Bury the Dead Internet

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the Dead Internet, which has nothing to do with zombies or the Grateful Dead. It’s the idea that the internet we knew and some of us loved is no longer a human-ennobled domain, having become a wasteland of algorithmic slop and bots talking to bots.

It’s a compelling concept, partly because it lets us feel like the only ones paying attention (WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!), and partly because the way we experience the internet has changed, not for the better. There are still plenty of carbon-based life forms online, of course. What we lost was never the people; it was the possibilities of an open, decentralized space that isn’t a corporate strip mall. What’s needed now isn’t some new architecture, just a return to what we had.

I started thinking about this again reading a Garbage Day newsletter, where Ryan Broderick argued that it’s not so much a Dead Internet as a Clear Channel Internet. Organic virality is over; the content that seems spontaneously popular is either bankrolled outright or floated through some payola arrangement between influencers and clippers, while the feed makes it seem like the unmediated voices of real people.

For old-timers like me, Clear Channel is shorthand for monolithic media, specifically radio. I spent years in federal policy pushing back against corporate consolidation, because I’d already felt the impacts of the 1996 Telecommunications Act as a musician. That legislation eliminated nearly all the caps on radio ownership, and overnight a company like Clear Channel went from a few dozen stations to thousands. The mom-and-pops were wiped out. What we got back were homogenized national playlists under an ever-shrinking set of programming categories.

I used to tell my students that when I was a kid, you could have blindfolded me and driven from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, and I’d have known roughly where we were from the music on the dial. Sadly, the regionally rooted culture I grew up in—back when hearing your own local band on full-power commercial stations was still possible—was treated by the corporations as underbrush to be “cleared.”

Having watched all this go down with radio, a noisy few of us didn’t want to see it happen to the internet. My fifteen years in Washington DC included not just broadcast consolidation but the fight to preserve net neutrality. Through countless federal filings, hearings, congressional testimonies, and meetings with FCC leadership, the argument never changed: the companies that own the pipes don’t decide what passes through them, how fast, or at what price. An independent artist or label’s stuff should arrive on the same terms as a major’s.

That battle focused on the transport layer, where the threat was obvious: ISPs pushing to charge tolls and throttle everyone else. We had some real wins that in hindsight weren’t nearly enough. What none of us fully saw was the consolidation of pipe, content, and device. A handful of companies now own the conduits, the search, the operating system, the ad exchange, and in the case of Comcast, AT&T, Amazon, and Apple, the intellectual property. We kept the road public, and then everything on it became a corporate-controlled shit show anyway.

I came across an essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, “We Need to Rewild the Internet,” that offers a useful frame. They open in 18th-century Prussia, where the state looked at a living forest and saw only lumber. The brilliant white men of the day replanted in single-species rows that erased the biodiversity that made the forest possible. Soon the trees were weak and decimated, if they grew at all.

The moral: simplify a complex system and you wreck it, and the damage may not show until too late—more or less the story of today’s internet. “Rewilding” online spaces makes me think of the good ol’ Geocities days, when everyone tended their special interest gardens and linked out to each other. Diversity as resilience; a time-honored truth.

Trouble is, the rot is deep. Organic search has been all but eclipsed by AI regurgitation with corporate fingers on the scale; now the web feels less like a forest than a feedlot. Which is why rewilding must not be thought of as repair. You can’t fix these platforms, just like you don’t improve feedlot conditions by adding more hormones to the slop.

What we might do is restore conditions for diversity. This means fewer monolithic platforms and more small strange places rooted in the meaningfully human. Who decides the meaning? Who cares? The important thing was always the connection.

Maybe best thing to do with the Dead Internet is bury it and grow something else.