This is the second post in a themed blog series exploring the fractured state of the modern internet and the possibilities for reclaiming it. If you missed Part 1, read The Day the Internet Broke Free to set the stage.
There was a time when the internet felt like possibility. Messy, but open, wild, collaborative. It belonged to no one and everyone all at once. We were building a commons, not a marketplace.
But somewhere along the way, that shifted.
Now we live in a digital landscape carved up by corporate fences, where every click is tracked and every action monetized. Where our digital selves are packaged, priced, and sold back to us through targeted ads and opaque algorithms.
In this post, I want to explore what we lost, how we got here, and why it’s time, past time, to reclaim the digital commons.
The Internet’s Original Ethos Was a Commons
The early web wasn’t perfect, but it was profoundly different. It was collaborative, experimental, and built, perhaps naively, on trust.
In the pre-commercial days of ARPANET and its successors, the network was small, academic, and deeply human. There were no ads, no algorithms, no logins. People shared not because they had to, but because they could. Ideas moved freely across the wire: code, research papers, manifestos, questions, late-night thoughts typed in text editors. It felt more like a digital salon than a superhighway.
Security wasn’t a concern back then, not because people didn’t understand the risks, but because the web wasn’t under siege. There was no concept of hostile actors, surveillance capitalism, or weaponized social platforms. Everyone on the network was trusted, because the network was trust. That trust, baked into the architecture, became both its greatest virtue and eventual vulnerability.
Commons of the 1990s
By the time the web blossomed in the early 1990s, a new generation picked up the baton. Open-source communities like GNU, BSD, and eventually Linux weren’t just writing software, they were building an ecosystem. An ethos. One where tools were shared, not sold. Where innovation wasn’t gated by patents or venture capital, but driven by purpose, cooperation, and the belief that software should serve people, not the other way around.
Protocols like HTML, FTP, and IRC didn’t come with monetization hooks or surveillance layers. Platforms like Usenet weren’t gamified for engagement. They simply connected people, across campuses, borders, ideologies.
That’s the digital commons in its purest form: publicly accessible, collectively maintained, and rooted in the belief that knowledge, culture, and connection should belong to all of us, not be leased back through subscriptions, algorithms, and data collection.
You didn’t need permission to publish. You didn’t have to trade your privacy for participation. You didn’t have to feed a feed.
You just showed up and started building.
How the Commons Was Captured
We didn’t lose the digital commons in a single moment. It was a slow erosion, not a war, but a thousand deals made quietly in boardrooms and code bases.
First came the platforms that promised to simplify things: one login, one feed, one place for everything. Then came the trade-off: you could stay, but you had to give up something, your data, your attention, your freedom to leave.
The more convenient it got, the more invisible the cost became.
This is what surveillance capitalism looks like. Not just targeted ads, but the normalization of being tracked, every click, scroll, and pause fed into a machine designed not to serve you, but to sell you.
And those so-called “walled gardens”? They’re not gardens. They’re extraction zones. You don’t own your audience on social media. You don’t own your content on centralized platforms. You’re a tenant in a digital factory town.
Reclaiming the Internet Starts with Reclaiming the Commons
If last week’s post – “The Day the Internet Broke Free”, was a spark, this is a reckoning. We are living in the aftermath of a hostile takeover. And if we want the future to be any different, we have to start treating the web as a political space, not just a technical one.
Reclaiming the digital commons means shifting from passive consumption to active participation.
It means:
• Demanding digital public goods, infrastructure that’s owned by no one and available to everyone.
• Creating alternatives that reflect our values, not the values of shareholders.
• Refusing to accept that the only viable internet is a corporate one.
This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about agency. We can either keep feeding the machine or we can choose to build something better, something slower, messier, more human.
Open Protocols Are the Infrastructure of Digital Freedom
Think about how much of the modern web is built on things you don’t think about. Protocols like HTTPS, SMTP, RSS, open standards that made the web interoperable and expansive.
Nobody needed permission to build a blog, launch a podcast, or send an email. These weren’t just technical choices. They were philosophical ones. They reflected a belief that the Internet should be a network of equals, not a hierarchy of gatekeepers.
Contrast that with today’s closed platforms. You can’t export your followers from Instagram. You can’t audit the algorithm that curates your timeline. You can’t meaningfully opt out of surveillance. You don’t own your experience, you’re leasing it, and the rent is going up.
Open protocols are more than a tech preference. They are the backbone of a free digital society.
What You Can Do (Even If You’re Not a Developer)
The idea of reclaiming the digital commons can feel daunting. But it starts with small, deliberate choices.
• Use open tools like Mastodon, Matrix, and Signal, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re ours.
• Publish on platforms you control. Start a blog. Host a podcast. Claim space outside the algorithm.
• Support projects financially. Even small donations to open-source teams or privacy tools matter.
• Share knowledge. Teach someone else what you’ve learned.
• Refuse the narrative that “everyone’s already on Facebook so why bother?”
Culture is contagious. And the more we normalize alternative spaces, the more viable they become.
The Web We Choose to Build Next
The Internet was never meant to be a strip mall lined with ad banners. It was meant to be a workshop, a library, a commons, raw and open and full of potential.
That version of the web didn’t die. It was buried. Beneath logins and layers of abstraction, it’s still there. Still waiting.
We can build on it. We can reclaim it. But only if we stop outsourcing our digital lives to the same five companies and start investing, personally, emotionally, financially, in something better.
Because the future of the internet isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice. And it’s being made right now.
Next in the series: “The Last Server Farm” – a speculative glimpse at the end of cloud monopolies and the rise of a resilient, decentralized web.
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The digital commons can rise again, but only if we raise it together.
