“Show me a 10-foot wall and I’ll show you a [11 or 12]-foot ladder” is a saying used by cheerleaders of everything from free, open borders in Texas to people who want pirated games on their PlayStation 5. They want to show that any attempts to restrict freedom, ultimately, will be defeated or worked around by the willing, especially on the internet. However, we are seeing the death of this free internet in real time, of the internet that used to resist.
The history of the internet from the early 2000s has been a story of walls, ladders, and gardens. Whereas the period before can be characterised as anything ranging from an anarcho-capitalist utopia to a wild west, the late 90s and early 2000s saw companies waking up to the internet and all the money that’s for the taking. This age saw a lot of friction between the erstwhile netizens and the new settler companies trying to occupy their space and build their walls on the internet (a nice example of this is the battle around the domain nissan.com).
This act of building walls by corporations was met with ladders by the internet users. Napster became a cultural phenomenon as a platform for downloading free music before the age of YouTube and Spotify when songs had to be bought individually. ThePirateBay was one of the earliest popular sites (among other torrenting platforms) where you can download everything from movies to video games, and this is all by ignoring sites like libgen, z-lib and Anna’s Archive that all of us are too familiar with.
But, of course, the walls were not taken down, instead the opposite happened. Napster went down under a flurry of legal troubles, and some of the sites I’ve mentioned use some form of life support, shackled by geographic and ISP restrictions. But at least in the early stages and to some extent, there was a recognition that the race cannot go on forever. For many corporations, it was a wake-up call that this is not a race they can win anyway.
This led to the rise of many platforms (to some extent, propped up by easy money) that sought to create a comfy middle ground which tones down the walls to passport-controlled border points. Platforms like Netflix and Spotify led the charge in the creation of a subscriber economy, which promised to tear down the endless walls of the old to a simplified system where a simple, small payment would get you the world. Reading up about the cost of watching sports in the West will give a neat idea about where this model has led us to, which is square one.
On the other hand, and more prominently, the internet also saw the rise of gardens, usually of the walled kind. They are smooth and seamless, as opposed to the clunkiness of the old internet. They are also largely free to use and usually have massive network effects, making it easier to attract and retain people. They promised a brave new world, where you need not worry about viruses, weird people, or strange websites.
But the flip side is that it’s increasingly walled. They don’t want you moving anywhere else, and the more time you spend there, the more ads they can serve (this is an ad to go touch some grass). If you’ve wondered why Instagram banned links in posts, this is why. It’s also the reason why Google search has gotten worse, and why platforms make it dense and hard to move data between platforms.
This propensity and drive to be the definitive, one-stop solution is much more destructive than one would realise. On one end, it leads to some funny things (remember those funny Meta VR stuff?). On the other end, it is destroying any semblance of a free internet: ads determine free speech, and summaries, overviews, and linking restrictions are killing media and independent websites to create an internet of a few walled gardens (Google Gardens has a nice ring to it, no?)
This has created a cycle of doom for the free internet. Independent websites and media that relied on ad revenue found themselves stolen by Google and Meta’s walled gardens. This partly led them to either enshittify themselves with ads and slop everywhere (ever tried to read Economic Teams?) or go on a subscription-first model, which involves building literal paywalls. Now, if that’s bad enough, bring in the LLMs that are literally devouring the free internet and recreating them behind the walls, leaving the rest of the internet broke.
Now, it’s not like there was no way around this; there are useful extensions and websites that can bypass these paywalls including 12ft.io (RIP), which was inspired by the idiom used in my lede. But they are also being put down by the heavy cannon of lawsuits, deplatforming, user bans and better technology (half the reason I’m writing this is because Wordle Bot recently got playwalled). The media feel that they are being squeezed by tech and AI platforms, but choose to go against the ones they can easily conquer.
The next few years are eventually going to take the internet beyond walls into dark, dingier, locked rooms of AI-induced slop and hallucinations where they have the power to not only understand you, but also shape your beliefs and actions while literally devouring anything that comes in their way (RIP robots.txt). Finally, we can bid adieu to the internet resistance.
Article 19 