Dear reader,
I’ve been turning over a particular thought lately, something about how we keep blaming "the internet" for all manner of social ills, when what we’re really talking about is just one part of it: social media.
It’s a slip of perception, subtle but important. When we grumble about dwindling attention spans, algorithmic rabbit holes, or the strange warping of time and self, we’re not thinking about email, or JSTOR, or even Wikipedia: we’re thinking about Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X. We’re thinking about platforms.
The issue is, we’ve begun to treat social media as synonymous with the internet itself. As though the village square had engulfed the whole city. And this distorts not only our conversations, but our assumptions: what we take to be natural, even inevitable.
This conflation carries consequences. It normalizes the particular architecture of social media: the infinite scroll, the algorithmic feed, the incentive structure geared entirely toward engagement. These aren’t foundational elements of the internet. They’re commercial decisions, design choices made by private companies, usually to maximize attention and extract value; not to support understanding, or even connection.
Think of this detail we give for granted, and rarely question: why can’t an Instagram user message someone on TikTok? We shrug it off as obvious, as though it simply couldn’t be otherwise. But compare it to email. A Gmail user can contact someone on Outlook. You can even run your own little mail server from a Raspberry Pi if you’re inclined, and still communicate with the world. The reason is because email was built for interoperability, with open protocols and decentralized logic.
Social media is the opposite. It’s siloed by design. These platforms aren’t trying to enable cross-boundary communication: they’re trying to keep us inside their walls, for longer stretches, gathering more data. The barriers aren’t technical: they’re strategic. But we’ve lived with them long enough that we begin to accept them as features of the landscape rather than intentional enclosures.
It’s not even a new story. In the early 20th century, telephone networks were monopolies: AT&T in the U.S., most prominently. You couldn’t call someone on a rival network because the companies refused to interconnect. It wasn’t until 1968, with the Carterfone decision, that users were allowed to connect third-party devices to the AT&T network. And not until the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that real interoperability was mandated, forcing companies to open their networks to competition.
What followed was a flourishing: more devices, more providers, and eventually, the open infrastructure we now take for granted. That kind of change doesn’t happen by market forces alone. It required political will, legal action, and a clear rejection of proprietary control.
Or consider the invention of the infinite scroll. That seamless, bottomless pit of content, so smooth we barely notice it anymore. It was created in 2006 by Aza Raskin, meant to improve user experience. And it did, in a way; but it also eliminated natural stopping points. Browsing became less a series of choices and more a kind of submission.
Imagine, if you will, a web experience with just a touch of friction: where to see more, you have to click. A moment of pause. A flicker of choice. That friction restores agency. The endless scroll removes it.
And then, of course, there’s the algorithmic feed. The great orchestrator of modern attention. It’s no longer us who decide what to see next. The platform decides. TikTok epitomizes this: you open the app, and content simply begins. There’s no need, nor space, for choice. You just keep watching.
This wasn’t always the case. Earlier iterations of the web asked you to click. To choose. Even that minor gesture carried meaning. The architecture of attention was different. Now, it’s passive. Content comes to you unbidden. Thought is optional.
Think about what TikTok would feel like if you had to search for every video. If curiosity had to be exercised. How much would change? Not just the experience, but your orientation toward it. That micro-decision, repeated again and again, shapes our habits of mind.
All of which brings me here: the shape of the internet is not inevitable. It is not the logical outcome of technology simply progressing. It is the result of choices. And that means (thankfully) it could be otherwise.
We need to get better at noticing the form that technology takes, because form is never neutral. It informs what we think, how we act, even who we become. To ignore it is to give up part of our agency. But to examine it, and to question it, is to begin taking it back.
Nowhere is this more important than with algorithms. These opaque little engines determine so much of what we see and, by extension, what we believe to be common, popular, normal. They work in the dark, often for the benefit of interests we don’t see.
And their power isn’t limited to content recommendation. During elections, for instance, algorithmic feeds can influence the very direction of a nation. By modulating which messages are shown, which emotions are stirred, and which voices are amplified or buried, these platforms are capable of swaying perceptions and nudging outcomes. It doesn’t take a leap to say: this is political power. Unaccountable, undemocratic, and exercised at scale.
These effects aren’t incidental. They are the system working exactly as intended: to capture attention and steer behavior for profit.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could outlaw recommendation-based feeds. I mean that quite literally. We could decide, collectively, that predictive algorithms have no place in public discourse. That the timeline should be chronological, that posts should appear because we chose to follow their authors, not because a machine made a guess about our psychology.
Wouldn’t that feel different? Now imagine if the web still resembled its earlier form: static pages, no infinite scroll, no recommendation algorithms. Would your experience of it be the same? Would your attention move differently? Would you? Would your behavior around your smartphone respond in the same way?
And luckily, we don't even have to imagine. Take RSS feeds, for instance. A delightfully boring bit of old internet tech. With RSS, you subscribe to a site or blog, and when something new is published, it shows up. No manipulation. No bait.
I use an RSS reader on my phone. When I open it, I see a clean list of updates from writers I’ve chosen to follow. When there’s nothing new, the screen is blank. It’s deeply boring and uneventful. And that’s precisely the point: when the screen is empty, I simply set the phone down and return to my life. The tool doesn’t demand attention: it serves me, then steps aside.
Vale,
Davide