Alternative Visions of the Internet

The internet—saturated with advertising, tracking, and surveillance; optimized for engagement and attentional capture at any cost; and riddled with spam—was made, not born. With an astute and accurate comparison between the haphazard and self-sabotaging legislation of spam email and the current debate on regulation of artificial intelligence, Rebecca Coyne’s “Spam Policy and the Myth of the Ungovernable Internet” (Issues, Spring 2026) is a reminder that the current arrangement is neither an inevitability nor an accident but a failure of vision and of nerve. It is the result of specific decisions taken, or not taken, by people responding to incentives, promises, and stories. Above all, it is a relinquishment of power and responsibility—and it has a lesson for
us now.

Spam was always a negotiation, down to the word itself. To identify something as “spam” was to assert the purpose of computer networks by flagging people, activities, and tools that were not permitted. It is astounding to go back to the archives of spam discussion in the early days of the network and see how sophisticated, serious, and diverse were the positions on technology use and governance. Most shocking of all is their shared, underlying premise: that it was up to all of us to decide. Information technology was answerable to our goals as users, contributors, architects, hosts, moderators, citizens, and humans.

Perhaps in retrospect, the most important thing about the AI hype cycle will be that it marked the end of decades of political passivity toward the tech industry. Strikingly, these new tech politics are often local and personal, not just national or international. Consider, for example, the data center construction struggles within states and counties, cities and towns, over the annexation of their infrastructure and the capture of their water. Or the compelling debates over when and how to incorporate AI tools into creative industries and creative work. Or the discussions about social, economic, psychological, and environmental costs versus the utility and future promises made by the industry.

After decades of being taught to see themselves as customers in relation to technology—customers who could always be cajoled and bullied into accepting whatever the industry needed to monetize—people seem to be understanding themselves as citizens. The goals people had on early computer networks were marvelously diverse: from building countless hyper-focused niche communities to accelerating scientific collaboration to inventing new games, from anonymous conversation free of interpersonal biases to free access to all human knowledge. Now is the time to begin excavating those alternative visions again. We should understand how much better our digital lives could have been and ask how we want them to be in the future—a question which we must assert the political power to answer for ourselves.

Finn Brunton