The Internet is a place where things happen, not a character that does things. Treating it as a setting rather than a plot changes what stories are worth telling and who is responsible for the place's condition.
Adapted from Why I Write (and Care) About the Internet on brennan.day.
The Internet works like every commons before it: the agora, the town square, the parlour cafe, the bathhouse. People flirt, argue, trade, grieve, and look for company there. The stories worth telling are about those people, not about the venue.
This framing rejects “digital dualism,” Nathan Jurgenson's term in The IRL Fetish for treating online and offline as separate worlds. The web is made of real people with bodies and histories. Logging off does not return anyone to a different life.
A place cannot write a plot, but whoever owns the place scripts what happens in it.
Places are only as good as the people who show up and care for them. Practical tending: redundancy (Wayback Machine snapshots, mirrored sites), small communities over big feeds, and daily communal action. Reply to a blog post, send an email, share a link, welcome newcomers, point people to good work, fund servers and creators when you can.