Rewilding

Description

Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon;

"Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” [according](https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/benefits-and-risks-rewilding) to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It’s less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.

Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in [their book](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262046763/rewilding/) “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.”

It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command and control.

“The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.”

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock."

(https://digicnx.notion.site/We-Need-To-Rewild-The-Internet-f824d179c5d445489edd74533e11f65d)

Discussion

The Look & Feel Of A Rewilded Internet

Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon:

A rewilded internet will have many more service choices. Some services like search and social media will be broken up, [as AT&T eventually was](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/what-att-breakup-teaches-us-about-big-tech-breakup). Instead of tech firms extracting and selling people’s personal data, different payment models will fund the infrastructure we need. Right now, there is little explicit provision for public goods like internet protocols and browsers, essential to making the internet work. The biggest tech firms subsidize and profoundly influence them.

Part of rewilding means taking what’s been pulled into the big tech stack back out of it, and paying for the true costs of connectivity. Some things like basic connectivity we will continue to pay for directly, and others, like browsers, we will support indirectly but transparently, as described below. The rewilded internet will have an abundance of ways to connect and relate to each other. There won’t be just one or two numbers to call if leaders of a political coup decide to shut the internet down in the middle of the night, as has happened in places like [Egypt](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/technology/internet/29cutoff.html) and [Myanmar](https://www.reuters.com/graphics/MYANMAR-POLITICS/INTERNET-RESTRICTION/rlgpdbreepo/). No one entity will permanently be on top. A rewilded internet will be a more interesting, usable, stable and enjoyable place to be.

Through extensive research, Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom [found](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378010000634) that “when individuals are well informed about the problem they face and about who else is involved, and can build settings where trust and reciprocity can emerge, grow, and be sustained over time, costly and positive actions are frequently taken without waiting for an external authority to impose rules, monitor compliance, and assess penalties.” Ostrom [found](https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2021/08/11/the-commons-lobster-maine-elinor-ostrom) people spontaneously organizing to manage natural resources — from water company cooperation in California to Maine lobster fishermen organizing to prevent overfishing.

Self-organization also exists as part of a key internet function: traffic coordination. Internet exchange points ([IXPs](https://www.internetsociety.org/issues/ixps/)) are an example of common-pool resource management, where internet service providers (ISPs) collectively agree to carry each other’s data for low or no cost. Network operators of all kinds — telecoms companies, large tech firms, universities, governments and broadcasters — all need to send large amounts of data through other ISPs’ networks so that it gets to its destination.

If they managed this separately through individual contracts, they’d spend much more time and money. Instead, they often form IXPs, typically as independent, not-for-profit associations. As well as managing traffic, IXPs have, in many — and especially developing — countries, formed the backbone of a flourishing technical community that further drives economic development.

Both between people and on the internet, connections are generative. From technical standards to common-pool resource management and even to more localized broadband networks known as “altnets,” internet rewilding already has a deep toolbox of collective action ready to be deployed."

(https://digicnx.notion.site/We-Need-To-Rewild-The-Internet-f824d179c5d445489edd74533e11f65d)