In an unusual right-to-repair battle, members of the ethical hacking group Dragon Sector discovered deliberate software locks in Polish trains that caused them to "brick" when serviced at independent repair shops. The manufacturer, Newag, has denied the allegations and threatened legal action, but hackers successfully restored the fleet to service by uncovering a hidden "unlock code" within the trains' control panels.In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.

Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.

It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies. For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over 80%. Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software. Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure make up over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.

Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can’t run an open, global “network of networks” where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete. No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”

Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots
The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency, it also ensures that the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.

Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.

Initially funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct “players” and “layers” is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.

In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force, raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, wrote in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.” Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services.

As Daigle put it: “The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation.” Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one.

Since then, standards development organizations started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of simplification and control, most internet engineers simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.

What Is Rewilding?
Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It’s less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.

Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.”

It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command and control.

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock.

What Ecology Knows
Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from. First, it knows that shifting baselines are real.

If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.

Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else?

Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. What scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It’s one thing to reintroduce wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, and quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a polder (land reclaimed from a body of water) known as Oostvaardersplassen near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but Oostvaardersplassen has struggled.

In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the famously bad-tempered German Heck cattle and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.

Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were horrified by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling.

Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Because the animals had nowhere else to go, overgrazing and collapse was inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right.

Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the Fediverse with its federated islands, or Bluesky with algorithmic choice and composable moderation.