Why We Fight For The Internet
July 18, 2026
There are a lot of things in this world worth fighting for. Things we would like to see improved in our society. Wealth inequality, corporate and political corruption, civil rights for queer people, especially trans and gender non-conforming folks. An end to the daily kidnappings of our neighbors by masked feds, who have been authorized to perform Kavanaugh stops — detaining people on account of their accent or other racially-based indicators. We're witnessing a mad king punish disfavourable media outlets, and political dissidents.
Why then, might you ask, should anyone be focusing on the politics of the internet?! Believe it or not, it's my opinion that fighting to improve the internet is one of the most important fights we can be having right now, in order to maximize our political effect.
Means and Ends
In the early 20th century, a new information medium was hot, spreading across the United States. It was called radio. It allowed a speaker to reach thousands, maybe millions of listeners all at once, if he was incredibly successful. And it was all real time. Prior to radio, the only way to spread a message would be to organize inside of some auditorium and speak to a few hundred people who were able to get themselves physically into the event. Now, you could reach listeners sitting anywhere between Los Angeles and New York City.
President FDR famously delivered his Fireside Chats over radio to assure the country during the hardships of the Great Depression and subsequently World War II.
The radio was more than just a medium for entertainment. Listening to music at any time was great, but the part that really made this technology so valuable was the way it enabled mass communication across the country, which allowed us to organize and confront our problems as a nation together. It's become clear that radio has had a monumental impact on public opinion in the 20th century.
Similarly, the internet is not worth fighting for just for the sake of the internet. Rather, the internet should be fought for as a means towards the end of maintaining a healthy democracy. As a tool for organizing and communicating about the issues of our day.
Humans are a social species, and as it turns out, we're much better at thinking as a collective than we are as individuals. The internet should help inform us on the public opinion of that collective. If our means of communicating with the collective is being skewed by a CEO like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, our thoughts will also be skewed in that direction.
A healthy internet should enable people to make easy, intentional decisions about which online communities they would like to be a part of. A healthy internet allows for disagreements between people, and subsequently enables constructive discussions between those people, should they so choose to engage with one another.
But a healthy internet also allows people to avoid discussions they don't want to be a part of. The consequence of not giving people this kind of freedom to not engage is what we see on the internet now: everyone is frustrated and mad, getting into flame wars and screaming competitions. I'd wager a lot of the people spreading negativity in certain comments sections are doing so because an opaque algorithm keeps feeding them content that they vehemently disagree with, and at a certain point, they feel the need to correct the narrative.
The Social Web
So, I've discussed some of why the internet is important to fight for, and I've hinted at some of the complaints I have against the internet as it exists today. You may now be wondering what can be done.
Probably the most succinct summary of the problems with the internet, as well solutions for improving it, can be found in Cory Doctorow's theory of Enshittification. In short, big platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become so dominant as to maintain monopolistic power over their sector. No longer disciplined by the forces of market competition, these oligarchic corporations have been allowed to degrade their platforms and tug on the strings without facing negative consequences on their end. The solution then is to leverage antitrust policy and enforcement against them, in order to reduce their power over us.
While I don't want to minimize the importance of policy-based solutions to this problem, it's also not the only action we can pursue.
We're currently sitting on the precipice of a new digital revolution that's just waiting to happen. And unlike the fake "revolutions" of NFTs, Bitcoin, and "AI", this new revolution promises to actually improve the lives of regular people, not just function as a power grab for the ultra wealthy. It's called the Social Web.
It's important to remember that the problems we face with the internet aren't actually about the internet at all — they're issues caused by the popular online ecosystems. There does, in fact, exist an internet outside of the "5 giant websites filled with screenshots of the other 4". The Social Web exists outside of this Big Tech sphere. As I explained in one of my previous blogs, it works like this:
The Social Web is just a bunch of different websites on the internet. You pick just one website to sign up with. From that site, you can interact with people who signed up on any other website on the Social Web. If you ever don't like the way moderation decisions or other actions are taking place on the website you chose, you can always pick up your account and move it to a different website.
On the Social Web, moderation decisions are handled by individual sites. That way, you're able to move to a site that aligns with your values, without losing access to your friends who signed up through a website with slightly different moderation rules. The result of all this is that the Social Web isn't owned by any company, it's controlled by the community, not by Big Tech.
The best part is that this isn't some theoretical technology. This is a living, active social media ecosystem that is just waiting for you to join it! It might not have as many people yet as platforms like Instagram or Facebook, but it's not empty either. There's lots of people interacting with one another all the time, every single day on the Social Web, and they would love to see you join them. It's an incredibly welcoming community, and it's just so kind and nice there. It's nothing like anything I've ever seen on social media anywhere else. The model really does seem to prove to make people interact in much more positive, constructive ways.
I recently wrote a blog post explaining how to get onto the Social Web, which you can read in full, but the passage you're probably looking for is here:
The quickest and easiest way to get on the Social Web is to just make an account on Mastodon. You can either pick the default site here to sign up, or if you'd like to sign up with a specific community oriented around a hobby, identity, culture, or whatever else, you can check out this page to see if something appeals to you.
There's also fedi.tips, which is a very helpful resource for answering any kind of questions you might have while getting started on the Social Web (fedi.tips refers to the Social Web as "the fediverse").
I also recommend following as many interesting people as you can, since there really is no algorithm to push content onto your feed. The "algorithm" on the Social Web is the people you follow, and the things they post or repost. You can find my account here, by the way.
Conclusion
The internet is worth fighting for not because it is important in its own right, but because it's an important tool that allows us to organize, discuss, and fight for all nature of issues that do matter in their own right.
The most important thing we can do to fix the internet is to improve policy and enforcement related to competition law. Secondary to that, we really ought to be moving to communication mediums that are owned by the people and the community, not by a vanishingly small number of oligarchic billionaires.
