The internet is broken (and we don’t need Elon Musk to fix it).

30 years after the foundation of the web we are celebrating while we should be worried. The internet is the greatest invention of humankind, but as nuclear physics spawned the atomic bomb, the internet is causing a similar side effect that, although not as evident, might be equally destructive.

Data breaches are increasing in number, and cybersecurity is not keeping up. In 2018 alone, over 2 billion accounts were hacked; statistically, you were one of them (have you checked? https://haveibeenpwned.com/). This is not a matter of privacy alone. It is about the future of all of us, as humans. Each civilization is as big as the network it builds. The Ancient Romans paved the roads. The Europeans of the Renaissance created the printing press. The post-nuclear generation has built the internet. “Has built” rather than “built” because the creation is still ongoing. It is a Big Bang that never ends. But even a continuous genesis gets more and more steady by the time. Men grow old. Water turns to ice. And so do the things that we create. Networks are rivers. The water takes time to dig the riverbed, but once done, its future flow is final; it will take time for the river to shape a new course. Indeed, each creation is recursive: the river shapes the riverbed as much as the riverbed shapes the river.

The internet is no different. While we, collectively, are contributing to its creation, it is molding the very substance of our species. What will become of us in the future depends on how we are going to shape it in the present.

And right now, it is not in good shape.

Fake news spreads like wildfire. Democracy gets hacked. The Flat Earth movement is on the rise. Anonymity is a relic of the past. Cyber-surveillance is the status quo. What has gone wrong? Who are the culprits? Social media, providing doxing-ready tools to tyrannies and keyboard warriors eager to be triggered? Search engines, that transform humans from subjects of communications into fungible data objects? Sharing economy companies, that make us work for a dime? But the answer is none of them. Social media, search engines, sharing economy companies: they all grow because of us. Because we use them. We, the users, are the culprits.

We are the rivers. These are just tools, they were not designed for evil. We did our part, chasing dopamine feedback loops and short-term satisfaction. We have turned us into addicts, allowing the marvels of the internet to hack into our mind, lying on our smartphones like pathological gamblers in front of the dazzling slot machine. In the era of robots we are the true robots. Who’s we? This is not a trench warfare, we versus them. There is no we. There is no them. The pool player that is trying to get us in the hole is a billiard ball to someone else. Everyone is a cog in the machine. There is no ruler of the internet looking down on us. The internet is a labyrinth without a Minotaur. To make it our home again, the only way is to break down the walls and build bridges.

The labyrinth is the culprit — the machine that runs the internet. The machine is the root of the problem, the machine is the Moloch to whom we offer out data as a sacrifice — the gigantic, tentacular, all-knowing server farm on top of which everything is built. Without the machine, Google, Facebook and the likes wouldn’t be hoarding and mining the invaluable treasure of the private intellectual output of humankind. They are not the machine, but temporary faces of the faceless machine. They are consequences. When we use the internet we are not simply feeding the internet giants. We are feeding the machine. We are becoming more and more a cog in the machine.

It is a matter of architecture. The internet was born peer-to-peer, not with server farms. Like the outer space, it had no up or down. It was decentralized, not hierarchical. Soon after the start, we discovered that the one-server architecture was not able to scale up to the workload and volume of data we were interested to share. Almost as quickly, a solution was found: moving from file servers to insanely massive server farms, the key structural walls of the labyrinth. And what happens when you tear down the key structural wall of a building? You tear down the whole building. You start anew.

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past. Tim Berners-Lee

This is our quest: to decentralize the internet. From centralized data centers to a living superorganism made of everyone’s resources. It is not impossible. We don’t need a Musk-like superhero, nor to split ourselves between miners and users. These resources already exist, we just have to put them together. It is not some parlor magic trick. There is no magic. One step at a time we can create a Swarm, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Give life to the machine. On top of this Swarm, a brave new world can be built: from distributed storage to distributed hosting, content delivery networks, edge computing — you name it. Together, we can make the internet alive.

Join us and together we can change the internet.