This week the British Standards Institute published a report into young people’s attitudes to the internet. The headline is “Half of young people want to grow up in a world without internet”. The report comes in the context of a wave of new regulations and legislation governing the internet, including the Online Standards Act, which has been criticised for potentially stifling independent, non-corporate community services such as web forums. The BSI will play a major role in establishing and managing standards for internet privacy and safety in the UK, and this research into young people’s experiences of the internet form part of the arguments underpinning their approach to internet governance.
The sentiment that one would rather live in a world without internet is certainly relatable. I’ve had the fantasy myself that perhaps one day the internet will just stop existing, and we’ll be free to explore something new. But when the Cloudflare outage happened in 2023, my initial anarchic thrill was quickly washed away by the realisation that vital services such as healthcare would be impacted by the disruption. The internet is no longer a place, that you visit from a terminal in the corner of your living room, not just because the rise of smartphones immersed us all in a pervasive media environment, but also because the internet underpins our infrastructure, and supports the vectors across which resources are distributed globally. “The internet” is perhaps not the right concept to describe the thing that young people would rather live without.
Looking more closely at the BSI report, the survey broke the internet down into three key services: online gaming, video streaming, and social media. All of these are almost entirely defined by corporate, centralised silos. This is not the internet that techno-optimists of the 1990s heralded as a new open commons that would support a new democratic era. The joy and possibility of the internet was stripped away little by little, and it’s not like nobody noticed. People noticed that Facebook’s rise brought about the fall of creative custom profile pages and online pseudonyms, that the end of the Featured section of the Youtube front page in favour of personalised algorithmic recommendations created filter bubbles and eroded a sense of community, and that the rise of influencer culture weakened less hierarchical networks such as web forums.
I’ve just finished listening to the audiobook of Careless People, by former Facebook exec Sarah Wynn-Williams. It’s a highly entertaining read, while also shedding light on some of Facebook’s darkest practices that have contributed to crimes against humanity. She points out on a number of occasions that in many parts of the world with low connectivity, Facebook effectively IS the internet. What she doesn’t unpack is how she herself, in her early days of wide-eyed idealism, attributed to Facebook the qualities that properly belong to the internet as a whole: its ability to connect people, to support community discussions, and to foster more democratic dialogue. It is not clear why she saw these as qualities of Facebook and not of other services, including its Web 1.0 precursors such as forums and BBS boards. She is sharing a very important testimony of how Facebook acquired massive cultural power through antidemocratic business practices in the global south, but I think it’s also important to recognise that users in the global north gave Facebook that power by giving up their own.
When I think about the fate of the internet, I want to quote Bo Burnham: “it wasn’t always like this”. But I’m not content to simply go along with the teleological view, that the internet used to be vibrant personal websites and independent web forums for small communities and then became this monolithic burden of manipulative platforms that poison our minds. The internet that some attribute to the 1990s still exists. Techno-optimism is flawed, but it’s not dead. The democratic power of the internet is still there. But the joyful internet is still a place that you have to access on purpose. It requires dedicated time and space. You can get there on your smartphone, but you have to go there on purpose, because it won’t pester you with notifications or pull you into an addiction loop. You can make your own content on there, but you have to learn how to do it. You can connect with community, but you won’t build a large audience. Oh, and you don’t need a new device made of conflict minerals in order to access it.
The legislation being introduced to govern the internet doesn’t value the ongoing practices of community-owned spaces such as web forums and Mastodon servers. It only considers them to clarify that the kind of harms being legislated against are indeed possible in such spaces and that therefore such services should not be exempt. A lot hangs on whether these laws will indeed be applied with due attention to “proportionality” - a term that applies to both the scale of the company running a service and the extent of the harm that a service could inflict on people.
I really believe that in years to come, the practices that defined the web before social media and smartphones will be valued as important cultural heritage to be preserved and passed on. But it shouldn’t just be seen as a relic of the past or a retro affectation - the independent internet still exists, and it continues to evolve through new developments such as the Fediverse. We still have the capacity to build and contribute to something beautiful. This is just as deserving of energy and attention as any effort to protect the vulnerable through stronger regulations.
