Global Voices Summit 2024 public days. Photo used with permission.

Ah, the beauty of the moment where one session, one conversation organically clicks with another!

Rebecca MacKinnon opens up the session by saying that this conversation will build on two other sessions we’ve had earlier in the summit: one of them is the session led by Ethan Zuckerman — “Where have the bloggers gone” — and the other is the session led by Arzu Geybulla — “Authoritarianism reaching through the screen.” This panel today, about whether we can save the internet, is a third part of the conversation the GV community has been having.

Joining Rebecca, we had Juke Carolina Bransiecq, a longtime GV contributor and a current GV Board member serving as the Volunteers’ Representative, Brian Hioe, founding editor of New Bloom Magazine, and Asteris Masouras, GV Social Media Editor and editor at the Civic Media Observatory.

This session highlighted the importance of intentionality, solidarity, and empathy-based learning when building communities that can help us regain the internet or better use its potential to serve our interests.  At the start of the session, Rebecca, a co-founder of Global Voices, recalled the origins of GV 20 years ago on the sidelines of an event at Harvard. She said the idea back then was that blogging was becoming increasingly a phenomena globally, and people who came together as bloggers at the time, felt that if we were able to use the internet to build dialogue, to connect, it would help to bring about change. “It was a much more optimistic time.”

By 2014, she recalled, it was becoming clear that authoritarianism had adapted and was adapting fast to the internet, and was beginning to change the internet in collaboration with large social media platforms that profited off of inciting hate. Rebecca mentions the book she wrote back then, “Consent of the Networked,” in which she argued that “if we didn’t do something, the internet would become more and more like China, it wouldn’t free us just by being the internet.”

Rebecca asks Juke that, given that authoritarianism has adapted and changed the internet, how are we able to take back the internet from hate, division and fear-mongering that have become so prevalent?

Juke proposes that we should look at the internet through countless spectacles. “In the beginning, we did have optimistic views of the internet, as a place but also temporality where people are exchanging ideas.” Now that has changed and the internet can no longer be considered only a tool, she says. “ As it evolves, it starts to become embedded and impact our lives in many ways. It became a place where many geopolitical actors, not state actors, embed themselves and thrive.”

Juke argues that we, as civic movements, NGOs, grassroots, indigenous voices, need to see ourselves as geopolitical actors. If there is authoritarianism on one side, on the other side, she argues, there are other actors with different capacities to organize and create something new.

Next up is Brian, co-founder of New Bloom Media, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific that was founded after the Sunflower Movement. For him, the key is a division of labor, where groups don’t necessarily replicate with each other and try to reinvent the wheel. Brian says that the early hopes for the internet were that it would be liberatory, but now we see this space has been taken over by the same actors we try to resist. On the other hand, though, we forget there has always been resistance. He refers to yesterday’s session about how the transition away from blogging, but Twitter and Facebook, although algorithmized, are also types of blogs.

Authoritarian actors have learned from each other and done similar things in leveraging nostalgia. We need to learn from each other and do it faster than the authoritarians. Our advantage is that we are more mobile than these actors in terms of creativity.

Asteris Masouras, GV’s social media editor and a longtime heavy Twitter curator, said he grew up alongside the internet. “The early days protocol was the initial architecture of hope that allowed us to build so much historical knowledge on top of the infrastructure of the internet.”

Going back to the question that leads the session, if we can save the internet, Asteris proposed a question in turn: Which part of the internet do we want to save? For many people, the internet is not limited to the “www.” For many, the internet is Facebook. He also points out that different people have different expectations for the internet, different from where he stands, which is a vision of the internet to create repositories. Because of this, some have eroded and disappeared over time. One question he believes is important is: “How can we trust the existing infrastructure and the people operating to preserve historical knowledge? Because history powers hope.”

The next part of the session kicks off with a question from Rebecca about how to strengthen inclusive, diverse spaces like GV and help to create new ones. Here, the panelists agreed that it involves intent, being open to learning and unlearning from the authoritarians’ playbook to know how to dismantle them, and cross-border and in-border solidarity.

Speaking about the more technical and infrastructural side, Asteris said he is saddened that the creativity that was seen at the beginning of the internet with open-source communities is gone. He does believe we can bring that back by creating a culture to foster the architecture of hope.

Another topic that was brought up in the session, including in audience questions, is decentralization and whether we should abandon platforms that have been taken over by authoritarians. Asteris defended that we should be everywhere all at once. “Twitter is my home, and I’m not moving away from it. If you leave, where will you fight authoritarianism? Do you keep running? Like the three little pigs. Hope is about standing where you are,” he says.

At the same time, ensuring no one can pull the plug is key, so being present elsewhere is important. Brian argued that there is a need for both spaces that are community, but also public squares where there will, inevitably, be some toxicity. Juke said she feels a bit on the fence regarding decentralization because it feels like we are being contained, which goes against the principles of the open internet.

Moving toward the end of the session, Rebecca asked the panelists how we can take qualities like hospitality, openness, and empathy and turn them into geopolitical powers that can have a true impact. Juke said that “many of us are tethered to GV because within this community, we’ve experienced learning stemmed from empathy — which is not a given everywhere.”

Brian recalls the 2010s when we wanted to move into our own tight-knit, safe communities. Now, with the failed attempt to install martial law in South Korea, he says he saw a lot of movement in groups he’s part of, where the same text circulated around different groups, building on top of each other. “A network of networks is something we can do.”

Asteris then said that Twitter is still useful for curation. “We’re accelerating towards a new dark age, but it will pass eventually, we need to have hope and prepare for it.” He acknowledged intentionality is a big part of it, and given that many of us have experience in weathering crises and tragedies and wars, solidarity is a mechanism. “We need to pass the baton in supporting people, but also in making them visible.”

Juke defended that we need to participate actively, despite feeling that our spaces are shrinking, despite the disappointments. “We are stakeholders because without us users, platforms are nothing. A newer platform may not be the solution for our needs, but what is tangible in the future is: how can we as a community call on policymakers and tech companies to be more responsible,” she said.

Rebecca asked panelists a quick question to finish off: What do you think the GV community can do to build a better future on the internet? Asteris said GV has a responsibility in preparing humanity for a worse stage of existence, but also in cultivating resilience and an architecture of hope that doesn’t rely on hardware. Brian and Juke said that we can be “models” or “prototypes” that can be multiplied. All panelists agreed that the future needs to be more empathetic and rooted in solidarity. The takeaway of the session, in Rebecca’s words, was that the internet  “is not only a technical construct, but a human construct and its future depends on all of us.”