The internet as we know it has always been suffused with libertarian culture. It is designed for access by individuals, and over time it has allowed more and more people to isolate themselves from their surroundings (despite any motto Zuck might belch up). In some aspects this is a good thing, marginalized people who would not have found peers in their viscinity have managed to form communities online, but seen through a different light, this individualisation can be seen as another step in (US:ian) suburbanisation. By moving out to suburbs in houses with large moats lawns and getting everywhere by car, it is possible to minimise human contact. The internet allows you to opt out of human interaction even more. You don’t have to know anyone in meatspace to (feel like you) have friends. You don’t even have to meet anyone to buy groceries, or work. It is easier than ever to isolate yourself, and without the need to meet and form community, it is not weird if that muscle deteriorates. Queue the isolation pandemic.

That leads me to some questions. What could an internet that didn’t start out in libertarian culture look like? What if it did not develop in an isolating direction? How would computers that center community function differently?

I invite you to speculate on your own, without thinking about feasibility or how our current societies are structured — that can come in later. For now, try to imagine a different world.

Here are some of my spontaneous thoughts:

There is this tendency among techbros (who have been steeped in libertarian culture) to find individual self-hosting as the solution to all problems with the internet. On some level this is sound, since a lot of problems stem from centralisation of power, but it is still a very individual solution. Not everyone have the capacity or ability to host and maintain one service, let alone a dozen. It is an infeasable solution, not to mention wasteful with everyone needing their own always-on computer. A while back I reread Speaker for the Dead, where the society has a very different model of computing. There, there is a centralised computer network that you access through terminals. People do not have their own computers, but they can access the big computer from home. It is a point of conflict in the book, since the computer is controlled by a government who can easily cut off the protagonists’ access to any computing at all. In the linked post I draw an analogy to cloud services and how they both take away control from the users. The central control is obviously bad, but I find this an interesting alternative to what the landscape looks like today.

Combining these two seemingly incompatible models, we could get community controlled central computers accessible through thin clients. I don’t really know how big the communities would be, but I imagine something on the scale of a neighborhood, or maybe they cover larger areas like libraries. Maybe each client is immobile, but spread out across the community, so instead of picking up your phone or laptop to do some computing, you go to a nearby community center, cafe, school, or work place. Maybe there are some laptops you can borrow from the library if you need one away from the usual locations.

This model could be less wasteful. Today most people have several computing devices, many of which are not utilised at any given moment. The computing capacity is very over-dimensioned, which is an environmental problem. Last time I looked into the numbers, the total greenhouse emissions from information and communication technologies were estimated to be roughly equally large as from the aviation industry, and that was before the “AI” hype cycle began. If computing was a community controlled resource, computing could be a more deliberate activity. Decisions around what services to keep would be done locally in service of the community, not for clicks for sillicon valley.

What kind of internet services make sense in this kind of world? Social media is probably not at all the same. Maybe prioritising local happenings that facilitate cooperation in stuff happening in meatspace. Keeping inventory for the local tool library, and discussions on what needs to be purchased. A calendar for when various events happen in the neighborhood. The services might only be accessible from the thin clients of the local community since it isn’t really needed outside of it. Social media for entertainment might not be needed, since people get a lot of satisfaction hanging out with their friends. Corresponding with people over long distances still make a lot of sense though, the way knowledge can spread and distributed is very powerful, but I’m not sure how that would look. How interconnected would the global internet be? How would its topology differ?

Maybe there are super local social media. When you go to a pub, library, or a cafe your phone could synchronise with a forum that is only accessible when you are there physically. You hang out with your friends, and then when you go back you home your read through what has been posted, and write your own responses that get uploaded to the server next time you are there. It would be social media as a complement to getting outside and meeting people. It would also create a reason to go to that specific pub, because you like to hang out with the people that go there.