What should be the future of the Internet?

A summit in Washington, D.C., poses many questions with fewer answers

Project Liberty’s “Summit on the Future of the Internet” included a dinner sponsored, in part, by the satirical American newspaper, The Onion. Photo by the author, Washington, D.C., November 21, 2024.

Recently in this newsletter, I wrote about the end of the 20th century and how a new societal and political order had emerged—not overnight, but over the course of the past decade-and-a-half.

One of those institutions from the 20th century undergoing massive transformation is the Internet, and this week I was among a group of invited guests that attended a summit in Washington, D.C., examining what the future of Internet could and should be, Project Liberty’s “Summit on the Future of the Internet.”

Longtime supporters of this newsletter will recognize Project Liberty. I’ve been involved with Project Liberty (formerly Unfinished) for four years now; I have been a speaker at their events, my History Communication Institute (HCI) has co-hosted webinars with them on artificial intelligence, and I interviewed founder Frank McCourt (former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers) earlier this year for my podcast. The HCI is part of the Project Liberty Alliance, a consortium of 100+ organizations working to shape the future of the Internet and social Web.

This summit was an opportunity to meet others in the alliance and hear updates on how Project Liberty is realizing its ambitious vision. Most importantly, it was an attempt to try and give shape to what the future of the Internet might look like.

Allow me to use this week’s newsletter, then, to share with you a few takeaways from the summit that have left me ruminating on the end of one era of the ‘Net, and the potential beginning of a new one…

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#1: The builders of the 20th century Internet will not be the builders of the 21st century Internet

Several Internet luminaries attended the summit, some of tech’s most brilliant thinkers who were instrumental in the creation of the Internet and World Wide Web—on the technical level as well as the operational level.

In listening to their remarks, and in my discussions with them on the sidelines, though, it became increasingly clear that these individuals are ready to pass the baton to the next generation. These legendary figures shaped the way all of us have lived for the past 25-30 years, but, by their own admission, they were products of a different era. They had different skills, they had different priorities, and they were solving different problems.

Many of these luminaries can now, with hindsight, see where the Internet went wrong. But they struggled to articulate where it should go next. My takeaway from speaking with these esteemed guests was that they had made their contributions—some that benefited us, some that harmed us—and they were eager to see what the next generation of builders could do. This segues into takeaway number two, namely…

#2: Technologists and creators have differing views on what the future of the Internet should be

This summit had a good mix of the individuals whose technical and leadership skills build the Internet and World Wide Web, intermingled with the creative talent that powers them. Throughout the two days of the summit, the gaps between these two important stakeholders became apparent.

The technologists, investors and funders manage companies, investment funds, or large foundations. They are often associated with Stanford, Harvard, MIT or Georgetown. Their pedigree pervades their work, with even the most boot-strapped founders operating under the capitalistic premise that money raised + technology deployed = solving today’s pressing issues and enriching the bottom line. There is a persistent, almost evangelical, belief that this is how the system must work, even when presented with evidence to the contrary.

On the flip-side, the content creators often come from more diverse backgrounds. They are more irreverent, less scripted, and often do not have well-polished elevator pitches or Ivy League pedigrees. They are authentic and charismatic personalities, which is how they connect so well with their followers. Most importantly, they recognize very acutely the predicament they are in: they benefit financially and reputationally from an ecosystem that they know is highly toxic.

They also have a much richer ground-level understanding of what the future of the Internet has to be in order for it to be healthier, while simultaneously promoting creativity, flexibility and possibility. After attending this summit, and after attending VidCon in Baltimore last year, it has become clear to me that creator voices must be at the forefront of whatever the future of the Internet and Web will be. This leads me to observation number three…

#3: No one knows the future of the Internet—at least not yet

I’ve been to many of these conferences over the past few years, and I have heard many lectures about the problems with our current online environment. I’ve also heard from a variety of people who believe they have the solutions.

It continues to surprise me, though, how much the proposed solutions resemble the structures we currently have. I suppose this is a natural part of acculturating people to new products, to say how much a new platform resembles TikTok or mirrors Twitter / X. The innovations come from tweaking how things work under-the-hood: more layers of customization, more layers of user-choice, more options for how ads work or more ownership over your data. Such refinements can move the needle significantly, especially at the scale of tens-of-millions of users. But so much of what I have heard does not really feel like a break from the past, so much as an extension of it.

Another element that has surprised me has been the nostalgia that permeates these events. There is significant nostalgia for the ‘90s Internet or the early-2000s Web. There are often debates about how to “re-create” that era or how to “reclaim” the Internet back to what it was.

To my ears, these do not sound like future-focused visions; they feel more like rose-colored glasses. After all, what is nostalgia if not the desire to return to an idealized past that never truly existed in the first place. This is another reason why there should be historians in these conversations (as is often the case, I was the only professional historian in the room that I could find). A critical analysis of the Internet’s past would help us break out of these nostalgic tropes about the “good old days,” and stop us from trying to make the future resemble what we’ve imagined our past to be. The future should not, in my humble opinion, be a reconstitution of our nostalgic memories, which leads me to my final takeaway…

#4: We must invest in education

At this summit, and other events I’ve been to over the years, I have heard a lot about empowering users to be able to build and customize API’s; allowing users to select their own algorithms; users having more control over who they filter or block; users controlling their online data, etc. While all of that holds promise, it will all require a massive educational effort to teach billions of people how to navigate a new Internet—even while we have millions of people who struggle to use the current Internet.

There remain, for example, older generations, rural populations, and under-privileged populations that still need basic computer and Internet skills: how to avoid phishing scams, how to navigate email inboxes, how to operate basic programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel, or even how to get online. Technologists are now proposing that users acquire more skills to customize their own algorithms or take their data with them from platform to platform. This will be a huge educational lift.

There is also literacy work we must do the navigate the future Internet and Web: media literacy, historical literacy and AI literacy. Users must understand how algorithms work, how to discern information they see on their screens, and how to ask critical questions about why things are appearing in their newsfeeds. It always surprises me how these critical questions are rarely raised at such conferences; I am often the person who raises them.

Technologists and investors seem eager to build the next app, invest in the next company, or devise a tech solution to a problem tech created. Yet there does not seem to be an equal appetite to invest in the education that will be necessary to on-ramp billions of people around the world into a new ecosystem. This is another area where we could learn from history; we should recognize that rolling out new technologies without the requisite education for people to understand them and use them is asking for a repeat of the harms of the past twenty years.

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All that said, I still thought the summit was terrific. But it is part of our job to be critical; we built this newsletter to be a space for critical thinking, and we need more spaces for critical thinking in this new era of the Web. In fact, I would argue that the future of the Internet and World Wide Web must foster and incentivize critical thinking. One could argue that a lack of critical reflection in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 got us to where we are today. If the goal for Web 3.0 is to be different, it should have critical thinking baked into from the outset, in hopes that we do not make worse mistakes this time around.

The good news is there is much of that already happening. There are terrific people involved in these efforts, there is a growing community, and there are individuals—millionaires and billionaires, as well as boot-strapped founders and content creators—who are taking risks to try and devise something new. For two days in Washington, we were able to connect around that work. I’m grateful to Frank McCourt and Project Liberty for making that possible.

At one point during the summit, we were asked to break into teams and write bullet points about what the future of the Internet must include. After some reflection, here are mine:

• The future of the Internet must integrate critical, historical analysis into its creation;

• The future of the Internet must foster critical thinking, historical literacy and media literacy among its users;

• The future of the Internet must center the diverse voices of creators and be responsive to their desires, needs and concerns;

• The future of the Internet must empower and reward humanists, ethicists, historians and other humanities and social science scholars, in addition to enriching technologists and investors;

• For every $1 dollar we spend on tech, we must spend $3 dollars on education.

Perhaps, if we do these things, we will build a better Internet of the future.

Have a good week—and a Happy Thanksgiving,

-JS

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