Building a new Net in the Shell of the Old (en)

Danny O'Brien The United State's radical syndicalists, the IWW or
Wobblies, had an expression: "Build the new world in the shell of
the old." That's the motto of prefigurative politics, where
activists and participants attempt to create a better society by
devising and inhabiting counter-institutions and cultures that
enact the change they wish to see. Prefigurative politics
influenced the direct action of the early 21st century, including
Occupy, and t's a model that has a long history in early Internet
utopianism, where we were all meant to build and share the tools
that let us be equal peers on an equal net. The last decade of
Internet policy work and governance has morphed from prefigurative
politics into one of careful accommodation and negotiation: with
the centralised, corporate goliaths of social media and the cloud,
as well as technologically sophisticated state actors. Now that
those states and giants are suffering their own set of crises,
should we work to defend those compromises? Or should Net activists
strike out on their own once again, and take seriously the project
of building a new Net to change the world?