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Rewilding the Internet

On the Metal · Ep. 22 · 46 min

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On the Metal · Episode 22

Curator’s Note
What if we treated the web like an ecosystem instead of a factory? This episode introduces a framework for thinking about the internet that changed how I see everything. The metaphor isn’t just poetic — it’s practical.

The internet was designed as a network — decentralized, resilient, diverse. Over time, it became a monoculture — centralized, fragile, homogeneous. This episode asks: can we rewild it?

The concept of rewilding comes from ecology: instead of trying to manage every aspect of an ecosystem, you reintroduce the conditions for natural diversity and let the system heal itself. Applied to the internet, this means supporting open protocols, decentralized platforms, and the messy, beautiful chaos of individual expression.

The guests — an ecologist, a network engineer, and a digital rights activist — explore what a rewilded internet would look like. It would be slower. It would be messier. It would be harder to monetize. And it would be infinitely more interesting.

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