Are You There, AI? It’s Me, the Internet

A Call to Nationalize in the Wake of Digital and Environmental Destruction

My first-ever post was a review of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. I wrote about the movie’s cool sound effects during the chase scene. I cracked a joke about Jango Fett’s armor being a Swiss Army knife. I gave it 3.5 stars. I was 14. It was 2002.

That same year, I read the Communist Manifesto online. I’d heard the title maybe from my relatives or my teachers, I don’t remember. I do remember thinking Communist Manifesto sounded cool (it objectively does) which is enough reason for a 14-year-old to do anything. The book resonated with me, especially the part about the communist revolution.

For a home-schooled kid who thinks the world will end when Jesus returns, a workers’ revolution is an easy sell. Isn’t a poor people’s revolution against the rich exactly what Jesus was talking about?

The Internet agreed with me even if no one around me did. The Internet was more than just technology in my family, it was our business. We ran a local Internet Service Provider in the 1990s back when you could do that kind of thing, and throughout the 2000s our home always had the most cutting-edge connection. Dial-up, ISDN, DSL, cable — these upgrades marked my adolescence.

That adolescence ended when I became an army medic. Soon I was in Iraq, only to return home to the mess of 2008. Iraq to 2008; Poor people messes happen in regions, but rich people messes happen in years.

I got involved with Reddit’s art and political communities in that year, 2008. I found people I liked, especially in the atheist community where my favorite Marxist author, Christopher Hitchens, was popular for his anti-religious views. There weren’t many Marxists on Reddit, mostly just Evangelical kids like me — but we found common ground in our disdain for organized religion.

Over the span of a few years, together we forced atheism as an idea into every religious space that we could. Our efforts worked in their own way: we gave Reddit a reputation and annoyed a lot of people.

I grew apart from the community in 2011, but returned when Bernie arrived on the scene, around 2015. I did the same kind of activism but different. And so it went that every few years, I would rigorously work to introduce specific radical thoughts in various ways through various mediums, mostly Reddit. I ran the underground newspaper as much as I read it.

Until 2023.

In January of 2023, I was convinced that the airline industry would fail, so I hatched a plan: I’d start posting every single day, specifically criticizing airlines. I would post diligently, bide my time, settle into a creative routine, maybe meet some people, perhaps even establish a small audience. Then, after some weeks or months or even years, some airline would need a bailout, and that’s when I’d pop the campaign into high gear to attack. That was the plan, anyway.

I kicked things off on February 8th with the title “Posting every day until the US nationalizes airlines — Day 1.” It did better than expected. But many of the comments called to nationalize rail instead of air. “Sure,” I thought, “I love trains. Why not both?” So the next day it was “Posting every day until the US nationalizes airlines and railways — Day 2.”

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a catastrophic disaster had struck East Palestine, Ohio a mere days before on February 3rd. A freight train had derailed and spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals, contaminating the entire town.

We will never know the full extent of the damage done in East Palestine, Ohio. The company responsible, Norfolk Southern, sent a burn crew so there would be less for them to clean. A literal cloud of cancer loomed over this small town. Over the days, weeks, months, their land was ripped up, dirt shipped off truckload by truckload to be buried in some far-flung corner. There’s always someplace smaller, isn’t there?

The aftermath played out predictably. The CEO testified before Congress. Promises were made, hands were waved, ads were run. But the posts continued. I was regularly clocking over 1K votes per post, even reaching as high as 4K. There were good discussions in the comments; I even had a variety of adorable trolls. Day 100 came and went. The wind was in our sails, and then:

On Day 144, July Day 2023, Reddit had a stroke. Or was given a stroke I should say, since the CEO deliberately shunted around 1/2 of its users. The decision was quite public and shameless and you can learn all about what happened if you search for “Reddit API change 2023”, but I’ll tell you what happened straight up: the CEO sold out the community for profit.

Kinda like how Norfolk Southern’s CEO sold out the community of East Palestine for profit.

I am 36 as of last month, meaning I’ve start my midlife crisis now, not to be confused with the other crises. I wish I could say I am grieving the end of my youth, but I have lost more than that. We all have.

The old Internet was a miserable let-down, but it was our miserable let-down. Through it, we learned both the extraordinary power and disappointing limitations of online activism. #BLM put some murderous cops behind bars, but we still live in a police state. #MeToo identified the tyranny of patriarchy, only for it to rear its head all the uglier. And with COVID misinformation, we began to wonder if the Internet was even a good idea at all. Judging by Reddit and Twitter in 2023, the rich folk must have agreed. That Internet is now gone.

I did not see it coming. I genuinely believed that Reddit was safe because I thought if they tried anything, the community outcry would be too much. But then they came and… it wasn’t too much. Reddit had its outcry… then it died. It was more like a final agonizing scream.

The days went by, weeks, months. The change settled. Today, Reddit is some lousy knock-off version of its former self. The craziest part: the owner of the company did this on purpose. On purpose. Everywhere, we see communities being led into disaster on purpose. Look closer. Don’t look away. These dying communities are reflections laying bare the depth and entrenchment of our collective failure.

What are we doing? What will we say to our children? Are we so incapable of reimagining our existence? Have we become so disoriented that we cannot see evil dangers in their most obvious forms, watching them even as they choke us?

This moment, this day, this year, this life — all belong to a cosmic chorus of pulses, ever-drumming even now, all fleeting beats in an unstoppable rhythm. But within each lies an invitation to embrace the cycle, to grow and rest, to reflect and act.

Today is an interlude. Between the shadows of what was and the promise of what could be, we are summoned not just to witness but to act. The deeds done by the people alive today reverberate beyond the confines of this existence. The clock is ticking in a whisper or a roar, each second calling us to act or singing to us our siren song. Will we not lift our own song instead? Can we only scream?

This is my eulogy not to Reddit but to the living communities it once sheltered. Is consciousness not community? Community is the bedrock foundation of consciousness — Can one neuron make up a brain? No. Can a trillion? Oh, yes.

People used to say “Reddit is a hive mind,” and I smiled to hear it. Yes, it absolutely was. Reddit had power. Because when you get a lot of minds together, what do you get? Community. Consciousness. The entire site unanimously printed the words “FUCK YOU” to its CEO pixel by pixel in the most painstaking and public way possible. Reddit was radical. We made it radical.

Seeing it now in 2024, it’s like I’m holding a vigil. I don’t know what Reddit is about these days; there’s a definite pulse, but it’s weak. From what I can tell, Gen Z has mostly taken over as custodians. And don’t get me wrong, the Gen Z communities are great, they’re just not my communities. Mine are mostly on life support. I feel like I’ve forced myself to stay with a family member in a coma, coming each and every day for 200-odd days. Other people visit. But I’m always here, keeping my post so to speak.

After 2011, when Christopher Hitchens died and the online atheist community got a little weird, I grew away from calling myself an atheist. It didn’t suit me because I did not align with the movement anymore. After my dad died in 2021, I lost my last connection to the Evangelical church and its God. To men like my dad, God was authority.

My God is community. Every word spoken to someone else is a prayer. Every harm that comes between us is a devil. I worship human connectivity and consciousness, whatever that may mean. The spill in East Palestine was a sin against God, and the API change at Reddit was a sin against God. The CEO of East Palestine is a sinner, and the CEO of Reddit is a sinner. Here’s some free advice for sinners: repent.

Day 365 arrived, and I was spent. I had begun a year earlier expecting a 1,000+ day slow-riding easy-going art+activism project, but right out of the gate it was a high-geared journalism+activism+art project. I scoured the news day in and day out, cobbling that news into the best content I could manage. I captured the failure of our rail network in all its boring detail. And if that were not enough, the social network that hosted my project failed at the same time, so I ended up capturing that failure in all its boring detail, too.

If there’s one thing we are all learning these days, it’s that what goes around this Earth comes around this Earth. But what can possibly come around from these 2023 failures? Against the ramptant fires and community destruction, what can we possibly do? Lean in close, dear reader, because I’ll tell you.

Nationalize.

One word, but it carries a promise of transformation. Imagine a world where the ability to suvive is a given, not a privilege. Imagine a decisive break from oligarchy to democracy, from exclusion to cooperation. Imagine converting their private power into our public power directly. Our way. If we take control of the services and systems that we all require, we would acknowledge not just their roles as infrastructure but as integral parts of our common good and we its solemn caretakers. Nationalization brings everyone closer to their common services and shared systems. That is healthy and good.

This goes beyond just a few sectors. To be clear— we must bring public ownership to our healthcare, our financial institutions, our energy sources, our water services, our housing, our airlines, our railways, and our social networks. Bold steps, yes, but it would be bolder not to.

Why? Because we’re not just talking about an assortment of services and technologies here; we are talking about the very structures that allow our living society to continue, the lifelines of this interconnected world that we all share and upon which we all depend. When we leave that infrastructure in the hands of the few, its potential is curtailed and then hoarded as profit. We see this across the board.

Just step back and look at the digital space so far this century: it is a testament to human ingenuity and potential for communal uplift. Yet peppered everywhere in it we see that, without collective ownership, it is just another tool of division, another asset in the portfolio of some elite. Over time, we forget it was any other way. For you Gen Z: did you know that Facebook was actually good for a while there? It’s true. Do you want to guess what happened? Here’s a hint: it was done on purpose.

Nationalize them. Convert these critical systems from private treasures into public treasures. We made them, we run them, we own them. It's a declaration of our collective will to prioritize common welfare over individual desire, to ensure that the technology and power that defines this human era serve us all and not just a handful of trust-fund babies. We must plot a course away from the ever-worsening disasters of private industry and instead steer towards a new, cooperative horizon.

Nationalization is not just a policy proposal, it’s a moral imperative. It's a shared commitment to build a society where every individual's dignity and rights are upheld by the common structures that bind us. It’s 2024, and the clock is running.