In their thought-provoking Noema Magazine essay, “We Need to Rewild the Internet,” Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon draw an unexpected parallel between 18th-century “scientific forestry” and our modern digital ecosystem. Centuries ago, Prussian officials sought to maximize profit by flattening complex, biodiverse forests into tidy, single-species rows of timber. While the first harvest yielded immense wealth, the resulting monoculture left the land fragile, eventually triggering widespread “forest death” (Waldsterben).
Today’s internet, the authors argue, has suffered a similar fate. Driven by a pathology of top-down command and control, a handful of tech giants have squeezed out the messy, decentralized complexity that originally made the web vibrant. We now operate within an extractive digital monoculture where two or three corporations dominate app stores, operating systems, browsers, and cloud architecture.
To remedy this, Farrell and Berjon suggest we look to ecology rather than standard tech regulation. Instead of focusing on incremental fixes or trying to preserve specific “endangered species” of software, we must “rewild” the internet. In nature, rewilding aims to restore natural, autonomous processes at scale to foster self-organizing complexity.
For the internet, this means treating the network as a living environment that requires structural intervention to thrive. It means using antitrust enforcement, open standards, and public funding to aggressively dismantle corporate chokepoints and raze the monopolies blocking out the light.
Rewilding is a paradigm shift: it transitions technologists from mere engineers to crisis ecologists, providing a shared story and blueprint to reclaim our digital spaces. By introducing multiple points of interaction and restoring true adversarial interoperability, we can shift away from a sterile corporate zoo and regenerate a resilient, open digital commons that can truly evolve.