We need to completely rethink our relationship with the Internet

The news cycle pushes forward relentlessly, but a common theme threads them together. The internet.

A longer, more detailed examination of our relationship with the internet, and how this relationship can be bettered, can be found in our upcoming sixteenth print issue, which will soon be available to buy on this website. Alternatively, you can subscribe to receive print issues, or purchase an online subscription subscribe to receive online versions of them. This article was written by John Power.

2021 is off to a blazing start. In a single month, the Capitol of the United States was invaded by conspiracy theorists, and retail investors across the globe banded together to attack Wall Street.

The news cycle pushes forward relentlessly, but a common theme threads them together. The internet. The discourse which occurs on unregulated platforms, has in the last decade, caused genocide in Myanmar, a wave of revolutions in the Arab world and has set cities ablaze in America.

The Internet destabilises society like a natural disaster. We resign ourselves to it, believing it to be at first principle, an entity beyond the designs of national governments. This is our intellectual inheritance from the 1990s, when the two dominant ideologies of Silicon Valley, Technological Libertarianism and Hippie Utopianism, combined to create an idealised perception of the Internet as a new frontier.

It is time to rouse ourselves from this sleeping dream, and extend the authority of rule-governed democracies into the virtual world, before the virtual world extends it’s authority onto us.