Table of Contents
The Internet as a Place
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.
What It Is
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.
The Enclosure Problem
A place cannot write a plot, but whoever owns the place scripts what happens in it.
- Amnesty International notes that five corporations (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple) function as digital landlords that determine the shape of online interaction.
- Jessa Lingel's The Gentrification of the Internet argues the web has been captured by the interests of business and capital rather than the people who use it. See Digital Gentrification.
- Scholars call the privatization of online commons digital enclosure: the appropriation of users' creative labour by the corporations that administer the space.
- danah boyd's research showed that digital spaces get abandoned once they become associated with marginalized populations, mirroring white flight.
Resistance as Tending
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.