Rewilding the Internet

The World Wide Web was intended to be a digital ecosystem, named to capture this concept of a global interconnection. In the beginning, it thrived on openness, collaboration, the frictionless exchange of ideas. But where a spiderweb grows from instinct, the World Wide Web is designed – coded and recoded by engineers, ad funnels and the infinite scroll. Its evolution has followed the logic of monetisation, not community.

What was once built on the sincerity of authenticity now bends toward the prioritisation of growth and profit over experience. As we enter Web4, the internet feels more like an entanglement – AI algorithms feeding markets, markets feeding themselves, expanding beyond their own capacity to sustain. Feeds are clogged with commercial content, competing for attention via hyper-targeting, data extraction and information overload. This prolonged environmental stress leaves digital inhabitants struggling to process, reflect or contribute meaningfully. The source has been contaminated – a once-living network turned stagnant, resisting renewal.

Social media has become the single largest advertising channel globally in total spend. The money keeps pouring in, yet much of it waters barren land. Many companies spend blindly in upper-funnel marketing, unsure why they’re doing what they do. The system itself is depleted. The constant hawking – ads, sponsorships, influencer-driven promotions – is killing the scene. Less and less feels real, because it isn’t. We’re digital labourers feeding platforms with data, content and attention while tech giants harvest the profits.

But there is a better way...

Rewilding the internet is an act of stewardship, not withdrawal. It is on us to regenerate these ecosystems, restore balance and conserve them for future digital inhabitants. To do so, we must dismantle the algorithmic uniformity that has been engineered into our ecosystems. Communities must reclaim agency, decentralise themselves from paid-search and nurture environments where genuine creativity can flourish. If we are to recover these spaces, diversity, creativity and genuine connection must be allowed to thrive again. Even small, deliberate actions – curating feeds thoughtfully, supporting independent creators and privileging meaningful interactions – can spark wider regeneration.

Vertical niches are becoming the new horizontal platforms, dug out by those seeking unmonetised, unmeasured refuge online. Here, the social internet breathes again and is simply alive. Across the web, small yet resilient communities model what it means to inhabit digital spaces responsibly and creatively.

4khd__ is a digital community visualising and articulating projects around cycling and navigation since 2019. They exist for their community, quietly drawing in those who resonate. Not built for social exposure or growth, but for the sharing of ideas and realities, they connect like-minded thoughts and experiment with translating ideas into a visual language.

Another form of digital stewardship is Jacky Zhao’s website, jzhao.xyz – a personal “hypertext garden,” a digital space designed for exploration and playful engagement. The site blends writing, research, and projects in a nonlinear, interconnected layout, inviting visitors to wander through thoughts, experiments, and resources – as if walking through a garden.

Similarly, Harriet Richardson, an online gardener, rewilds the social internet with her digital performance artistry. Her projects dance nude in the shadow of her visibility. Using engagement to measure algorithms and leaning deeply enough into her webcam, she invites her audience to occupy the intimate space between what is temporary and real online.

These rooted online inhabitants contribute actively to the evolution of digital niches, taking agency in shaping the spaces they wish to exist within. Rather than extracting value or submitting to algorithmic control, they carve through paywalls and conventions, cultivating new possibilities for co-creation, engagement, and sharing online. By experimenting with new forms of being online, they enable both themselves and their communities to thrive, encouraging adaptation and evolution.

“Getting offline” is not the answer. We have a right to protect our online spaces from commercial monopolies. The evolution of the web depends on our ability to see it as an extension of our environment, one which, like any ecosystem, survives through balance, care and diversity. Without intervention, the web risks cultural homogenisation, creative stagnation, and the loss of collective agency. Stewardship, thoughtful engagement, and the reclamation of digital niches are the pathways toward a web that is not only functional, but alive.

Tyla Jurgens is a Berlin-based strategist. Find out what she is currently obsessing over in Inside SEED CLUB #2.

Takeaways 

For brands, this isn’t strategy anymore – it’s more like an invitation to slow down. The era of shouting into infinite feeds is burning out. What matters now is presence: showing up in smaller, quieter ways, backing communities, sparking creativity, offering something that feels alive, not extracted.

Authenticity’s messy, unpredictable, human – see how brands are leaning into it on Substack, as we explored in our recent SEED – and suddenly that’s the most valuable thing in the room.

Micro-communities, weird corners of the internet, niche worlds that exist just outside the noise – that’s where attention actually means something. The brands that move gently, that collaborate instead of dominate, start to matter in ways no metric can track. It’s less about reach, more about resonance. Tiny gestures, offbeat experiments, shared moments – they stack up, quietly reshaping culture from the edges.

The web isn’t just a channel anymore; it’s a living thing. It hums, glitches, grows back. The brands that get this stop extracting and start cultivating — something fragile, vital, alive. Their worth isn’t in clicks, but in the spaces they help bloom, the threads they keep alive, the soft potential they leave behind. This isn’t a roadmap. It’s an ecosystem. And the ones who linger with care are the ones shaping whatever comes next.

Further Reading 

• The Age of Extraction Tim Wu’s forthcoming book The Age of Extraction explores how digital and cultural economies have shifted from creation to extraction – a system designed to mine attention, labour and value rather than nurture them. It extends the conversation on how our online environments became industrialised and what might emerge beyond that logic.
• The offline world is coming In an Instagram post, the London-based musician Murkage Dave reflects on a near future where people turn away from algorithm-driven life. He imagines a split between the “online” and “offline” tribes as AI blurs reality and digital fatigue peaks, and frames the web’s decline in intimacy as both inevitable and oddly human: a rebellion against artificiality, attention economies and influencer-era exhaustion.
• Tim Berners‑Lee Profile The New Yorker writes about how the inventor of the World Wide Web now wants to save it from misinformation, addictive algorithms and extractive monopolies.