From its earliest days, the internet was intended to reliably connect people in the worst possible situations. Some of the early work on what would become ARPAnet and then eventually the web that surrounds us partly started as a way for the US to have a reliable and decentralised way of communicating in the event of the a nuclear strike. But this year, the Internet seemed to have failed that central aim, started 60 years ago: the world seems to be falling apart, and we can't even reliably connect to each other.
OK, sorry, that's dramatic. The end of the year can make sensationalists and sentimentalists of us all. But it does at least feel like we are going in the wrong direction. That grandiloquent, sometimes overly abstract aim of connecting the world that powered the early internet has been falling apart for the last decade or so, and this year it felt like the internet itself was falling apart, too.
There was the more obvious ways that it stopped working. This year was marked by a number of technical issues that meant the internet ground to something of a halt for hours. Of course, we've had big outages as long as we've had big websites.
But notable this year was that so many of the outages were not at the websites themselves, but the services that power them in the background. Problems at Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare both meant that apparently disconnected websites all, well, disconnected. They were notable for their impact but also the way they seemed at once to make the internet so powerful and so breakable, all at the same time.
And there were less obvious ways, too. Social media isn't actually social anymore, as algorithms prioritise unknown people and brands apparently to encourage engagement. Documents like images and videos aren't actually documentary evidence anymore, because AI has made it trivially easy to produce falsehoods without even really thinking about it.
There are, of course, lots of signs of hope. The objection to AI content on feeds feels – at least from here – to be fairly universal, such that posting it leads to immediate and intense outcry. Other, nourishing kinds of posting and publishing are flourishing, such as on platforms such as Substack. There are kinds of social sites that are still reliably both social and media-focused, such as Strava or Substack.
The internet was built from the very beginning to be resilient, and the ideas underpinning it – community, creation, understanding – are even more so. Both have been shaken this year. But they all have an unbeatable tendency to just keep at it.
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