Rewilding the Internet

Okay, so rewinding the internet.

So first of all, we always start with story time.

Story time our pulse rate goes down.

We take deep breaths, we become slightly more emotionally receptive to what we might learn.

Story time today takes you back to 17th century Germany.

What we currently know is Germany, but what was then Prussia and Saxony?

And at that time, forests were owned in common in the main, which is to say that the land registry deeds may have belonged to the Lords, but the peasants owned many, access rights of forage, rights of hunting, rights to grow things, rights to take plants and use them to make medicines, to take herbs, to grow all sorts of things, even to weave cloth.

As time went on the Lords decided that this was not an arrangement with which they were completely happy, and in fact, the arrangement which with which they will be completely happy, will be an arrangement whereby the peasants did not in fact have access to the forest.

An arrangement whereby, in fact, the peasants were locked outta the forest and were criminalized from ever entering the forest.

And so instead of having peasants moving through the forest, and using it in different ways, they were criminalized and kept out.

Fences were built, professional foresters were employed.

And those professional foresters didn't tend to know as much as the previous foresters who often came from the area, there were these foresters were, almost like an algorithmic form of forestry.

In fact, it was called scientific forestry.

The job really was to keep forests tidier, but they had a job to do before that, and that was to cut down all the trees.

And German scientific forestry started off with something that looked like this, which was thousands of years of soil growth and diversity and trees centuries old, and a great diversity, not just in the trees themselves but in the understory.

The scrub and plants that grow beneath, cut them down, made a ton of money and planted new forests, new trees.

And the new forest and trees looked like they are a bit over here on the right.

All the same species, straight lines, no understory.

Nice and tidy.

Nice and clean 'cause these are Prussians.

And somebody knows their history.

Prussians like Otto Bon Bismarck, the most famous of all the Prussians, the man who uni reunited or United Germany in 1870 and thereabouts.

These were people who liked marching.

They liked straight lines.

They like things to be clean and clear and quick, and they had what you might even call an aesthetics of control.

A real emphasis on legibility, on being able to see all of the trees, count all of the trees to count the money you were going to make when the trees were harvested.

And so they made their in their own image.

70 or 80 years pass, they cut down all of the trees and they had a second massive bonanza of tree harvest.

They made so much money.

They made so much money it was history changing.

They bought townhouses, they bought ball gowns, they bought petty coats, they paid off their younger sons gambling debts, they fought several very ill-advised wars.

And when the time came to replant, they said, this is all going so well, we're just gonna do it again.

We're gonna plant in strange straight rows, single species monocrop, and we are just going to wait back, sit back and count the money before it comes in.

You've all heard European fairy tales and you though that they come in threes.

The third time was not so lucky.

In fact, the third time, they didn't even have to wait 70 or 80 years.

20 or 30 years in, they started looking at the trees and worrying that the trees were spindly, they were weak, they were falling down in storms.

They were ravaged by disease.

So many of them died, but the Germans had to come up with a new name for the phenomenon they had created.

That name is Vosterban, which means forest death.

So many of the trees had died, that the entire new word was created to describe the devastation that had taken place.

And it turned out that the counting and the aesthetics and the straight lines and the legibility, the control that they were not, in fact what was helping, what was creating the bonanza.

It turned out the bonanza was simply the one-time harvesting of generational wealth that had been laid down in the soil, in the diversity of the soil, the biodiversity, and synergies that have been going on.

And once it was gone, it was no one man's genius.

It was this simple extraction of profit, which happened once, and then it was finished.

That's pretty much what the internet looks like today.

The internet started off as something that was diverse, abundant, uncontrollable, wild.

It was a place where we call this, there was a separation of the players and the layers.

So no one person, no one company owned the physical infrastructure, the fiber optic cables, the the internet, the protocol layers.

The application layers, the browsers and the app stores all the way up to the content layer, the social media, the websites, the Netflix, all of those, they were all owned in different layers and by different companies, by different people in different countries, different business models, different forms of relation between the services that were provided.

Not all just command and control.

Some of it was cooperation, some collaboration.

Some of it was just open source, people doing what they like to do.

Hobbyists, a whole network of people set up the global domain name system.

It used to live in one guy's notebook, John Pastel, just like that.

Possibly not great cybersecurity practice, but that was the internet as it began.

It was diverse, abundant, global, open, accessible, decentralized.

In fact, I often think it looked like this, which is Tetris.

I don't know.

Has anyone ever actually played Tetris?

Oh, okay.

Okay, fantastic.

Thank you.

I'm always worried that this is gonna be one of those weird demographic things where it turns out you're way too old and your references have gone out of fashion.

Tetris is all of the little blocks are coming down in unpredictable shapes and sizes.

They're all coming down super fast and you're trying to slot them in.

That really is a brilliant depiction of what the internet looked, and to some extent still looks like.

It is a everyday miracle of, of contingency of trying to put different services and protocols and layers and types of data and types of use together on the fly.

And it works.

It's one of the most brilliant, mad, kind of crazy things humans have ever invented really.

And it's quite beautiful.

It just is one of those things that works in the moment.

It's dynamic.

It's something we recreate every day, and I think that's something to bring with us as the internet is not something that happens to us.

The internet is something that we do, and so that was where we started with the internet.

But as that's not where we are now.

And I usually just click through this pretty quick and I think this is a crowd that gets it.

We have a series of planetary duopolies on all of the levels of the inter, most of the levels of the internet.

We at the social and content layer, we have basically five services and four companies.

Browsers, we have two app stores.

We have two operating systems.

We have two mobile operating systems.

We have two, these are companies that have a global share, duopoly share of over 80 to 90% on a planetary basis.

So we basically, at every layer of the internet, we have two players.

Those players aren't just simply operating on a layer by layer basis.

They are gathering all of the different services that previously were distributed in different stacks all into a single stack that they own.

In fact, it's not even always a, global duopoly.

Sometimes it's just a global monopoly.

This is Google and can anyone see the little dot below it?

That's Microsoft, Bing.

They just keep trying.

And seriously good for them.

Other good things live on top of being like DuckDuckGo, which is an alternative search engine, uses their engine.

But Even though tech bros like to talk about their products as an ecosystem, I think it's very clear that what we are actually dealing with in these concentrated, consolidated, software pileups is plantations.

Now plantation is a mono crop, single monoculture, single crop.

It's a place, it's a landscape of control.

It is a landscape of maximum legibility where the person who controls it can read it very carefully.

But is not themselves read in turn, there's no transparency and accountability for the owners or controllers.

Plantation is a great place to grow a commodity like rubber or in this instance tea.

But a plantation is not a place where diversity and diversity is the source of most of the network resilience that we have ever had.

When those German trees, the Prussian trees were all falling down because they all had the same disease.

It reminds me of the, just a couple of months ago when the CrowdStrike failure happened, which was basically a Microsoft failure, when one company doing one shitty kernel update brought down half of the critical infrastructure of the planet, hospitals, airlines, hotels, entire government, public services just all went down.

They fell down like Skittles.

In one day because they all relied on one software giant.

And so what we really are seeing is the consolidation of what was a free and easy, loosey goosey, competitive, innovative, interact, interactive dynamic, constantly remaking itself kind of world into basically single species skyscrapers.

That's a mixed metaphor if I ever heard one.

They I think I call them skyscrapers because nothing wrong with skyscrapers in particular, although this one is fairly looming and ominous.

I think we all have to agree.

But simply because two things really.

One is to give you this idea, which is so hard to, sometimes conceptualize of pulling together into one single block.

A lot of stuff that used to be all over the place.

And also just to remind you that sometimes when you're in a skyscraper and you look out the window, the one thing you cannot see is the skyscraper that you are in.

You almost don't realize what it is we are living inside because it is so ubiquitous and it's so natural.

And so when I was listening earlier on to Steve Beaty saying one year, the great question that said, how did we get here?

How do we get to a world of massive concentration, global monopolies and polies and extraction?

And he just said, we got here because of deregulation.

And that is absolutely right.

Deregulation meant that companies are able to gather so much power, so much data, so much capital, and with almost no pushback.

And also because competition regulators around the world and because of a particular doctrine in competition policy basically took the notion that because internet services are quote unquote free, they don't need to get involved with regulating them because it doesn't matter if you have a monopoly for a free product.

The consumer is not being harmed by increased prices.

It was an incredibly narrow theory of harm, but it has meant that con, that competition authorities all over the world simply refused to act as this massive global concentration of power was happening before their eyes.

And when I heard about Charlie Munger tap dancing every morning to work this morning, I have to say yes.

Okay.

Interesting.

I love that.

He loved his life.

He died fabulously wealthy, comfortably in his own bed, lying on a very large pot of money.

What was he doing when he went to work?

He and Warren Buffet, their business model for investment was they wanted to invest in companies that had a moat, a huge defensive structure all the way around them.

That stopped other companies coming in and competing with them, their favorite company.

Google in a massive planetary monopoly on search and on advertising.

So when I think about, how we got to where we got where we are, it's not that people like me or John or whoever are asleep at the wheel.

Frankly, we didn't make any money.

But it is that a lot of people abrogated their responsibility for to defend competition, to defend real innovation, to stop people just invest investing purely in companies that will build a moat around them and put up their hands and say, Hey, this is wrong, and it's our job to make this not happen.

So I think there's something very peculiar about the business model, but also about the social model that we have seemed to have stumbled into.

This is just a little kind of a likeness, if you like, of suggests our phones, these are the social media, the main three social media, experiences that most people have.

And each dot represents an individual, a single person.

And I put it like that because these companies say that they are here to connect us.

They have all these high-minded slogans about connection.

But in fact, what happens when you are using their products is you are an atomized individual whose only connection is to the algorithm, which is telling you what you must read, what you must think, how you must feel, what you must watch.

Your real life connections to the people who you want to hear from are cut off.

And I'm not just talking about, oh, put away your phone and your life will be so much better.

I'm talking about how the algorithms of social media companies, purposefully cut you off from the people whose content you would like to read.

And anyone who's tried to get Instagram to show them, to actually have your follow feed, have that be the thing that you can read.

You try and you try and they will not give it to you.

They'll give you anything else except the people that you want to follow and that you want to interact with.

Other features of this very peculiar form of social interaction, are that you are bombarded with disinformation and that you are strongly discouraged from ever leaving those platforms.

And there's one other thing which I think is notable, which is that you are also strongly discouraged from ever reading anything that doesn't come isn't originated on those platforms.

So if you are on, let's say it's Twitter or it could be Facebook as well and Instagram and you post an external link to a newspaper, to the media.

You want people to read an article that you're interested in.

That link will not find its way to anybody.

If you are somebody who has a following of 40- 50,000, when you tweet or whatever about yourself, you normally get let's say 5, 6, 700 likes.

Put an external link on that and you will find what it is like to have 22 followers.

Nobody is going to read that, and that is an active choice of those platforms to keep you there and also to keep starving the media of links, of advertising, of attention.

And of course we know what happens when the media is weakened.

Our democracy is weakened.

I say it's a peculiar model because, but it's actually not a new model.

The relation of individuals to each other and individuals to the source of power and control on these social media platforms as they're currently construed perfectly mimics the relationship of the individual to the leader of an autocratic state.

This, and it's hilarious that the piece of word art I was able to find has a woman autocrat.

I'm not sure what that does for equality.

But, this matches those characteristics perfectly.

So in an autocratic state, your relation, the person who you have a, cult of the leader.

That's who you're thinking about all the time.

That's who your most important relation is.

Sometimes they do a little bit of patriarchy and say, family's rules are very important and there are many autocrats in each family, and that mimics the structure of the society under the leader.

But really it's basically you and the algorithm, you and the leader.

What else?

Your links to family, to friends, to social and civic organizations.

All of those things are purposefully weakened because they're alternative sources of information of connectivity, of power, of mutual aid.

The media, of course is massively suborned and crushed, and you are very strongly disincentivized from ever leaving.

And I think it's not just an accident that these two peculiar social models find their perfect expression and in fact they're perfect partners together.

Maria Resa, the Philippines winner of the Nobel Prize for her work on really on what Facebook did to the Philippines under the dictator Duterte.

She has said very recently that big tech loves autocrats and dictators and she's really put her finger on something and because she's lived it, which is that it's not simply that social media platforms is currently construed happen to amplify hate clicks and far right content, although that is the case, they certainly do, but it is also the case that their leaders, personally seem increasingly seem to share a lot of that political view of the world.

And of course, every time they have a choice of do we reduce the amount of disinformation on the platform, do we reduce the amount of division that it foments?

They always say, absolutely not.

And it comes back to actually something Martin Thomas was saying earlier today when he talked about, you both talked about the invisible systems.

The design values inherent in many of the systems that we use.

The systems they make almost ubiquity of these systems may make the design seem neutral, but then when you actually look closely you can find, yes there is designed in misogyny, designed in racism, designed in affordances, that privilege and give cover and courage to the far right.

And so it's not just an unfortunate coincidence that the far right is preferenced by these systems.

It is in fact a personal preference of the leaders of some of these systems to amplify the far right and to be increasingly brazen about their personal adoption of the far ideals.

Yeah, here's another one.

I was talking yesterday about how there are lots of different theories about internet governance and many of them are very academic, very interesting, and they come into foreign policy or international relations.

But I have a simple theory of internet governance at the moment, and it's called the OFG Theory of Internet Governance.

The one fucking guy.

The one fucking guy is the guy who decides what the algorithm says.

The one fucking guy is the person who is personally responsible and delightedly responsible for the far right amplification that his platforms do.

The one fucking guy is the guy who is extracting data, extracting capital, and concentrating control.

And I think it's also worth just pointing out, and these are structural deep economic forces, but they're also choices made by individuals.

The men who are running these platforms, and it is all men have been most of them now doing their jobs for about 20 years.

Very few of them have, any, increasingly, any experience of what it is to live a normal life, to be subject to normal risks, to be a woman walking through the world and know what the risks are that you take every time you do that.

To be catcalled, to be constantly brigade and trolled on their platforms.

Those are not experiences that these people have.

They're insulated from those experiences.

And we also know that along with all of the pathologies of wealth and the pathologies of exclusion that go with the lifestyles that they have, people who are fabulously wealthy are also weirdly slightly sociopathic.

It's not something that they start off as, but it is something that life brings.

And I say this, it's too easy almost.

It's too easy to mock these guys.

They're almost beyond parody, but they have so much power, and I think we do have to think about who they are and how they wield that power.

Just something that we were hearing earlier, first thing this morning.

It was about the citizens assemblies in Ireland and how some years ago we had a citizens assembly about an equal marriage referendum.

And I think that is a lovely story.

It's very sweet.

And it's also not the full story, that was playing the game on easy.

The time we did the Citizens Assembly and said, look, are we going to accept that gay people are real, that are like gay?

Not that gay people are real, but that gay people are like as important as everybody else and should be able to get married if they want to.

That was a let's all do something nice and we'll all feel pretty good about it afterwards kind of thing.

Where the rubber really hit the road was when we had the citizens Assembly about abortion.

You see when you're talking about abortion, you're talking about women's bodies.

You're talking about power and patriarchy, and you're talking about powerful people who have to give something up.

You're not talking about let's all get together and have a street party and do something cool.

The rest of the world is gonna come.

There's gonna be cameras, we're gonna be progressive everyones gonna be thrilled.

It'd be like Team Ireland go, green, go the green jersey.

When you talk about abortion lots of groups in society feel like they're losing and we managed to get that one through.

We managed to get that one through.

Using citizens and assemblies, yes, but not because we had some kind of aristocratic ideal of people on a mountain being perfect.

Acting in a perfectly disinterested ways.

No, it was about identity politics.

It was about movement, politics.

It was about people putting their bodies on the line to get something across the line.

Do I think that thanks to this guy, we could get that through today.

Absolutely not.

There is no way if Ireland were to have a citizen's assembly today on abortion, that we would get reproductive rights for women.

We would have American far-right money coming in.

We would have Russian trolls coming in.

We would have the whole kitten caboodle of disinformation division, and disaster.

So the world has changed.

We are in a fight for our lives.

This isn't some nice governance exercise.

This is a absolute war on democracy and we in this room, and everybody who knows it, who gets it needs to understand that we have to be using everything at our disposal to bring the fight to make, to not let them win.

Tony Ben, the British politician in the seventies and eighties used to ask these questions of power.

He would say to anybody in power, A CEO or a Prime minister, whoever it was, what power have you got now?

How, what power have you really got?

Not just what it says on the tin, where did you get it from?

In whose interests do you use it?

To whom are you accountable?

And to who?

Are you legible?

Are you transparent?

'cause you can see us?

And most importantly, how do we get rid of you?

Tony Ben used to say that if you cannot answer the final question there, you do not live in a democratic system.

And of course, the social media and systems that many of us live inside, and the internet stack that many, all of us live inside that is being concentrated under single ownership, single planetary control.

That is not a democratic system.

So how do we get rid of it?

I think the first thing we do is we understand that the people who are running those companies believe that they own our future.

They believe they have a monopoly on dreaming, and they believe that the future is inevitable and that we just have to roll over and accept it.

And the other thing I think is really important to know is that we're not going to civility politics our way out of this thing.

We're not going to open up our echo bubbles and listen to the far right, and they will open their hearts and listen to us, and we'll all hold hands and have a pint in the pub later, and it'll be gorgeous.

And, sorry, that's a bit of a crack, but there you go.

The way we get out of this is we take it on where it is and we take the fight, which is coming to us, Audrey Lord, an American poet, an activist and woman of color.

Who fought all the way through the sixties and seventies.

She came up with a line that many of us use now and I think we need to use in relation to social media, to the internet, to technology, and to all of these technocratic worlds in which we live now.

And she said the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house.

We cannot tweak these systems.

We won't succeed if we ask them to be a little bit less democracy killing, and nor will we succeed if we take it on the chin and go, whoops, we kill democracy.

We better move on now 'cause there's nothing we can do, we just have to keep on interneting the same way we have for the last while.

We basically have to take a much more radical approach and understand fundamentally in our bones what the kind of fight is that we are having.

That fight is not gonna go away just because we don't want to fight it.

That fight is global.

That fight is planetary.

So the good news is, and there is gonna be good news because we do have to end on an obligatory note of hope, although the ending is not soon sorry, but it is coming.

This little atomized, angry little box that we're all living.

And it's peculiar form of social networking.

It's not normal as you all know.

But it's how you can organize.

Look, put it this way, it's a very peculiar form of social networks that we don't need to use.

And because it is such a strange and inorganic and hostile one to us.

This is how people have always made lasting progressive positive change.

In 1985, the minor strikes in the north of England were taking place because the mines were all being shut down and tens of thousands of working class white, and to be fair, like small sea and big C conservative men were losing their jobs.

What happened?

The government was trying to divide them to say that they were an isolated set of people who could just be thrown away.

And you know that when you close the mines and you shut those people out of a job.

Very few of them are ever employed again.

So they really were throwing people into the bin, basically.

A bunch of, lesbian and gay, groups from London, got on buses and went up north and went to join the minors in protest, and they achieved some change, but I'll tell you mostly what they achieved was they achieved lasting solidarity between those two groups.

And I know John mentioned this yesterday, there's a wonderful film that describes what happened.

It's called Pride.

And, if you're somebody who finds it hard to connect with your feelings and you sometimes go, do you know what?

I just need a good cleansing cry, put on pride because it will lift you because it says something fundamental that we all know before we got pulled into these little scrolling, Skinner boxes of horror.

It's just people putting our bodies on the line and being together, moving and finding unlikely alliances.

That is how we build coalition and that is how we make change.

And that is also how social networks really work.

Organic human social networks.

This is just a very ordinary little schema of a bunch of college students and who knew who the people with big circles are, have lots of friends, and the people with small circles have fewer friends, but are still very much connected into the big group.

This tells us a couple of things.

Social networks, about 20 network theorists.

About 20 years ago, 15 or 20, started putting out papers like called The Strength of Weak Ties.

And that is just it's a sociologist way of basically saying that if you're looking for a job or a partner or a place to live, you're not gonna find it in your immediate circle of friends.

But you are very likely to find it in the friends of friends or in the family friends.

So the network of your network, that is where all of the good stuff is.

And politically, because we can't take the politics outta power.

Politics is the contestation for power.

Politically this is where allegiances and alliances and coalitions are made.

People who are one degree of separation away from you.

And this is also where resistance movements are built quite literally.

This is where resistance movements are built like the French resistance.

And we are moving into a time, certainly many of us in Europe get this where resistance movements both overt and covert are how we are going to need to start organizing ourselves.

And I think to move back from that, these social networks how we really do things and how we really choose to be together are basically organic looking.

This is a bunch of fungi cultures in a jar, and they're funky looking, I think they're really beautiful.

They're organic, they're weird shapes.

They all have different connections to each other.

And they're all together, but alone, but together.

They're not like one person screaming into the void on a broadcast amplification algorithmic kind of shouting in your ear thing.

There's basically a pretty good and accurate model of how we choose to be together because it's the fundamental lesson really from social network theory and also I think from nature, is that clumpy networks make good habitats.

They're where we choose to live with little groups and larger groups, not broadcast mode to everybody.

So how do we get our internet to look like that?

How do we get an internet that, as somebody said earlier, you know, and helps us make the institutions that help us do the things that we need to do?

I'm gonna turn my page here 'cause I don't wanna forget anyone's name.

We get from this, we get from the kind of the structured Prussian straight line internet to an actual place where things can flourish and thrive by learning one thing that the Prussians didn't know.

And that's one of the reasons why so many of the trees die.

The second and the third time around was that underground there, the tree, the network of the forest had been supported by a mycelial, network of Microrisal fungi, continent spanning fungal networks were circulating water, sugar, chemical signals that warn you that a predator is coming, that, some leaf eating bug is on its way and it's, a collaborative relationship and we see them all over nature.

And once the forest had been cut down and the the monoculture had prevailed, you saw that the mycelium networks basically were more or less eliminated and without the mycelial networks, the forest couldn't work.

And I don't think I have to stretch the metaphor too much to make it plain that the networks that underlie politics, the networks that underlie all of our infrastructures, the social networks are what we need to make work.

But without good networks, we cannot make good networks technologically.

Rewilding is basically a way to think about the internet as a habitat first and foremost.

And when we think of the internet as a habitat, I think it makes us, it just gives us a whole different structure of feeling from thinking about it as a place where bad things happen.

A place where bad men are in charge.

A place where we get bombarded all the time with stuff we really don't want to hear.

When we think of it as a habitat, we realize it's a place where we live.

We have feelings about the place where we live.

It's not just a utility to us.

It's not just infrastructure.

It's habitat, it's home.

And I think that is a whole different set of feelings that we have when we can access to and share when we think about how to make it better.

And rewilding does a very important thing, first and foremost is it makes us see what is almost so ubiquitous that we don't see, which is here is the Scottish Highland and it is, how a particular part of it was looking 25 years ago, and a lot of people thought it was beautiful.

To me it looks like the moon.

It is overgrazed by sheep and by deer.

It is almost monocultural.

There is hardly anything in it that is taller than six inches off the ground.

And what the owners did in this instance was they just simply walked away.

They stopped, they took the sheep off it, and they took the deer off it, and they simply let it be.

And the reason they did that is because rewilding is not about saving one species.

It's not about the lesser wired horn beam angler fly.

I just made that up though.

We would like to see one actually, that sounds fascinating.

It's about making space for an entire ecosystem to regenerate.

And why is that more important than looking at one charismatic species?

It is because an ecosystem's value is in its connections, and the more connections that operate within the ecosystem, within all of the different aspects of the ecosystem, the more value the ecosystem generates, the more calories it has to pass around.

It is a completely different way of thinking about the world from like a box with a bunch of dots inside it.

The more ways we connect, the more richness we have.

And in a real ecosystem, you don't just have this kind of tech bro idea of nature where it's basically the predator is at the top, the apex predator, and everybody else is scurrying around frightened underneath.

In an ecosystem, you basically have a lot of different species interacting with each other in surprising, often synergistic, often unexpected ways, and you have a multiplicity of kinds of ways to relate.

So rather than in the tech plantations where you simply have one relation and that is predation.

In an ecosystem, you have multiple different ways to interact with each other, and that brings us back to the players and the layers of the internet, how it was to begin with.

Complicated, messy, and good.

And finally, one final thing that Rewilding brings to us as an, a general comment is that ecologists get the urgency and they get the scale, and they get the what's at stake.

And I think we in technology need to have that.

Ecology over the last 20 years has reshaped itself entirely from something that was just like studying the pretty ants to, we are now a crisis discipline and we are trying to save what it is that we study.

It's not just good enough to know about things.

We have to be able to do things.

We have to be able to save things, and we have to be able to make the coalitions that make that possible.

And I think we, in technology, that's our job right now.

And that's what we've gotta do.

So what does an Rewild internet look and feel like?

It's got a bunch of different business models.

So it's not just the single database surveillance ad click advertising.

It's got all of the different ways to provide infrastructure that we always have ever used.

It's got a bunch of different kinds of websites.

It's not basically just, six websites passing around screenshots of the other five.

It's people doing different things, people with their weird quirky habits.

If anyone remembers Tumblr for 15 years ago it's an internet of weirdness.

It's an internet where we're not always on broadcast mode or not.

We're not always on receive mode.

It's some people call it the cozy web.

It's a place where there are just different corners of it, different places where you can sometimes be with your friends, sometimes with your colleagues.

It just matches human life.

We can possibly know maybe 200 people reasonably well in our lives.

The in a Rewild internet allows us to be in all of those modes together.

And it has no permanent winners.

It has no one fucking guy.

It has a bunch of different websites, different services, different choices, all the way up and down the stack.

And you can make it serve you.

It's not about your somebody else's data point.

You can own your part of the internet.

And we're seeing that increasingly people are registering their own domain names, putting up their websites like it's 2003.

All of the old things are coming back again.

Email letters, newsletters, it's all starting to come back.

And how does it feel?

I think it feels more, open, accessible, it feels less frazzled.

It feels less, you feel less shitty when you put down your phone.

If I was gonna wrap it up in one thing, that's what the Rewild internet looks and feels like.

So how do we get there?

I think we've got two ways that we do this.

One is we use the power of government, the power of the state, the coercive power of the state to re-level the playing fields.

We knock down those skyscrapers and lots of people flinch back from that.

They think there must be another way.

We must be able to negotiate.

You don't negotiate with fascists.

And it's not that they're all fascists, certainly not, but the business model tends towards authoritarianism and the current owners of many of those businesses, several of those businesses personally tend towards authoritarianism.

And if that sounds like I'm over egging, the pudding, just wait till you see what happens in the US after next January.

So we knocked down the skyscrapers.

We use competition, and regulation to separate, to re separate the players and the layers again.

And we mandate interoperability.

The idea that you can use different services, bring your data with you wherever you go, that you don't have just one single choice, which is, no I don't like this platform, I'm gonna leave.

That you can actually exert your choice, exert your power.

When John Bell was talking earlier about all of the different things that you can get social media to do if you could just do the things that he himself is now doing.

I was thinking, this is wonderful.

These are all great things.

I can do some of that on Blue Sky and because it's now on Blue Sky, Threads is starting to do stuff they said they could never do, but also just the kind of, I was just, there was a slight moment of feeling just a little bit mad like it feels It feels like he's talking about a car, right?

And the car is sitting there and it's got no wheels on it, and we've all just got used to the car having no wheels.

And now John Bell walks in and said, do you know what?

I think we should put wheels on this thing.

I think we should drive it around.

I think some of us should, maybe even more of us should get into it and we'll be a bigger one.

We call it a bus.

And we could all go somewhere together.

Wouldn't that be great?

And it's just like they, like this is a revolution of low expectations.

There's so much more that those companies could be doing and that having interoperability and having choice actually forces them to do stuff that they say they can never do.

But to do that we level the skyscrapers, we make the extra space.

And Rewilding tells us that you just sometimes have to stand back and make the space and people are gonna rush in and build fabulous things.

The first bit is hard, and it requires giving your politicians hell, giving them absolute hell because they have abrogated the responsibilities and they have stepped back from their job, which is to use regulation to make life fairer, to make life better for people.

In fact, what we've seen in Australia is politicians who failed three years ago, they had the chance to hold Facebook's feet to the fire on the social media, on the Facebook's refusal, when Facebook blocked the newspapers of this country.

Have we memory hold that?

No, that was crazy.

How could that happen?

How could they block the fire services and they weren't prosecuted for terrorism?

It just blows my mind.

But having refused the jump, politicians come back three years later and say, you know what, these companies are really big and scary and we just can't make them stop using shitty algorithms on us.

So you know what we're gonna do?

We're just gonna take all the kids off.

So every gay kid who's growing up in a small town who thinks they're the only one, they won't be allowed on social media anymore.

They won't be able to find other gay kids, find out who they are.

Seriously, that's the answer.

To me it feels an alcoholic when they're going down and down in the spiral, they're negotiating and saying, I'm gonna, if I can just drink, if I don't start drinking before nine o'clock in the morning.

Then I can keep on drinking.

It's if we can't stop these social media and we can't stop these algorithms, but we're just gonna throw the kids under the bus and it's gonna be fine then.

We won't have to take on Facebook again.

It'll be okay.

Not okay.

Absolutely not okay.

I think we really have to hold our politicians responsible for what they're doing and also our regulators.

And to be fair, the Australian AC CC is one of the weakest on law, in law, one of the weakest regulators in the OECD.

There are fabulous people doing their best there.

But they have the weakest laws, competition laws in this country.

It just is amazing to me that here we are under a labor government.

I could say the same in the uk, but here we are and we're just not even considering using the normal powers of government to do normal things to improve people's lives.

That's off the, just not even worth considering like taking the kids out of social media, it feels like, you know the Mark Fisher line about it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

It's easier to imagine kids never using the internet again than to fix the fucking internet.

It's not that hard.

So if that doesn't work and it is quite possible that it will not work.

And these, planetary coercion systems cannot be tweaked or pleaded with or negotiated with to improve themselves.

Then we already start the rewilding, and people have already be gone.

Here's just some basic stuff.

And I used to shrink back from saying, use this, use that.

Don't use that, don't use that.

But actually I think people do need a bit of a guide that says, here's a starter kit, as we call it on, starter pack as we call it on blue sky.

Here's a start to using some things that are just a bit less monopolistic.

And I think freedoms are additive.

As we've discovered in Ireland, once you get one freedom, you can build a bigger coalition to get more freedoms.

And once you have some, you can get more.

So I think we can, do a lot better there.

But also we can choose to pay in a different way for the fundamental infrastructure that we all need.

The intranet is a utility.

So maybe we should tax it like a utility.

Maybe we should regulate and govern it like a utility, like electricity, like water.

There are lots of parts of the infrastructure which now are being free, but which we are paying for with our democracy.

So this is simple stuff like, I use Signal and I pay them five or $10 a month.

Because they're critical infrastructure for my life.

It's a secure and private messaging app run by, I have to say, an absolutely kick ass woman, Meredith Whitaker, who understands what the stakes are.

Similarly with journalism, with news, with reporting that you value.

We need to pay for this stuff.

And again, outside of maybe China and North Korea, this is pretty much the most concentrated, monopolistic, media market in the world.

So you really need to pay for what you want to see in the world.

So the good, the joy of Rewilding is that stuff grows back.

Nature truly does heal.

We are already beginning to see massive structural, deep rumbling structural changes taking place in the internet, not just in the whole, let's do more blogging and those things are really important.

But for example, in Europe right now, there is a big move, several months before the US election.

Leaders began to realize thanks partly to the work of Meredith and other people.

I was slightly involved myself to realize the massive geopolitical frailty and risk of having your entire government's backend, your entire continents digital systems being provided by three or four American companies.

When there was a risk we thought at that time that a person of the far right might come into power and be trivially able to suborn those companies, and that has now come to pass and we will see as it goes on, unfortunately it's not going to get better.

But European countries basically are saying, look, we can't be reliant on that anymore.

We have to build our own digital public infrastructure.

And they're starting to do it.

They're starting to have the political will that says, this isn't actually about competition, innovation and risk.

This is about geopolitics, and in geopolitics, resilience is a choice.

Resilience is non-optional.

So we have the, we also have people, like in Silicon Valley, funders of, formerly funders of Big Tech are now trying to fund Little Tech, competitive alternatives, that are less data, guzzling, less surveillance, less coercive.

So the money is starting to come around the German Sovereign Wealth Agency, under a very able and active.

A woman whose name currently escapes me, so sorry, I've forgotten her.

She's a delightful woman.

Anyway, she basically a few months ago said, you know what we're not funding is.

Open source and open source is of strategic necessity to our country's future.

And so they've now started putting money into the open source repair, open source maintenance.

So there's this green shoot coming up all over.

And I think that's what we have to, maybe not to look at for hope, actually.

Just to look at, to see like this is a rising tide that I think you can get on.

Meredith said something brilliant in an article that she put out just yesterday or the day before, and she said Now, because the tide is turning and people get it, and people are building new things.

She said the smart, actually cool, genuinely interested.

People will once again have their moment getting the resources and clearance to design and build or rebuild a tech ecosystem that is actually innovative and built for benefit, not just for profit and control.

And that's what's actually happening right now.

People are rushing in to fill the space.

Because I've worked in this area for so long, and I've spent so much of my life and my career, saying to big tech companies and saying to governments who, you know, who adoringly support them and bring them in to do government's basic jobs.

I've spent so much of my career saying, please don't do that.

You'll kill people.

Please don't do that.

You'll shorten people's lives.

And so much of my career has been about saying, no, please don't do that damaging thing.

And.

People like me, like Meredith, like lots of the people involved in critical and public interest technology.

We didn't get involved in this because we hate technology, but because we love it, because we love what it can do.

We love the possibilities it has.

We love the magic of technology, the delight, when it just works, when it does something well.

When you feel that, when that it gives you, like 10 league boots, you put on these L boots and you can jump over mountains.

That's what we want from technology.

We want it to bring us together.

We wanted to help us to face these massive planetary challenges and crises that we are currently facing.

We wanted to help us to be our best selves.

We wanted to, to reflect the ways that we connect with other people, not to get in the way and not to divide us.

We wanted to help us build the coalitions that we need to build, to do the things that we need to do before it's too late.

But also, I think, and this is the thing I'd probably want to leave you with, is we want to get back that feeling of being connected, of being in joy together, of being involved in a. In a common, in a collective task, that feeling that we've all got our shoulders to the wheel and we're pushing in the same direction.

That feeling that things may not be perfect, things may not end as we might wish them, but they'll be pretty good because we'll be with other people because other people will take on the task and carry it on after us.

That's what we want from technology.

That's what we want from the internet.

And I think that's why thinking about it not as a problem to be solved, but as a place where we live is so much the better way to think about it, it's our home.

It's where we want to be our real selves.

It's where we want to be with the people we love, and I think it's the home that we want to pass on to the people who will come after us.

To pass on the most, joyous, connecting home that we possibly can and to be secure in the knowledge that Rewilding gives us.

That when we, sometimes, when we just get out of the way and let other people do the things that they can do in the space that we have made, they're gonna do things that we could never have imagined to begin with.

And there is joy in that.

There's joy in walking the road and knowing that you won't get to the end, but that the person beside you might, and that where they are going.

It's going to be wonderful.

Thank you.