That really is a long read. I think the extended metaphor was good. I just skimmed the article, which might be antithetical to this community’s intent. However, I feel like I understand the gist of it.
I wish they provided some more concrete technical examples of rewilding the internet. When it comes to the internet, the number one barrier to entry is security. Whilst big companies represent a single point of failure, they have far more time and energy to protect servers from vulnerabilities. Rewilding implies - to me - self hosting your applications on your own servers? Because otherwise how do you get off of the large corporate server farms? But self hosting comes with problems: security, resiliency, speed, etc.
The article dismisses these issues by pointing out that large corporate solutions have security failures, downtime, and the speed comes at the cost of data privacy. Those are valid points - sort of. But they are not really taking historical context into account. Self hosted / self managed servers were constantly under attack. The wild internet was… Wild. People were extremely vulnerable and hacked all the time. Servers went down because upgrades often meant shutting down your server while you upgrade it. Speed was just flat out slow.
Maybe I swung too far in the other direction from my - admittedly skimming - interpretation. Does rewilding still have room for companies to solve those things for us? Just more competition?
Rewilding, as defined in the artIcle, isn’t about reverting a place to a previous state, but instead is about reintroducing diversity to a monoculture system. So the author isn’t saying we need to go back to self hosted small independent servers, only that the internet needs more service providers in each space. It really was a fantastic read.
