On the death of the internet

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On October 20, I woke up just past 9:00 am and began my morning tradition of immediately logging onto my computer to drown in the horrors of our own making before even eating breakfast. It was here that I read the devastating news— the internet was dead. Kind of.

The real news was that over 1,000 websites were unavailable due to an AWS malfunction. AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a hosting platform for more than 50 million websites, run on Amazon’s servers. Thus, when AWS had a failure, some of the sites it hosted also went down.

This is the problem with a single point of failure. If one service controls so many products, it only takes a single problem for the tower of dominos to fall. Many years ago, Tom Scott illustrated the potential ramifications if the “sign in with Google” option on many websites malfunctioned. He concluded the same thing people have learned with this week's AWS failure— putting the fate of so many of our systems in the hands of one single program that can so easily fail is foolish. 

And yet, I routinely sign in with my Google account. I built this website with a major website building platform. I drafted this piece in Google Drive. So much of what I do could be obliterated if a mega-corporation decides to "move in a new direction," or if a single server fails. But, it’s convenient. And, really, what’s the harm in putting our trust in companies like Google or Amazon? Repeated privacy breaches and anti-competitive practices? 

Oh, yeah. There's that.

It feels like the internet is dying. Maybe it’s our fault. But, I don't think it is. We didn’t decide that millions of websites would rely on a single company’s servers, nor did we ask for AI to be integrated into every single product that can possibly include it. Our algorithms tell us what we want to see, instead of the other way around. We complain, and nothing changes, and we don’t leave. How can we? It's the Internet.

In theory, the internet is a public system— controlled by individuals and companies, but working toward a collective good. In reality, though, it's a medium controlled by people and corporations that are answering to yet another party, made up of advertisers and the ever-important SEO (Search Engine Optimization) metrics. That data, the abstract profit potential of an endeavor, is driving what we see, and the choices that we have, not us.

By putting the internet in the hands of those whose only seek to work towards their own benefit, no amount of public good can save a platform. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he could completely alter it without consequence. When Trump was reelected in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg removed many of Facebook's restrictions on hate speech, and everyone had to just go along with it. 

In addition to the continuous degradation of services and the increasingly unsafe nature of being on them, there lies another danger. When the people that use a service have no say in how the service is run, it's entirely possible that service could disappear overnight. This has happened many times before— with social media sites like MySpace and Vine, with websites like Google Answers and Omegle, and with services like Google+. Increasingly, this same fate could befall any service at any time. For what it’s worth, that’s why I’m such a strong supporter of the Internet Archive.

Recently, Hank Green compared the internet to a ghost town. When a town is abandoned, pieces of it remain, a symbol of the life that used to exist there. But, when a platform disappears, when a site gets shut down, it's just gone, and all of that vibrancy goes with it. 

We don't own what we're making and we don’t control when it goes away.

And, sure, it’s very unlikely that the internet will ever really disappear. But, increasingly, it’s becoming a digital Ship of Theseus, where the place we exist becomes more and more unfamiliar to us while claiming to be the same thing it’s always been. Is it really, though? How much has to change, without any input from the people who make it what it is, for it to be a fundamentally different place?

The internet was once a town square, a resource to endless information and a gateway to anyone you could ever want to meet. But, the systems that rule over us pushed it further and further into the economy of attention. “Get that viewership," they said, “by any means necessary." And it was so. We developed algorithms to keep people addicted to their devices and content to enrage them while they're on it. Hate gets more clicks, so that'll be the currency of our new republic! We’ll give everyone access to everything and immediately use that to foment division.

And, now, we’re so entrenched in it that making change is impossible. AI will determine what you make and make it for you and tell you what others think and what you should think and will respond for you and send it to your friend for their response, so you can just sit there. Sit there and feel bad. You have to. It's how we make our money. What are you going to do? Stop using us? No. You need us. We are your information and your only source of connection. Do you want to be ignorant? Do you want to be alone? No? Then shut up and log back in. This isn’t your platform. It’s ours. And you'll use it how we tell you to. How we force you to. This train is on its tracks and there is no escape.

So. What now? 

I don’t know.

I could suggest curating the algorithm, verifying information, monitoring screen time— being aware of your relationship with the internet, and making sure it’s what you want it to be. But, these systems are designed to trick us. To turn a brief social media break into doomscrolling, the search for news into a tunnel of clickbait, a genuine quest for discussion into angry vitriol from all slides. The power's out of our hands now. 

We can't change the systems that power our platforms, or that so many of them rely on individual dominoes that are so easily toppled and features that poison the well, just because they make for a more profitable quarter. We can, though, decide what we want to do with it. To reject the slop and boost the human expression that the internet was made for in the first place. (Which reminds me— share this article! You must.) 

This is a future of someone else’s making. But, we get to decide how we live it. So, let’s make the best we can out of it, shall we?