Picture the internet as an infinite waveless sea. On this sea, each website is its own boat or raft floating on the water. There are little independent canoes and massive cruiseliners, all sharing the same water. We've all decided to make one or more of these ships our home on this sea, because the people hanging out on each boat have different and interesting things to share, and it is easy to move from boat to boat.
Sometimes, a ship has its hull punctured and staying on it is no longer a good idea. People pack up their things and take them to more secure boats. You let your friends on that boat know which boats they'll be able to meet up with you on after this one sinks. Some boats take a long while to sink, others sink almost immediately. But there are always more boats. You usually have plenty of time to jump ship with everything you want to take with you, and the sea is calm enough that the loss of a ship isn't likely to kill you, just inconvenience you.
In the last week, many people have just had their first experience of their home ship becoming unstable. TikTok has been temporarily patched up, but it has different rules, and has allegiances that make the ship no longer feel like a safe haven. That is OK. It is not the only boat.
No one can take out all the boats at once, and unless they remove the sea entirely no one can stop us from reconnecting. This sea - the internet - would be nothing without the people who give it life, those who make use of these spaces and who make their own spaces for themselves or others to use. We are in a constantly shifting infinite landscape, an endless country undefined by borders.
We can, of course, lose access to this space. The countries we physically live in can bar access to parts of the internet or the whole thing entirely. We are lucky that there are many international agencies devoted to keeping the internet online and available to as many people as possible. If we do lose the internet, it will be hard. But unless that happens, they can't stop us from moving from boat to boat in this flotilla.
Collectively as an online international community, we have shown over and over that we are good at working around technicalities and barriers. Keep an eye on the stability of the boats you spend your time on, and maybe make your own little raft if you want to in case all the big boats get taken out at once. They can't take away your knowledge that all people are people as real as you, even if they're in another physical country. When you were a kid playing video games or chatting with someone over in Canada, or England, or Korea or Brazil or Türkiye or Egypt or Pakistan or Afghanistan or Nigeria - you were breaching borders that countries have fought hard to keep as limiters on your generosity and empathy for other humans.
Borders and nationalism put us in a team-sports mentality regarding war. There are enough resources in this world to go around - enough to waste in horrifying quantities in some countries, while people in other countries are starved. The internet allows us to see this incongruity easily. Hold onto that knowledge. It is useful.
Wars are fought over resources and borders and zealotry and xenophobia. But we are all people. No person should have to kill another person. War itself is a horrifying waste of resources. It should not even be a last resort. Remember this. This country you are a part of, this international borderless country, is of a kind that has never existed before. It has already fundamentally changed things, although it is hard to tell because the leaders of the physical countries are largely people who did not have those experiences, those ones you had, of meeting someone halfway across the Earth and seeing yourself in them, and doing that again, and again, until it was undeniable that we are a single communal species who mostly just want to hang out and share with each other, separated by borders.
written 01/21/2025