understand that it is not people who want to create SPAs; it's an industry—businesses.</p>
 <p>Many people are not differentiating here, and so they just repeat the capitalist programmers mantras. But that says much more about how they relate to others and how they define themselves. Do they even consider themselves craftspeople? Do they even see the craft that is there?</p>
 <p>Ultimately, the fact that we see a conflict here can be considered a good sign. As I said before, systemically, we can understand a conflict as an oscillation between possibilities. That means that in order to experience conflict, we first need to see possibilities. So if you are currently battling this conflict, you may find some relief in knowing that you are experiencing it because you see possibilities and are not submerged in the trance of the factory worker, induced by industry.</p>
 <p>We do need to talk about AI because it is an inevitable part of industrialization and there is no escape for any of us. The desire to reduce manual labor by automation and reduction of complexity is the seed that gave birth to programming in the first place, and AI is a tangible premise of endless scaling. I think it would be incredibly unwise and hubristic to assume that the broad majority of us who are employed at this time will remain employed in the next years.</p>
 <p>Apologists often claim that "we will move on to other things", but that is not true. Some of us will divorce further from craft and appeal to business desires in managing or other administrative jobs, but these jobs are given, not earned. The value of our work will inevitably reduce massively, and few of us will be able to do what we do now and get paid for it.</p>
 <p>The groundwork for this has already been laid. Take a look at dribbble, and you'll find one interchangeable site after another. And this is the dataset that AI is being trained on because it can't look at an actual website; it only looks at pixels for the most part. But even if it were looking at real websites, they have long since started to look so similar that they are often only differentiated by their themes.</p>
 <p>In order to protect ourselves from this inevitable reality (again, programming was invented to make human labor in weaving redundant; this is the leitdifferenz of the entire profession), we can learn to understand employability does not make us craftspeople.</p>
 <p>Because the craft will remain even after most of it is automated. You can order mugs online, yet there are still potters out there. We can go into C&amp;A and buy a dress, but there are still seamstresses making bespoke garments. This is the craft's unavoidable final destination - where it all began.</p>
 <p>Handcrafted websites are made by humans for humans. This is what differentiates our craftsperson from the factory worker—what the craftsperson does is valuable to people, not businesses.</p>
 <p>And until that time comes, we can be both at the same time. We can hold both perspectives as important voices with different concerns. We can switch between them, look for common ground, or side with one or the other in a given situation.</p>
 <p>So the next time you are approaching a website, ask yourself, "What would the craftsperson do?" And also ask yourself, "What would the factory worker do?" See what answers you come up with!</p>
 <hr>
 <p>Thank you to <a href="https://hidde.blog/">Hidde de Vries</a>, who in a conversation we've had, helped me to see the potential value, that a post about this topic could have.</p>
 <p>I feel especially grateful for these individuals, who not only took the time to read through this post, but also came up with fantastic and extensive feedback, which I've incorporated into this post. Thank you so much!</p>
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@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
 title: Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns
 url: https://helloyes.dev/blog/2023/craft-vs-industry/
 hash_url: f000099cbb33176d35e7aeccdab687b3
 archive_date: 2024-04-17
 og_image: https://helloyes.dev/previews/craft-vs-industry:-separating-concerns.png
 description: We have long referred to our niche of the web as the web industry but never has the term been more congruent than it is right now. I believe this throws us into some conflicts, that we are left deal with alone.
 favicon: https://helloyes.dev/assets/favicons/illusion/icon.svg
 language: en_US

 <p>This post is probably too long, but I need someplace that I can refer to. As is often the case, I am writing this to sort my thoughts, primarily. But I am hoping to give voice to what I am observing in other people in our field but is rarely spoken about. I am not attempting to postulate a solution to a complex problem; instead, I am trying to provide words in the hopes that they resonate with what other people are experiencing, if nothing else just to let them know that they are not alone with it.</p>
 <hr>
 <p>Every good post starts with a quote, right?</p>
 <blockquote>
 <p>[Industry means] something that is produced or is available in large quantities and makes a lot of money.</p>
 </blockquote>
 <p><small>(Quote from the <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/industry" target="_blank" rel="noreferer noopener">Cambridge Dictonary</a>)</small></p>
 <p>We have long referred to our niche on the web as the "web industry," but never has the term been more congruent than it is right now. I believe this throws us into some conflicts that we are left to deal with alone. Because what we've learned in the decades before, what mattered to the craft of making websites, seems to sometimes not be compatible with what is asked of us from our jobs. This throws us into significant conflict, and resolution seems to be left to our own devices. In this post, I am trying to tackle this conflict that has been on my mind for so long.</p>
 <p>I think it is very clear for most of us to see that our little corner of the world has reached the age of industrialization. With this "little corner", I am referring to the community of people who make websites. Designers, developers, and everything in between and beyond alike</p>
 <p>There are many signs that we have irreversibly entered a new era, one that is determined by industrial practices. We constantly hear that we're not supposed to reinvent the wheel; websites are now being derogatorily called MPAs (multi-page apps), and we're generally referring to websites as software. UI is now coming in the form of self-contained, composable pieces of single sources of truth, "components", and the question "Will it scale?" is the number one differentiator for "maturity" in the tooling surrounding our craft.</p>
 <p>A single difference that allows us to sort something into a dichotomy—that is what a "Leitdifferenz" refers to (I am using the German word directly here to refer to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann">Niklas Luhmann's</a> concept, because I cannot find a semantically fitting translation). We have been obsessed with this scalability as the single differentiating factor that will tell us how well something will adapt to the changing requirements of an organization and increasing, diverse technical demand. But for businesses, scaling means that output remains the same or only slightly degrades while production costs lower.</p>
 <p>Scalability has become the leading differentiator, the Leitdifferenz, of almost everything in our industry. From the tech we develop with, for, and on to what, how, and who we design for It's almost like a trance that we keep repeating to ourselves."But will it scale?" is first and foremost a matter of business. But in development and design, it also refers to other factors. Yet when it comes to matters of industrialization, these factors remain secondary.</p>
 <p>For example, a course is a scaling product. Because you are investing time into its production, and then all you have to do is maybe every now and then generate a promotional advertisement for it, but the price remains the same while your initial expense disappears entirely. Your margin has increased; your product value has scaled. The purpose of industry in general is to achieve scale by reducing production costs. Create a "streamlined" (another term that we have become very familiar with) manufacturing process and automate it as much as possible to generate a product that will sell to as many consumers as possible.</p>
 <p>We can consider design systems themselves as an <a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/scale-design-systems/">answer to the question of scalability for design</a>. And even here, scaling is still the leitdifferenz by which we categorize. Design work is being compartmentalized into "components", small, self-contained deliverables that can then be composed together by someone who is not a designer. The idea is that this will allow for a more efficient and scalable design process. But obviously, design is more than just that. And design is still happening by the person who puts components together, just without the skills necessary. So the reaction is to create an even more restrictive set of rules, so that instead of applying systemic principles to design work in order to enable design work, it is being reduced to a set of consumable components and rules.</p>
 <p>That is not the premise of design systems as a way of working, but it is what some designers are postulating because that is what sells them to industry. The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing <a href="https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/design-systems-agile-and-industrialization/">similar concerns</a>. In the words of <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/16369">Jeremy Keith</a>:</p>
 <blockquote>
 <p>[...] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.</p>
 </blockquote>
 <p>So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality. And it is also reflected in the way that people are entering the industry. Lately, we've seen a lot of <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/the-good-bad-and-the-ugly-of-web-dev-coding-bootcamps-e82d2715eabf">bootcamps</a> popping up that, for the most part, educate people just enough so that they can <a href="https://cult.honeypot.io/reads/the-ugly-truth-about-coding-bootcamps/">get a job</a>, at least that is the premise. But they rarely know the principles, values, and philosophies that constitute the web platform. But they can create a fully functioning "web app" with Next. JS in React! Of course, they don't learn how to manage CSS for this type of site; instead, they just use Tailwind. But at least they know how to specify TypeScript interfaces!</p>
 <p>And of course, they learn that design comes from UI libraries. Gone are the days where we used to tell people that bootstrapping was just for prototyping and otherwise would quickly turn into technical debt! Nowadays, designers are sometimes even told to start with one of these libraries. Just, they're not called bootstraps. Instead, they're called Material UI, Headless UI," or Chakra UI. But they bear every necessary resemblance. But it's fine, because it's just the components, right?</p>
 <p>What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the "output" is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce "free" iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!</p>
 <p>The larger premise of design has degraded over the years, in my opinion. As it got more embraced into the industrial process, it did so by devaluing the perspective of the people for whom the discipline used to design and replacing it with the perspective of companies. This is the price that design continues to pay for its seat at the capitalist table. In my opinion, the cost is too high to be worth it. This was also one of the reasons why <a href="/blog/2022/leaving-design#what-it-is">I decided to not pursue it as a career any longer, in 2022</a>.</p>
 <p>When we referred to ourselves as Web designers, we were constantly struggling to find companies that took our profession seriously enough to integrate us into their processes. But design was not considered valuable. So we started to call ourselves UX designers because we were designing experiences, not websites. And slowly but surely, we got our oh-so-desired seat at the table. But only if we demonstrated our worth by demonstrating a number-go-up linear-causal relationship to our work, which would necessitate extensive monitoring of our users.And thus, companies have successfully forced us to degrade the merit of our work to quantifiable markers of increased conversions and clicks and the firing of whatever other random KPI we could somehow pull off our asses—all to appeal to the growth-at-any-cost mindset.</p>
 <p>This often happens with important values in our craft. The recent increase in attention on accessibility is already taking a similar path. Accessibility advocates and experts are often forced to "sell" (see what I did there?) accessibility work to companies by showing them how much more revenue, conversions, or users they could be having by making their sites accessible. But our craft, on the other hand, clearly dictates this as a primary focus—a Leitdifferenz to judge the merit of our work. If what we do isn't accessible, it's to a certain degree broken or incomplete at best.</p>
 <p>The problem with this angle is that, inevitably, industry will respond industriously. And now we're having to explain to companies why they cannot just install an overlay and see it done. But that is the price of putting a number on marginalized groups. Unfortunately, that is the language that businesses speak, so experts and advocates are not to blame. They are doing the best that they can because they know that, in the end, the removal of barriers for people who rely on them is what matters. They are, in their own way, navigating ambivalence and finding their way through the conflict of craft vs. industry.</p>
 <p>UX Design used to stand for "User Experience", but in order to get our seat at the table, we had to degrade it so much that it has long since shifted its meaning to "User Exploitation", as <a href="https://creativegood.com/blog/21/losing-faith-in-ux.html">Mark Hurst writes</a>. The practice of UX, removed so far from its subject that it now considers the company itself the subject of their work, is now being used for bad-faith manipulation to increase capitalist numbers.</p>
 <p>This is reflected in another marker in language. Just as we were once web designers and then UX designers, we now call ourselves "product designers." As designers, our relationship to what we design and for whom we design it has changed. We used to design websites for people, then experiences for users, and now we are designing products for companies.</p>
 <p>This coincides with the fact that we are now broadly regarding websites as software, but we're not calling them websites. We're calling them "Apps". And it makes sense—we have entirely normalized the practice of having our websites controlled by JavaScript from server to client because JavaScript is mature now and thus appealing to traditional programmers, who used to shun it fiercely.</p>
 <p>This change in the demographics of those who write code has made it easier to hire for these positions. A website entirely rendered in JavaScript can be worked on by someone with a University Degree, in which they are rarely taught about the special relationship between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but are instead told that CSS and HTML are not real programming languages. And with these capital-P programmers, their language is long, as are their world view and their heuristics.</p>
 <p>People who make websites and are also working in what we refer to as "the web industry" are often forced into a difficult conflict. In their position as an employee or freelancer, they sometimes have to work on technology that they know isn't compatible with the values that they learned to hold dear in their craft. Designers are asked to implement <a href="https://www.deceptive.design/">dark patterns</a>, even though they know that it is unethical. Developers are asked to work with React, even though they are aware that it is maintained by Facebook, a company <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/">profiting and and enabling genocide</a>. And the list goes on.</p>
 <p>It is also expressed in what I think is best summarized as "Industry Fomo". Developers know full well that using next.js to create a relatively simple website is overkill, inappropriate at best, but they see themselves required to use industry-grade technology because job requirements are not listing skills anymore, instead they are listing tools and frameworks.</p>
 <p>I consider this a conflict between two identities: the craftsperson and the factory worker. The craftsperson wants to do what honors the values of the craft, but the factory worker needs to do what will keep them employed or employable. A conflict that we are being left alone with, often lacking the words to conceptualize what is really happening here.</p>
 <p>Postulating to know a solution to what I consider would be hubris on so many levels. But what I can do is access a little trick from my work as a <a href="https://sonstnichts.com/">systemic counsellor</a>. Systemic counseling operates on many different principles, one of them being <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics">second-order cybernetics</a>, in which cybernetic principles are applied to cybernetics itself—recursive cybernetics. We know a thing or two about recursion, right? We can apply some of the principles that we usually use as a guide in our craft to our own situation: <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#separation-of-concerns">Separation of Concerns</a>.</p>
 <p>While this integer design principle of HTML is usually referred to in order to justify the separation of concerns for content (markup, HTML), presentation (styles, CSS), and behavior (scripting, JavaScript), it is also a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns">general design principle in computer science</a>, and we can also use it to separate the concerns of the craftsperson and the factory worker.</p>
 <p>If we separate the demand into independent concerns, made by independent parties, we get the chance, instead of having to decide, to hold the ambivalence and complexity of the situation. Industry of course would force us to reduce complexity, another religious mantra of programming. But complexity means possibility, and with possibility comes the ability to decide. Do we go with what the industry demands, or do we go with what the craft demands? The conflict is the oscillation between both possible decisions. Not only can we not decide, but we are also uneasy with the fact that we cannot decide. Fritz B. Simon calls this a "double negation,", and it becomes the constitutive marker of conflict, described systemically.</p>
 <p>But what if, instead of oscillating between both positions in an attempt to make a decision, we just stay in this ambiguity for a while?A room emerges that we are holding. In this room, both positions aren't changed, but it may allow us to not experience them in conflict with each other. If we understand them as a conflict of concerns and not a conflict of identity, we may even see where both concerns align. Or we can give voices to both parts.</p>
 <p>At the very least, it may help us to not experience this as a personal conflict but instead leave it to the job, which has to find a way to utilize craft in a way that makes it compatible enough with industrial processes—another different concern reveals itself here, the concern of the business, not the concern of the employee.</p>
 <p>This isn't always possible, though. And sometimes, people may decide to leave not only the industry but also the craft all together to protect themselves from this conflict. Not because they couldn't hold the ambivalence of the craftsperson and the factory worker as is, but because they don't want to degrade themselves or their view of the craft—or maybe because they weren't able to see two separate concerns but instead saw a personal conflict that they were left to deal with on their own.</p>
 <p>But if we somehow manage to conciliate those two competing identities, we may find some personal relief from trying to find a common ground between two competing sides within ourselves. I have to work with technology that I find deeply offensive and politically abhorrent all day. But at some point, I found great relief in understanding myself as an employer who works with this technology, not as a craftsperson working on the web. I understand that it is not people who want to create SPAs; it's an industry—businesses.</p>
 <p>Many people are not differentiating here, and so they just repeat the capitalist programmers mantras. But that says much more about how they relate to others and how they define themselves. Do they even consider themselves craftspeople? Do they even see the craft that is there?</p>
 <p>Ultimately, the fact that we see a conflict here can be considered a good sign. As I said before, systemically, we can understand a conflict as an oscillation between possibilities. That means that in order to experience conflict, we first need to see possibilities. So if you are currently battling this conflict, you may find some relief in knowing that you are experiencing it because you see possibilities and are not submerged in the trance of the factory worker, induced by industry.</p>
 <p>We do need to talk about AI because it is an inevitable part of industrialization and there is no escape for any of us. The desire to reduce manual labor by automation and reduction of complexity is the seed that gave birth to programming in the first place, and AI is a tangible premise of endless scaling. I think it would be incredibly unwise and hubristic to assume that the broad majority of us who are employed at this time will remain employed in the next years.</p>
 <p>Apologists often claim that "we will move on to other things", but that is not true. Some of us will divorce further from craft and appeal to business desires in managing or other administrative jobs, but these jobs are given, not earned. The value of our work will inevitably reduce massively, and few of us will be able to do what we do now and get paid for it.</p>
 <p>The groundwork for this has already been laid. Take a look at dribbble, and you'll find one interchangeable site after another. And this is the dataset that AI is being trained on because it can't look at an actual website; it only looks at pixels for the most part. But even if it were looking at real websites, they have long since started to look so similar that they are often only differentiated by their themes.</p>
 <p>In order to protect ourselves from this inevitable reality (again, programming was invented to make human labor in weaving redundant; this is the leitdifferenz of the entire profession), we can learn to understand employability does not make us craftspeople.</p>
 <p>Because the craft will remain even after most of it is automated. You can order mugs online, yet there are still potters out there. We can go into C&amp;A and buy a dress, but there are still seamstresses making bespoke garments. This is the craft's unavoidable final destination - where it all began.</p>
 <p>Handcrafted websites are made by humans for humans. This is what differentiates our craftsperson from the factory worker—what the craftsperson does is valuable to people, not businesses.</p>
 <p>And until that time comes, we can be both at the same time. We can hold both perspectives as important voices with different concerns. We can switch between them, look for common ground, or side with one or the other in a given situation.</p>
 <p>So the next time you are approaching a website, ask yourself, "What would the craftsperson do?" And also ask yourself, "What would the factory worker do?" See what answers you come up with!</p>
 <hr>
 <p>Thank you to <a href="https://hidde.blog/">Hidde de Vries</a>, who in a conversation we've had, helped me to see the potential value, that a post about this topic could have.</p>
 <p>I feel especially grateful for these individuals, who not only took the time to read through this post, but also came up with fantastic and extensive feedback, which I've incorporated into this post. Thank you so much!</p>
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