To an Intranet Future, pt.1
Taking the World Wide out of the Web
This is the first part of an ongoing series where I’m discussing a potential future for a degrowth digital space. Hope you enjoy.
In John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken pulls one of the classic switcheroos, tricking a military fascist in a dystopian future and using a military super weapon to deactivate all technology on Earth and then uttering the line “Welcome to the human race”, obviously after lighting a cigarette. I couldn’t say whether or not it’s really a movie worth watching, but that ending stayed with me from the age of 14. It’s luddite, and I’m not sure the technological dependencies that we have in 2025 (healthcare a primary factor) would necessarily benefit from this kind of solution to the myriad problems we have in the tech dystopia of the 2020s, but for me it’s a starting point to the kind of thinking that I’ve been gradually adopting since the emergence of social media and those horrific Boston dynamics robots.
We (the global north) anticipate the growth of a number of new technologies as a kind of future utopia that seem to promise the kind of Jetsons flying car technology you often see discussed as what we really expected from the 21st century. LLMs posing as artificial intelligence, a cashless society, automation as far as the eye can see, electric, self driving vehicles, robotics, the Web as a modern library of Alexandria, and so on. It doesn’t take much extrapolation to see that these tools and technologies can be ultimately used by neoliberal/technofeudalist/fascist governments (delete as appropriate!) to repress and control their populations and the people in the global south. I don’t have a toolkit prepared to deal with police murder robots or the future of automated society where the working class are pushed further to the periphery, as much as I’d like to. What I do believe in, and what I think is possible with the right will and effort, is a reduction of dependence on the World Wide Web. From the massive number of data centres draining energy and water from our already thirsty and dying world, to AI decision making, to astroturfed campaigns of bigotry, to data collection by massive corporations for profit, the World Wide Web is no longer the commons that we once anticipated it would be.
If you’ve looked at an instagram story in 2025 there’s a strong chance that you’ve encountered an infographic or video detailing exactly how destructive the effects of entering a request into ChatGPT or another AI model have been already and how destructive they are going to be. The amount of water just needed to cool these data centres during a period of climate change in which droughts and wildfires proliferate should amount to crimes against humanity (it does, btw). But increasingly more of our lives exist and depend on these kinds of massive digital platforms. The internet was once a place for hobbyists to make Geocities pages about fishing and to send emails. Now it’s a place you exist in, a brand new physical space for capitalism to extract and exploit. Furthermore the AI boom has meant we’re spending more time demanding more of these data centres just to avoid learning how to interact with or communicate with others, to write university essays, to skip the hard part of making art, to ask questions you could ask your parents or your friends or colleagues. The world is burning so you can send an email that avoids using the wrong sign-off. If you’re low income or no income, if you’re unhoused, if you have access requirements that make using the internet hard, or you don’t have a mobile phone then - tough! You can’t access job services, use your bank account, apply for housing, the list goes on and on. Being perpetually online is a requirement now for having access to the basic things we have in society, and god forbid you try pay for anything in cash. Fascist groups, bigoted hate campaigns and their deplorable ilk now have access to a million ways to funnel false and inflammatory information to you, your parents, your grandparents, without any oversight on whether it’s true or not, and Facebook and friends couldn’t give a hoot whether it’s going to result in hate crimes or challenges to long held legal protections for minority groups. Astroturfing is easier than ever for the kinds of super rich American Evangelicals or thinktanks, and it’s only going to get easier as they erode more and more of the fabric of society and undermine so-called liberal democracy further still. You’re being tracked at every step of your journey to the shop - the crisps you buy are being tracked, your Alexa is listening to you talk about new trousers, your phone is scraping your notes app to give google ads an idea of what kind of colour paint you want for the house. You’re being surveilled by every corporation in the world for every microscopic piece of data they can get from you to get you to buy more Products, more new and cheaply made things at the cost of anyone being exploited in the global south whether that’s for their natural resources or their labour. Tech utopia indeed.
We could, if we wanted, pull a Plissken and welcome ourselves to the human race. Though perhaps it’s just a matter of degrowing the internet to both help our climate recover and to recover some of our ever eroding humanity. It’s convenient and easy and satisfies the kind of urgent need for consumption that capitalism implants in us, but the costs are mounting up. How about we try return to Geocities? I’m not the first to propose this. I’m deeply passionate about it, though, and I hope in writing this I can make a case for taking the World Wide out of the Web in some aspects.
I’m suggesting here not necessarily a technical framework for this idea but instead a kind of backbone for the implementation of a more localised, community first and sustainable kind of Web. One that should and could be possible at a lower cost both in terms of environmental impact and monetary cost, as well as accessible to all in the area. What I propose doesn’t necessitate the end of the internet but instead suggests that we could split our time between the intranet and the internet, allowing community services and communication to flow through the intranet rather than opening the field to anonymised, Anywhere users (corporate and private actors on the internet who are present in areas that do not necessitate or benefit from their presence).
I’m not trying to doomsay here, either. I do remain pretty pessimistic about the future, though I mean to swim against the current as best I can and in the way that I know best, which tends to be the digital and online world. So I want to explore the potential futures of an intranet and how that can, while not solving the latticework of alienating factors in modern society, apply some salve to the things that the internet age has made worse.
What does the local Intranet look like?
Homebrew network enthusiasts (homebrewserver.club and the Feminist Server Summit, among others) will gesture to a few key principles, chiefly: low-cost and low-energy; resilient; sustainable; secure; and many others. Another priority of mine when thinking about decentralising some of the services for which we rely on the internet is to make the network relevant. If we’re hosting a local network intended for the postcode region we’re in, for example, there’s no need to host a national newspaper’s website but a local newspaper and local publications would be welcomed and ideally embraced. Importantly, this service is free and ad-free, and not dependent on capital or national infrastructure to continue its operation. Most of us already have the tools to create this kind of network, but we should always embrace the constraints that might be before us. The Feminist Server Summit in particular outlines a few ways of working that seem to me to be the core principles of this. A feminist server, as outlined:
* Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible
* Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps
* Treats network technology as part of a social reality
* Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible
* Does not confuse safety with security
* Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity
While formulating some of these ideas this manifesto was greatly informative. While referring to a different kind of server (elaborate), I think there’s a useful lens through which to view technology, that being the deprioritization of those things we think of traditionally as being aligned with capitalism and efficiency. The goal of this is not to necessarily make our lives easier (although I will be outlining some of the ways I might suggest that it will), but to reduce the dependency on corporations based in the silicon valley whose priorities and values are unlikely to match those in cities in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Degrowth, conceptually, argues that we must accept a lower quality of living in order for our world to remain liveable. After all, the standard of living guaranteed now in the Global North is dependent on the extraction and exploitation of the standard of living in the Global South, which is already undoubtedly facing the consequences of our new ‘digital utopia’ through extraction of resources in the Congo to manufacture new mobile phones, through droughts and global heating affecting countries much worse off than ourselves, soon to be exacerbated by the massive data centres promised to us in the north so that we can build more of our digital selves. It might be impossible to imagine a post-internet world or a post-digital existence. I suspect the well fed, satisfied people of the west don’t particularly want a Butlerian jihad any time soon.
With the right appetites and effort, though, the kinds of issues caused and exacerbated by the internet can be mitigated and help us sketch out a new future. Maybe. Maybe we can save the print journalism industry and resolve the SEO/clickbait news cycle; maybe we can address loneliness among our communities; mutual aid could flourish; maybe we can become less atomised.