Today’s internet is fragile, toxic, and broken, with tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta “consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure.” In this thoughtful essay, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make their case for “rewilding” and rebuilding the web and look to ecologists for inspiration, vision, and actionable next steps. Rewilding doesn’t mean repairing, but restoring—considering the internet as an entire habitat, making it more resilient via diversity, and allowing more people to make, remake, and innovate.
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.
But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?
Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view.
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