Re-placing the Internet

The first YouTube video I remember waching was the music video for Weird Al’s White and Nerdy. This was when I was a kid around 2010, when “viral” meant a video broke the 100,000 view barrier. We watched it at the computer in our family room, which was a sort of half-office half-hangout space, also housing our printer and storage for board games. Looking back, choosing to not confine the computer to its own room was a rather progressive choice, given the trend of putting computing everywhere. A few short years later I had my first smartphone with a data plan (2GB per month, just enough to browse text-only communities on Reddit really), and a few years after that I had a phone and plan that was capable of reliably streaming those same videos I watched in our family room years back.

“The Internet used to be a place”¹ is an oft-repeated mantra that captures the idea that you used to have to go somewhere to access the Internet. It wasn’t just an omnipresent cloud that you could tap into with basically any device you own. When you logged out of the computer, you could just walk away. It’s not as easy to do that with a smartphone.

I won’t belabor the point—I believe that longing for the old days of the Internet, when it was its own thing separate and not irrevertibly entangled with our lives, is more than just nostalgia. I think that it genuinely was a better version that adhered to “the promise of the Internet,” to actually connect people together. And I hope that we can create the infrastructure needed to get us moving back in that direction. In this post I will discuss my main problems with the modern Internet and propose a solution that helps address all of them.

1. Accessibility

…

2. Bandwidth

Related to accessibility is the fact that so much data can be beamed to you at any given time.

But text-only information

3. Control

Finally, Internet users don’t have much direct control over the Internet at large. Since large platforms