“I think the Internet is pretty much over. It’s a lot more useful for businesses and leaders these days than it is for individuals,” I say in a blog post that I then publish to the Internet. Pic related.

Where we’re at right now

The way that information flows is centralized across a handful of platforms. Except for personal blogs, which are mostly discovered through these centralized platforms, and not as much from other personal websites. This has a few effects:

• 1: Discovery is easy for the consumer. It’s easy because it’s more passive than it used to be, though. Instead of following links and visiting the sites that publish the points of view you believe in, you’re clicking and swiping through “content” (stories and information forced into a standardized format) recommended (selected) by a machine learning model. The people who developed that model did it so that they could make money from showing you ads.
• 2: Advertising is easy for the business. You, the business owner, have powerful allies in the form of platform businesses whose existence depends on you. They’ll share as much of their users’ attention as they can spare with you, in exchange for as much money as you can spare.
• 3: Narrative control is easy for the powerful. Even if the people running the platform businesses don’t want to cooperate with you, there’s only a handful of platforms. Put the screws to ‘em and you can promote and suppress whatever narratives you want.

Some of these effects have second-order effects. For example, effect #1 leads to the following:

• 1a: Cultural phenomena quickly spread to millions of people once they gain traction amongst a couple thousand. This hampers the development of truly regional subcultures. Once a new slang word, a new musical style, or a new fashion trend strikes a chord on the Internet, it goes worldwide.
• 1b: Individuals can become famous overnight, and they can lose it all overnight as well. The fame is given and taken away not by other individuals that they have relationships with, but by discovery algorithms and a hive mind that boils vigorously in the heat of controversy.

And effect #2:

• 2a: The content that wins is the content that holds attention the best. Providing nuance is not necessary to hold attention (in fact, it makes doing so more difficult).
• 2b: The businesses that win in this landscape are the ones that are able to harvest attention directly. Why pay a platform to deliver views when you can integrate advertising into sponsored events, branded vacations, and recommendations from trusted faces? It’s textbook vertical integration, and the bigger you get, the more capable you are of doing this.

These effects (problems) have existed for the better part of 15 years, so I hope you’re not surprised. But then why am I now claiming that the Internet is dying?

It’s because of effect #3. As truth and creativity are suppressed or drowned out by sanitized status-quo-compatible messaging, the Internet stops being useful as a tool for education, organization, resistance, or specialization.

This isn’t a hypothetical threat either. It’s quite dire. The UK passed their “Online Safety Act 2023”, which went into effect recently. Under the guise of protecting children, it has imposed a requirement that users upload their ID to access some online content. It’s not just porn (it’s never just porn; censorship never stops at the stuff you might not like), people are expected to upload their ID so they can listen to music on Spotify. There are numerous examples of TikTok and Facebook suppressing posts related to protests and minorities and boosting posts that sow discord and political unrest.

In other words, the Internet is rapidly filling up with AIs, advertisements, and state-sponsored messages. Interacting with these won’t help you get smarter, or discover the parts of yourself that aren’t mainstream, or hold government and corporations accountable. It will only help governments and corporations surveil you so they can influence your behavior.

What comes next?

The solution is a peer network that runs on mesh radio. Hear me out.

Mesh radio is a technology where you can wirelessly exchange information with people that are near you. If necessary, you can reach people who are further away by asking your peers (the people near you) to forward your message.

A “peer network” (as opposed to the existing “social networks”) is a medium for exchanging information over mesh radio where your peers (but not distant strangers) are able to hold you accountable for the things you post.

This idea is based on the successes of torrenting (sharing files in a peer-to-peer fashion via the Internet) and Community Notes (crowdsourced fact-checking on Twitter), both of which I’ve personally found very useful for accessing and fact-checking information.

Imagine this:

1. You post something from your device.
2. Your device forwards the post to other devices that are physically nearby using mesh radio. The Internet is not involved in this process - no WiFi, no 5G, no Verizon.
3. Nearby people browse the posts that have accumulated on their devices. If they approve of what you’ve posted (or they approve of you in general), your post is forwarded to more devices. If not, the propagation stops.
4. As your browse the posts that have accumulated on your device, you can see how they got there: who posted it, who co-signed it.

A system like this will naturally solve several problems:

• People will upload things that their peers are going to like, things that they would want to publicly approve.
  • This means no brainrot. No ragebait. No clickbait. Imagine how peaceful it would be.
• You can’t be censored by a middleman organization (like a platform or an ISP) because information is transmitted directly between personal devices without any middleman.
  • Hypothetically, you could be “censored” by your peers. But if no one around you likes the things that you say, that’s different from the government not liking the things you say. You probably shouldn’t say those things if you can’t get any of your neighbors on your side.
• You can easily limit your audience to the people in your vicinity by limiting the number of times it can be forwarded.
  • This means the risk of being swarmed by belligerent strangers halfway across the country is much lower. It’s easier to prevent your posts from ever reaching them.
  • This means the dilution of regional subcultures will slow down as information propagates out of those regions only when we want it to.
• Surveillance becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, as information no longer flows through centralized servers.
  • This makes it harder for law enforcement to do their job. In cases where the state is at odds with the people (ex.: mass protests), this is good. In other cases (ex.: terrorists, premeditated murder), the people can still easily report criminal activity to the state.
• Advertisement becomes unnecessary. Platforms are costly to run because of the servers, but in a peer-to-peer mesh network, the whole thing runs on the devices of the users.
  • We can put advertisements in designated channels, similar to the classifieds section of a newspaper, instead of allowing it to bleed into everything else.
• Human curation is brought back into the mix. The stuff you see is a combination of the stuff you search for and the stuff that your peers co-sign, rather than the stuff that will keep you online and viewing advertisements.