Censorship and Courtyards

I fondly remember the forum era of the late 00s, when vBulletin, PHPBB and SimpleMachine Forums was the name of the game. It was a time when real-time meant IRC and otherwise waging discussions across days or weeks was normal. We’d log in, write a bit, and then log off.

Facebook started to collect these communities into its groups, moving them into its grasp away from the complexity of servers and databases and sovereignity. GitHub, Slack, and Discord joined in and offered similar advantages: Focus on what you do well, not on servers.

IRC logs disappeared from the search history, safely tucked behind the grasps of the properietary chat app’s own search solutions. Forums followed. Sovereignty suffered, but just like any management consultant might tell you: Focus on what makes you you, not what everyone else also do (and fire some people).

The locking down of the internet didn’t happen quickly, but it did happen.

And today search is less useful than ever. The public discourse is less useful than ever. In a sense, even facts are less useful than ever. And we’re seeing an increased demand for drastic actions against the ills of our modern internet, such as age-limits on social networks and whatnot. We’re seeing more expensive and shittier video and music streaming and an ever hostile video game industry. The three operating system giants Microsoft, Apple, and Google are all seemingly uninterested in supporting local and pushing for cloud-everything. Their cloud-everything. We’re growing accustomed to both Cloudflare landing pages and the slightly odd Anubis page flashing by when we surf the web, much in a desperate attempt at keeping the influx of LLM-enhanced bots at bay.

There’s also an insurgence around VPNs on two levels much thanks to WireGuard: Providers such as NordVPN and Mullvad help you circumvent local ISP restrictions and offers some protection from law enforcement when hiding file sharing. Providers such as Tailscale and Netbird offers the private network experience companies have long enjoyed but individuals haven’t. Unlike alternatives such as Tor, these overlay networks are performant and nearly transparent to the user.

And I think they will become more common.

This brings me to my theory for the next evolution of the internet: Small bubbles of networks, available to participants therein, and essentially invisible to people outside of the bubbles. There’ll be teenagers joining forums flying under the radar of social media restrictions, friends sharing their media collection, and AI-exhausted people seeking network bubbles that provide a sense of smallness and community. There will be talk about darknets and legislation to follow, possibly followed by an uptick in physical variants of these illicit bubbles (the return of the LAN party?). We might have youth speak to their rights to organize and communicate and people in general engage in the discourse on one side or the other, much like the piracy debates twenty years ago.

And as all this is happening, the bubbles will remain bubbly, expand organically, and be organized to accomodating its own community. Like a courtyard, bringing joy to its community with little care for the world outside.