I’ve been thinking about the internet a lot these past weeks. We built something we don’t understand, handed it over to people we shouldn’t have trusted, and now we’re living inside the result.

I think a lot of us are in the same boat, endlessly considering this thing that has consumed us all whole, prodding the edges of the sac that binds us, trying desperately not to drink the increasingly toxic amniotic fluid we're swimming in. We're a global cabal of smokers, each of us desperately chasing that nicotine fix of our first time, that first drag. We can’t even recall how it made us cough up our lungs, so Christ knows what it’s doing to us now.

Except, we all know what it’s doing to us now, don’t we? Last week, to date this a little and place it in amber in the context of time and place, we all watched in horror as the President of the United States, communicating purely through a social media ecosystem that he himself owns, threatened to wipe an entire civilisation ‘off the face of the earth.’ A country of 92 million people, the cradle of civilisation itself, threatened with obliteration not based on its incursion into another country, nor any outward aggression, based on the whims of a man who seems barely able to hold a conscious thought in his head.

The next day, I found myself, with my family, wandering through Kew Gardens. If you’re not familiar, Kew is the Royal Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of London. It lays a claim to being one of the most biodiverse places on earth, and is both a wonderful visitor attraction, as well as a place of serious scientific work to try and preserve this wonderful world of ours before we manage to burn it all to the ground.

I was, at possibly the most opportune moment, getting out and touching grass. But as I wandered through cherry blossoms and tulips, I found myself wondering, how did we get here? And, more importantly, how do we find our way back? And why is it so hard to buy a soft drink here?

As for the first point, the truth is it was the internet wot did it. Trump is the logical endpoint for a digital ecosystem that’s been hijacked in the name of a global oligarchy that feeds a far-right movement hell-bent on destroying democracy as we know it.

Oh, wait, my tinfoil hat slipped a bit there.

Let’s back up a bit.

Soil Acidity

I fall into a weird bracket, generationally speaking. Technically, I am a late Gen X’er, but I share a lot more in common with the millennials that followed than I do my more nihilistic brethren. I’ve seen it referred to as a Xennial, but that’s a stupid word, so let’s not use that. What it means, however, is that we were the first generation to encounter technology and the internet as a defining part of our adolescence, but we also remember a time before the computer.

For me, personally, I resisted a lot of that change at first. I didn’t get an email address until my university foisted one upon me, and I didn’t get a mobile phone for a good few years after my friends. But by the time The Internet landed a few years later, I was hooked.

First, it was Livejournal. Then Myspace. Then Facebook, and finally Twitter. That period, right up to, say, 2016, is what I think of now as the halcyon days of the internet for me, personally. Back when it seemed to offer us so much hope, such a sense of community. Of possibility. All these little communities we built were filled with hope, with optimism. We were going to bend that long arc of history with our tweets, our jokes, and hope. Fucking hope….

Remember that?

Fast forward a scant ten years, and where do we find ourselves? A technofascist new global order is still gunning people down in the streets. Its leader threatens civilizational wipeout, without consequence. At the same time, billionaires extract the last drops of profit from a dying Earth, and the AI hype machine tells us all that we'd all better get used to doing menial jobs.

And how have I responded to all of that? Well, I doomscrolled through it all. I let it all wash over me like a tide of effluent, like I’m swimming in one of Britain’s increasingly enshittified rivers. Then that made me sad, so I would cut myself off from it all. But then I’d feel like I’m missing out on stuff that I really felt I should know about, seeing as I’m a writer and all that. So I’d plug into a different bit of the internet, and turn the hosepipe back on.

Except, it’s the same old slurry. All doom, no understanding. None of it settles. As Steve Bannon so ineloquently put it, the zone is constantly flooded with shit, and we’re the ones wading in it.

So I made a conscious choice, over the past six months or so, to be a bit more intentional. I deleted the social media apps from my phone and replaced them with an RSS reader. I followed journalists’ writing, rather than their tweets, and I set about trying to understand where we are, rather than stare at it in desperation.

Let me tell you, it didn’t make me feel much better.

Invasive species

I read about the intersections between Epstein, Bannon, Mandelson, and Peter Thiel, and how they’ve led to vital parts of the British state being captured by an openly fascist corporation. I read about how AI slop is being used by the far right as a dehumanisation engine, while eroding the very concept of truth.

I learned about the concept of enshittification, and how it captured not just our internet, but our democracies, and the planet at large.

Closer to home, I learned how Reform-led councils are quietly dismantling climate policy while promising to fix the NHS by replacing it, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch campaigns for North Sea drilling at a company run by one of her party's biggest donors. About the billionaire takeover of the Telegraph, and what that means for what passes for mainstream conservatism in this country.

And, of course, like so many of us, I’ve read about how the AI industry is burning billions it doesn't have on technology that doesn't work, that erodes our collective intelligence, leads to mental health degradation, and possible economic collapse, all while the content it was trained on was stolen from the people who created it.

People like me.

Through it all, I couldn’t help but feel, this is all connected, right?

Frost Tender

At one point, I found myself staring at my phone, wondering: Is this what people feel like when they fall through a QAnon or anti-vaxx wormhole? If the conspiracy mindset is part of what’s led us here, is me sitting in bed reading all this shit any different? Am I falling for the same shit, but a different flavour? Piss and vinegar, perhaps?

So I’ve tried to interrogate my assumptions and the sources I’m reading. Am I reading primary sources, or am I reading people with a particular worldview interpreting primary sources? Am I seeking counter-argument, or confirmation? Are the journalists I trust actually following the evidence, or are they following a narrative that happens to confirm what they already believe, which just so happens to tally with what I believe?

The honest answer, most of the time, is: I think they're following the evidence. But I also know that ‘I think’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The QAnon believer thinks they're following the evidence too, even if they’re doing it while injecting themselves with some unknown ‘peptides’ they got off some dodgy bloke in their gym. The anti-vaxxer thinks they're asking the hard questions. The anti-trans lobby believes they’re standing up for women’s rights while they police the toilets and the local sports pitches for anyone who doesn’t match their idea of what a woman looks like.

The difference, I tell myself, is that my sources have editors, corrections policies, and track records, and names attached to them. That the journalists writing this stuff have put their bylines on it and can be held accountable in a way that an anonymous Facebook Group post cannot.

And that's probably true. But it's also exactly the kind of reasoning that feels airtight from the inside of any belief system. After all, there are plenty of anti-trans activists out there who have editors. Fuck, they’ve got all the editors.

So I keep asking the question. Not because I think I'm wrong, but because the moment you stop asking is probably the moment you should start worrying. It’s the only defence we have.

Huh, turns out I did learn something from my media studies degree.

What I keep coming back to is this: the connections being documented aren't really that hard to find. They're not hidden in the dark web or whispered between conspiracists. They're in the Guardian, in the Financial Times, in Byline Times, in congressional testimony, in public company filings.

The story isn't ‘shadowy cabal is secretly running the world.’ The story is that a very small number of extremely wealthy people are doing this more or less openly, and counting on the rest of us being too overwhelmed, too busy, or too demoralised to join the dots.

Which is, if anything, more frightening than a conspiracy. Conspiracies can be exposed.

This is just a Thursday.

Deadheading

But, as I read deeper and deeper, I found something else. Hope.

Wherever you find these deeper investigations, you find communities built around them. And they often have an interoperability about them that leads you from one space to another. In these places, there’s hope. There’s sharing of community and ideas and… whisper it… resistance.

Resistance, not just in the formalised way of organising marches and sharing information, but in a resistance to the Brave New World that is pushed by the billionaire classes and their captured, client journalists. To their closed social media ecosystems and their algorithms, and to the isolation that fuels conspiracy and fear. If AI hype is a dehumanisation engine, community and human creativity are the opposite.

It seems to me, from years of being online and on the left, that there’s been a trap that the right has exploited, again and again, and that is trying to appeal to everyone. To find that ONE TRUE WAY that will convince the whole world that we’re right, and pure, and we will all walk into a utopia forever. But that’s never going to work, because none of us can agree on everything. If you’re reading this, even if you agree with most of what I’m saying, chances are there’s ground we won’t agree on. And we let those disagreements get in the way of what we have in common: empathy.

The right has no such problem. They don’t need ideological purity because self-interest is enough. The only motivating factor for them is greed, and everything else can be moulded to meet that greed. People. Democracy. The world’s finite resources. None of it is anything more than an obstacle to their greed. And there are too many people out there who we will never reach, because they’ve formed their whole worldview through that fear by people with no empathy or consideration as to the consequences of their actions.

Germination.

We can't reach all of them, and I increasingly think we shouldn't even try. We should cultivate the strength of our own side, because there are more of us. We may even find, in doing so, that some of those who seem so lost to the ideas of justice and compassion may come back. But we need to stop trying to beat the right at their own game, as we see Labour doing again and again, and develop a garden, to which the price of admission is empathy and hope. Actually, not a garden. A shitload of them.

That can only happen through establishing interconnected communities, small enough to self-govern. We can't trust corporate-driven spaces to do that, because they'll just flog us bad AI and their own self-interest. Instead, we need to build our gardens and let real people look into them and say: hey, that looks nice.

We’re already seeing this happen. The success of Zohran Mamdani and the rise of the Green Party here in the UK have not happened in isolation. Both believe in community building. In fact, the recent success of the Greens in Gorton and Denton happened because they were able to speak to very different communities. Not through misleading, being fraudulent, or ignoring the differences between those groups, but by speaking directly to their shared concerns.

The No Kings protests and anti-ICE movements in the US and the Pro Palestine marches across the world show that people can still mobilise and create communities even in an ecosystem that shouldn’t allow them to do so. And, as I prepare to post this, Victor Orban's 16-year reign of Hungary is at an end, brought down by someone who was once a part of that same reign.

It's early days, but it seem that the new ruler, Magyar, was able to convince Hungarians to vote for him and not for any other opposition party (who, in the end, got a total of 2% of the votes). Magyar himself is no liberal leftie, but the people of Hungary got their arses together to get rid of fascism. The new leader is saying all the right things, and let's see how long he can hold that support together, but for now, there's hope in a country that hasn't had any for so long. That hope reverberates all around us, and gives pause to the enemies of hope.

And there are the smaller things, too: People are increasingly moving away from subscription models back to ownership of the things they love, be that through the resurgence of CDs and Blu-rays, or the growth of self-hosted solutions like Plex, because people are sick of paying for nothing. People are running their own servers again. Hosting their own photos. Keeping local copies of things they care about instead of trusting them to disappear behind a paywall or a licensing deal. Go onto reddit and look at r/degoogle or r/selfhosted and you’ll see thousands of people trying to cut the tech giants out of their lives, however they can.

Then there is the increasing return of RSS, and the rise of reader-funded, independent journalism. And in people choosing to follow individuals rather than platforms, to read deliberately rather than scroll. Newsletters, personal blogs, weird little websites that aren’t trying to scale into anything. I mean, look at you, making it nearly 2000 words into this nonsense.

Well done, you.

You see it in smaller, quieter ways, too. Group chats replacing public feeds. Private Discords where people actually talk to each other instead of performing for an algorithm. Communities forming around shared interests that aren’t immediately flattened into content. People making things, be they zines, podcasts, niche forums, and just… letting them be small. It’s all quite punk rock.

Lastly, as I wrote in my last post, there’s also the birth of federated social media protocols AT Protocol and ActivityPub, and the incredible communities springing up in both. They’re showing us all that a different way of being on the internet is possible, and they’re building the foundations of it, right now. Not for VC financing, not because they want to build a closed platform and make billions, but because they see an internet for the user, not the platform.

A garden is not a place. It’s a journey.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to try to explore all a bit more, in a series I’m calling The Garden. But what exactly is that? Well, here’s my definition, the best I can see it:

The Garden is your own corner of the internet, built on your own terms. It’s small, tended, and deliberately not optimised for scale or engagement. It’s an act of resistance and resilience against the corporate platforms that have captured our attention, atomised our communities, and handed the infrastructure of public life to people who want to use it against us.

It's the belief that the answer to a broken internet isn't to fight for the platforms we've lost, but to build something new in the spaces they haven't yet colonised, connected to others doing the same thing, where the price of admission is empathy rather than outrage, and where what you create belongs to you.

Right, where did I leave my trowel?

About the author

Paul Stephenson writes pulp fiction for the digital age. His first novel series – the indie-published apocalyptic Blood on the Motorway trilogy – has been an Amazon bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. A former journalist, he holds a diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University.

His stories have been featured on the chart-topping horror podcasts, The Other Stories and The Night’s End. His newest project, the eBook serial The Sunset Chronicles, is a dystopian sci-fi thriller that will delight and terrify fans of science fiction and horror alike. He is also the creator of the podcasts, Bleakwood, tales of terror from a mysterious English town, and Darkness Come Alive, a modern vampire tale set in York.

He lives in England with his wife, two children, and one hellhound.

Check out all his books here: