The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic:

Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to frequent.

If you care about The Internet, capital I, this is worth a read and think… The systems that underpin everything outside the corporate theme parks of Facebook and Google have stayed alive almost miraculously, but need help…

And yet… The fact that this was posted on The Atlantic may well mean that some visitors will be paywalled from seeing it, one of the great harms that I didn’t see in the essay.