It is time to build a new internet | Mr. Market

Every morning that we open our phones and laptops, we are staring pitifully at a necrotic digital organism.<br>It's sad and fucked up, no way around ...">

Every morning that we open our phones and laptops, we are staring pitifully at a necrotic digital organism.<br>It's sad and fucked up, no way around ...">

Every morning that we open our phones and laptops, we are staring pitifully at a necrotic digital organism.<br>It's sad and fucked up, no way around ...">

It is time to build a new internet

22 May, 2026

Every morning that we open our phones and laptops, we are staring pitifully at a necrotic digital organism.

It's sad and fucked up, no way around it, and there is no reason to go on what I'll call the Obvious Internet at all anymore IMO unless you are morbidly curious about how far we have fallen.

There are tiny safe zones, like secret closed invite-only forums (i am part of one and it is great), Hacker News is still solid, and bearblog has lovely little corners. Kagi makes it easier to find these remnants of our more honest past. So all is not yet lost. But it is so, so close to being lost. And there is no longer a true decentralized public commons for discourse in the digital realm.

I keep wondering if maybe I should make a private, invite-only forum where I can invite some interesting friends and acquaintances (including zany founders, reclusive poets, eccentric engineers of all kinds, high school teachers, homegrown philosophers, garage tinkerers, and beloved drug-addled futurist artists), but I think this would quickly be ruined too. I would want the network to become tree-like, each initially-invited friend or acquaintance of mine inviting their own interesting friends, but eventually someone with a profit motive would wiggle their way in. And as long as companies and the people who work for them have access to the same internet you are using for your forum, there is a profit motive to ruin that forum. It is hopeless to try to keep them out.

I want somebody to build a new internet, straight up. I'm going to post this to Hacker News to see if a wayward, bored, ambitious computer scientist will take this on. I am not a computer scientist; I understand some basic theory stuff but only insofar as I've read a lot about it.

This will be a shitty/abstract PRD for the new protocol and how we should govern it.

Problem

I do technical writing and founder content for work and I agree with everyone that marketers are a virus (for the most part. I'm biased obviously but I do think certain kinds of founder content and technical content, when done right and in good faith, is fun and interesting.)

I'm not even trying to pass any kind of moral judgment. Viruses aren't evil. They're just doing what they do: replicating within an open host system.

That said, it does suck for the host system, of course. We keep trying to fix the problem of this virus by creating new platforms and open forums and stuff, but that is like trying to stop a virus by generating new cells within an infected host. Obviously it's not going to work.

We had Reddit, which was good for a time, but now every other comment is clearly AI generated or at least heavily AI assisted. And any community that has users that can be funneled toward a product is full of astroturfed product endorsements. Twitter has decent profiles and threads but there's obviously lots of trolling, bots, and mindless AI-generated shit there, too.

Discord, group chats, and certain subreddits are decent. But LinkedIn as a good-faith networking site is trashed, Reddit is trashed, Google itself as a search engine is trashed, and I have no idea what Instagram/TikTok/Facebook look like right now because it has all sucked for so long now. Threads just pissed me off from the jump, so I don't know what's going on there.

The internet experiment is yet another depressing example of humans failing to be conscientious stewards of an open commons. The things that made the internet great (democratized access & contribution permissions, low barrier to entry, and ease of use) has also made it insanely easy to pollute.

I don't know if we can moderate our way out of this one. I think we have to throw it away and start fresh.

Of course, this doesn't need to be a mass exodus. Those who are satisfied with this version of the internet are more than welcome to stay. I am not interested in bankrupting Google or the companies who depend on Google. I just want to read interesting things, learn, and have gratifying discussions and debates with people who want to do the same.

Goal

This is going to sound absurdly over-earnest and idealistic, but that's just the kind of person I am and so it's unavoidable.

I want a living, growing, evolving archive of knowledge, curiosities, and stories akin to the most ambitious, collaborative, and good-faith intellectual explorations ever created. Something similar in architecture and spirit to the Talmud or...