The internet has always had libertarianism as its underlying ideology, or at least for a very long time. It was declared in various manifestos — and for some observers, it was painfully clear where the ideology was guiding the internet. In this essay I want to talk about specifically the cultural aspect of this ideology, and how it affects my experience of the internet. (sidenote: There might have been many ideologies in the beginning, but this one is the one that won out. )

I wrote before about CJ the X’s account of what they call libertarian culture, where the most important part of a person’s identity is their unique individuality, as opposed to different groups they belong to. Libertarian culture at its extreme sees group belonging — or even just having to interact with people, as something authoritarian, chains to be cast off.

The internet, seen through this cultural lens, is very libertarian. CJ demonstrates this in their video by showing an ad from the 90s for a computer with internet capability that appeals to individuality. It paints the city as something dark, inhuman and monstrous; endless queues through dark corridors; store clerks are living corpses that represent authoritarian bureaucracies. You can flee all this with a computer so you don’t ever have to leave your home. The internet comes with the promise of being able to accomplish your errands without interacting with other human beings, and to socialize without chaining yourself to others. It promises to complete the suburbanisation that has been going on in physical space. (sidenote: You can tell it is old because they cannot imagine inscrutable bureaucracies being in the computer. The computer cannot be a force for autocracy, it is liberatory in its very nature. That idea feels… quaint today. )

Quoting matduggan from the article above:

The point of all this technology is personal liberation. Anything that gets in the way of the individual maximizing themselves be it government, regulation, social obligation, your annoying neighbors, is an obstacle to be removed.

With the internet we are unfettered by communities and can pick and choose our identities and interests, tailor-fit our experience to perfectly match the things we like.

This is something that is still embedded in the internet today, of course in Big Tech services but sadly also in many of the nonprofit initiatives that try to become their alternatives. The former because it allows them to amass more power, and the latter because they are uncritically reimplementing the services of Big Tech.

More concretely, this ideology manifests itself in various platforms and protocols. Social media recommendation algorithms create a personalized feed just for you. You don’t have to know anybody or associate with any particular group of people to have content served to you, you just have to nod or shake your head and the algorithm will do the rest. It will give you a unique experience with a blend of posts based on whatever makes you stay longer on the screen.

Platforms like Mastodon that want to be an alternative to Big Tech, or the blogs and RSS readers that predate it, also follow this logic. They don’t have recommendation algorithms so you have to interact with people, choose who you associate with, but that is done on an individual one-to-one basis. The posts still get churned through an individualized feed that is unique to you all the same.

It all leads to a very fragmented experience that is described so well by Bo Burnham in Welcome to the Internet from his comedy special Inside:

See a man beheaded, get offended, see a shrink
Show us pictures of your children, tell us every thought you think
Start a rumor, buy a broom, or send a death threat to a boomer
Or DM a girl and groom her, do a Zoom or find a tumor in your—
Here's a healthy breakfast option, you should kill your mom
Here's why women never fuck you, here's how you can build a bomb
Which Power Ranger are you? Take this quirky quiz
Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids

It is fragmented and it’s very hard to tell if there are social circles and where its boundaries lie, contexts blend into each other into a feed as if we are feeding some omnivorous livestock. Even if it doesn’t have to become as extreme as in the song — particularly on timeline based feeds like Mastodon or blogs, the experience is still similarly fragmented and mushed together. My Mastodon feed for example, has news of Israel’s latest war crimes right after a cute picture of someone’s cat; acquaintances and friends are similarly mixed with famous people and complete strangers. Other people have very different feeds, but I suspect it will contain similar contrasts.

This chaos also makes it harder to have and follow conversations. When people are talking in my feed it is shown out of order and interspersed with a bunch of other things, perhaps a fragment of a different conversation that someone has boosted. Everyone else’s feeds are different so we aren’t even seeing the same chaos, aren’t part of the same conversation. It’s like being in a crowded room where you can’t help but hear everyone else’s conversations, except everyone else are simultaneously also walled off in a different room. Physical metaphors don’t quite cut it.

Consequently it’s hard to feel a connection to the other people, and it shows in how much I interact with them, which is to say it’s mostly through boosts and stars with the very occasional reply. Because we all sit in our own chambers with our own feeds it doesn’t feel natural to just have a chat. Replying feels like reaching out to cross that boundary, an intrusion, a demand for their attention through a notification.

The end result is that I use Mastodon as a broadcast medium, where I read and send broadcast messages. News basically. That is ultimately what it seems to be designed for, not for community but for shouting to the void. It doesn’t have to be this way, and depending on the Mastodon instance it is different, but my thoughts on my ideal fediverse will have to wait for a future post.

This isn’t to say that the corporate tech landscape is all like this. Discord (, Slack, IRC, or other similar services ) for example serve as a useful counterexamples. Discord, specifically Discord servers, are tailored toward communities instead of individuals. A Discord server is essentially many group chats grouped together, one big house with many (chat) rooms. If you are a member of the server you have access to all of the individual group chat rooms (by default anyway). Each individual chat typically has a topic which makes it easier to keep track of what the topic is, and the many rooms make it easy to have only one conversation at time in any given room. This creates an environment that is more cohesive, both in terms of topic and tone without much whiplashing, but also in terms of social spheres.

Social spheres are more clearly defined and are more durable because you’ll see more or less the same people who share the same space with you. You have the same chat logs, the same chat rooms, and perhasp the same emoji. You get to build up relationships around some shared experience and the other members become people instead of a profile picture and a quippy post. In a group chat like this the relation we have to each other isn’t that of producer and consumer, performer and audience. It is more like you are in the same room talking to each other.

I’m struggling to put this into words because it is really such an alien concept, but the normal mode of interaction on a Mastodon server would be so strange in a chat room or daily life. Outside of formal meetings where you want to avoid going off-topic at all costs, there isn’t really a social mode of interaction where each member of the group just says their thing out into the room without expecting a response. The best I can come up with is a workshop for stand up comedians where they take turns telling a joke and the only feedback they get is if the others laughed, but again, that is a formal meeting. On Mastodon the Twitter clone we are still talking in memes whereas in chat rooms there are conversations.



If it is not obvious I have grown to dislike this aspect of the internet. Libertarian culture demands that everything is tailored for individuals, not communities and groups, but in order for that to happen everybody has to exist in the same platform. The ideal where everyone should be able to talk to everyone else means that the communication have to happen through a singular medium. We obviously haven’t yet boiled all of human communication down to a single social media platform, but we’re not far off, and that is the direction the tech companies and many of their alternatives want to go. If everyone gets to have their own hyper-individualized experience from a singular platform we haven’t achieved freedom, we have resigned ourselves to the rule that is the medium. The internet that I want is one that focuses on communities, where the norm is that each community controls its infrastructure in a democratic fashion so they can tailor it to their needs. But that’s the topic of a future essay. (sidenote: Here’s someone else that was also searching for digital communities: https://hypersubject.net/entries/2026/05/digital-communities-i-found-in-the-wild/ )