internet
Call for abstracts: Rewilding the Web: diversity and resilience in digital infrastructure
This workshop will bring together ecologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and technologists to discuss how contemporary insights from theoretical biology and ecology can provide a richer understanding of what makes for a thriving biosphere, and how this might provide inspiration for cultivating sociotechnical infrastructure that is more resilient against co-option by monopolising tendencies.
Over-Filtering The Internet
Despite many, many failed attempts to do so, people keep trying to filter the internet. Let’s look at the lens of the current moment through past attempts—including one led by, of all people, a librarian.
Presenting our Ecology of the Internet ideas at Aarhus 2025
Presentation at Aarhus 2025 on Internet ecology, proposing AI-driven software diversity to fight protocol ossification and create more resilient networks.
Steps towards an ecology of the Internet
Paper exploring biological ecosystem models as inspiration for Internet architecture evolution towards trillion-node scale at Aarhus 2025.
They paved paradise and put up a bunch of slop
Bluesky, Fedi, and making centralisation modular
LLMs are DRM for information
Taking A Mile
The risk of the open internet is that someone will exploit your well-intentioned openness thoughtlessly. That’s how the internet slowly stops being open.
Several people are typing...
The Web App Switcheroo
In its quest to do as little as possible to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple randomly kneecaps web apps. Also: Am I sending this newsletter to fake people?
The Modem Tax
How a real-life attempt to charge online services for using the phone line became an infamous internet legend. The “modem tax” was a chain-mail boogeyman.
Let The Internet Be Grimy
Meta’s take on mimicking Twitter feels like it was built for brand safety first, and you don’t get fulfilling internet experiences when you build for brand safety first.
The Next Chapter
Online culture sure feels like it’s in a transition phase, doesn’t it? In an attempt to understand what we learned this week, let’s compare it to some prior internet-era shifts.
Surfing Upstream
In an era when hundreds of free web browsers exist, Orion Browser has a novel idea: It wants to charge money. Why’s that? Simple: It wants to fix the paradigm.
Source Tags & Codes
The saga of the Missouri governor reflects a failure by the powerful to embrace curiosity—curiosity encouraged by the HTML language he fails to understand.
Tab It Your Way
How the power-user web browser Vivaldi has managed to maintain a flexible design philosophy in an era when so much is decided for you online.
Dr. Koop’s Digital Korner
How famed U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, at the age of 82, became an internet entrepreneur, and why his namesake website burned out, fast.
By Our Powers Combined …
How the webring became the grassroots tool of choice for sharing content online in the ‘90s. The concept was social media before media was social.
FTP Fadeout
The beating heart of the early internet may have been FTP, or file transfer protocol. But after 50 years of mainstream use, its demise may be imminent.
News In Small Bytes
Newspapers said they wanted to protect the print product, but they were raring to go when it came to experimental online news approaches in the early '80s.
We Were Promised Skynet
Satellite internet was once seen as a holy grail of connect-anywhere online access. It hasn’t worked yet, but the promise is closer than ever.
Now You’re Playing With Power
How I found home networking nirvana with a powerline connection, a form of home networking that might be called poor man’s ethernet. No drilling involved.
Browse Minimally
Perhaps the problem with the modern web browser is that there’s just too much stuff. What if we cut things down to the bare minimum?
The Internet’s Many Branches
The evolution of the top-level domain, a solution to a technical problem that has evolved into something with lots of cultural and marketing value.
The Wires Barely Reach
It took a while for the internet to turn into a major global force, but it wasn't for lack of trying. (Peter Gabriel deserves at least some of the credit.)
Jumping-Off Point
What the heck is a jumpstation, and why did it fade from internet nomenclature? It’s complicated, but the web’s first search engine is in there somewhere.
The Internet of Food
Online food delivery was probably secretly essential to the internet’s success, but it took a while for us to get a food option as good as Grubhub.
Close Your Open Tabs
A case in favor of browser tab minimalism, or closing the tabs you’re not using. Sometimes, information overload has its limits.
Nothing But Net (And Ads)
The rise of the ad-sponsored dial-up ISP offers some useful lessons on promising too much in the age of MoviePass. Good luck getting rid of that ad.
WebTV’s Greatest Celebrity User
Turns out R. Stevie Moore, a Tedium favorite, was a very active user of WebTV, an under-loved icon of the early internet. It’s apparent in his video work.
Doing It For Erma
An 1956 book about the early history of automation finally hits digital shelves, thanks to a friend of mine. And its appearance is deliciously ironic.
Picking Up The Slack
Internet Relay Chat beat Slack to real-time chat by decades and helped define much of our early online culture, yet way more people use Slack. Why is that?
Encoded, Decoded
How Usenet—a protocol intended for conversations—was forever changed once the public figured out you could transfer binary files through it.
A Eulogy for Eudora
The early graphical client Eudora was how people checked their email in the ’90s. But in the end, only the power users stuck around. Here’s what you missed.
The Internet On Dead Trees
Books and periodicals about the internet were a curious phenomenon—in no small part because they frequently pandered to the largest possible audience.
Burrowing A Gopher Hole
The Gopher protocol isn't supported by the modern web basically at all, but despite this, it lingers on, a quarter century from its peak. Here's how.
Your Code Is Junky
FrontPage tried to solve an important problem in the early-internet era—the idea of making web design accessible to mere mortals—but the code wasn't so hot.
The Internet Will Be Televised
Two decades ago, WebTV launched a bold idea into the mainstream … and caught the fringes. What can we learn about the internet from this noble failure?
The History of Internet Explorer Hatred
Microsoft's Internet Explorer was one of the earliest things that made tech users really freaking mad. It gave those users something to fight against.
Tales Of The Interwebs
Protecting internet history is an important task, so we've taken it upon ourselves to save some of the best stories.