Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Internet: The Future of Democratized Information

The prospective reader should note that no living dead, Romero-style zombies will appear in this essay. It’s not that kind of work, and frankly not that kind of apocalypse. My goal for this piece is to outline a set of already well-discussed problems with the contemporary internet and then explore some ways in which we might, as Cory Doctorow puts it, “seize the means of computation ” and reclaim the information flow around us from the ongoing digital apocalypse. TL,DR: No zombies, no zombie apocalypse. Go watch “Sean of the Dead” instead. Caveat lector.

A Dead Internet

As with the rest of this essay, nothing I have to say in this section is especially original. It is however foundational so I’d like to go over it in brief so that we’re all on the same metaphorical page to start with.

At the time of this writing I’m about a week shy of my 45th birthday, which means that I can just about remember the “good old days” of the internet. My family were early adopters so I got to experience the IRC/BBS days and a brief glimpse of that golden time before the Eternal September changed everything. In the wild days of the Web, information and interaction were dispersed across a vast sea of hosts , services, and ISPs. In part as a result of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and in further part due to the collapse of local ISPs and hosting services, things began to consolidate. While the AOL-esque dream of the internet as a series of walled gardens never quite came true, the focus shifted from a “house of many mansions” approach towards concentration. Social media accelerated this, offering to bring us all together in one place but—advertently or not—creating an online world in which a handful of platforms fulfill virtually all user requests—the proverbial “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four .” And then the bots came.

With the advent of cheap to implement bots originally designed to stack discourse on review sites in favor of the corporation being reviewed, we had to face the potential reality of an apocalyptic “dead internet”. Explained in brief, Dead Internet Theory states that at some point in 2015 or 2016, internet usage shifted towards automation and now a significant and perhaps dominant portion of online activity is carried out by bots pretending to be humans rather than actual human users . Search algorithms favored bot-created posts and SEO-heavy, content-light result meaning that the greatest tool for the dispersal of information in the history of the known universe was now an impediment to spreading any data beyond cat photos and meme content. And, as you might imagine, AI hasn’t improved matters any.

No, bots do not count as zombies. Also, it gets worse from here.

The Future is No Longer “Cool”

Computers and computing are no longer cool, at least not in the eyes of anyone much under the age of 40. There was a brief period in which computing shifted from the preserve of technicians, academics, and nerds and became an intriguing and engaging means of creating community and exchanging thoughts, information, and pirated music. Adolescents and college students led the charge in making the dream of a pervasive and universal World Wide Web a reality by finding ways to incorporate it into most aspects of their daily lives. This digital embrace occurred during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, leading to an explosion in the number of young people pursuing IT related careers out of the belief that a knowledge of computing could lead to social and material success.

While I’d argue that IT is still a valid career path and that computers and the internet have everything to offer us, the fact is there’s truth in the old adage “familiarity breeds contempt”. We’re now at least one and maybe two generations in on people growing up with the internet as a household given, making it no more interesting than any other household appliance. “Kids these days” don’t think that the internet is cool anymore than former kids my age think that—God forgive me—the refrigerator is cool. A bright techno-future is now regarded as a quotidian birthright by the very people who are most likely to be the engine of social change. This leaves us with a stagnant internet dominated by streaming services, corporate-sponsored content, and artificially steered discourse. The real conversations don’t happen online anymore, if they happen at all. Information may want to be free, but centralization of the internet has created a digital world in which information is carefully censored via the threat of copyright strikes, service disruptions, and shadow banning . As a result of this deliberate program of enshittification, information-rich content and thought-provoking work no longer appear in the coveted first page of search engine results. For most internet users, this means that they may as well not exist. And so many of us no longer know enough to care.

Thriving in the Digital Apocalypse

Ripping off Tolstoy’s paraphrasing of the Gospel of Luke, what then must we do? While the loss of a free, open, and vibrant internet doesn’t really present an immediate risk to life and limb, it does impair a powerful tool for social change, community organization, and political resistance. I don’t want to live in a world where the Arab Spring and the early days of Anonymous were the last hurrahs of the Wild West Internet and actual digital freedom. I genuinely wish that I could roll out a comprehensive 12-point plan for reclaiming our digital spaces and reinvigorating online life, but the best I can do is offer some suggestions for how we as individuals can start to organize and affect change in the communities around us.

The philosophical underpinning to every suggestion here stems from a conversation I had with a dear friend about a similar issue. I’ll quote Gina directly, as her words capture it perfectly: “resistance begats resistance. You resist by creating the new and allowing the old to become obsolete.” So with her wisdom in mind, let’s focus on how we can create a new digital culture rather than fighting the apocalypse happening to the old one. Maybe, if we do things right, we can plant the seeds that will make online life vital, vibrant, and “cool” once more.

Our first task is to stop gatekeeping on all levels. This is more complex than it may at first appear, as it involves both attitudinal and technical changes. We have to stop excluding newcomers, casuals, and young people from hacker spaces, technical communities, and other digital pursuits. By pushing the new blood out we only hasten the great day when we dry up and become dust—there will be nothing and no-one left to replace us as we pass on. No, this doesn’t mean you have to become a mentor to the kids in your community nor am I demanding that you open an DEI office on your Roblox server. Rather we need to make sure that the spaces we occupy are open to everyone of good will and that we’re welcoming and at least non-hostile to folks just starting their journey into whatever communities we happen to be a part of. It also means that we as communities need to address the digital divide in real, tangible, and actionable ways. While I doubt that there’s any truth to Governor Hochul’s unfortunate statement that inner city African-American children “don’t even know what the word computer is”, it’s no exaggeration to say that many folks in marginalized communities simply don’t have access to digital tools or to the internet. Once again I fail, in that I cannot offer a comprehensive road map to fix this; such work is best done on a community level by folks who know the situation on the ground. We the techies and hackers need to start working with existing organizations and non profits to identify the digital needs for the less-connected around us and helping to meet them. This will likely take the form of donated time, material, and expertise—and sooner rather than later.

Our next step involves protecting digital freedoms both at home and abroad. As you may know, this is a huge-unto-daunting prospect. Freedom of information, personal privacy, and confidentiality in communications have all been under siege since at least the 1990s if not far longer, and turning the tide is a Herculean if not Sisyphean labor. This will involve active engagement in politics on all levels, tangible support for organizations fighting for digital rights such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation , and the adoption of personal and community practices for digital self-defense and anti-surveillance . The ugly conglomeration of corporate and governmental entities seeking to monitor our data and communications while stifling real online community and discourse aren’t going away, meaning that our work to build a better digital world won’t end anytime soon. Thus is the price of freedom.

In order to make manifest all of the above suggestions, we’ll need to adopt better tools and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS ) solutions, including operating systems and messaging apps. For the record, I am not opposed to either Apple or Microsoft. Both are titans of the industry and foundational in making IT as omnipresent and accessible as it is today. However, both are corporate giants who are devoted first and foremost to their respective bottom lines, and We the People need to treat them and their products as such. I’m writing this in the immediate wake of the Windows 11 Recall controversy , during which we discovered that the latest version of Windows would be recording everything we do on our Windows 11 machines without our consent. Microsoft has since rolled back that feature, making it opt-in only, but only after tremendous public outcry.

I humbly suggest we keep that energy going and take back control of our digital lives and communications. While a 100% switch to FOSS solutions may not be possible for many of us—I haven’t done it yet—it’s entirely possible to refocus at least some parts of our digital lives away from for-profit computing and on open source operating systems , end-to-end encrypted messaging apps , and email that is actually secure and private . Many if not all of these tools are free to use, easy to implement, and make using the web an anonymous pursuit once again , free of relentless commercial tracking and activity logging. There’s a lot to learn in order to get the most out of these resources, but that’s where the more experienced of us are called to step in and open up our spaces and our knowledge to those who need it. This is and will be a community effort end-to-end and we’ll have to execute as a community in a sustained way.

Finally, we’ll have to expand our communities and our sense of community and engage with other activists and other organizations in order to affect the culture change. How this plays out will look different for each of us. We all have our own believes, priorities, and values, and I’m not in a position to speak to all of that in a remotely adequate way. Finding things we care about and then carrying our tools, voices, and ideas to them is a great start, however, and identifying the methods for doing so is an exercise best left to the reader.

The Revolution Will Not Be Live-Streamed

We cannot force any of this into being, nor can we mandate it. Doing either would have us promulgating the very issues we’re seeking to address, and we do not have to live long enough to become the villains. Again, I don’t have an actionable answer or a comprehensive plan for us as we move through this. I can’t even offer a detailed map of the territory. All I have is hope that we can start some conversations about life in the wake of this digital apocalypse and how we can rebuild on the old wastelands so that the internet as we know it can grow past enshittification and into something alive and liberating once again.