When Elon Musk purchased Twitter this year for US$44 billion, the ship-jumping began,
with many Twitter users urging others to switch platforms.
What is perhaps being reached for, yet overlooked, in Musk’s disastrous takeover of the
social media platform is that one billionaire should not be able to purchase the virtual town
square. What’s more, Twitter’s new ownership has shone a light on the ugly balkanization —
in other words, division and compartmentalization — of the internet into privatized
companies.
The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee as an information superhighway. It
was always meant as an access point for the exchange of information and connecting
people from opposite sides of the world, meaning you didn’t necessarily have to join a
private company’s website to speak to other human beings online.
David Bohnett, the founder of the early internet’s free webpage platform GeoCities, said in
a recent interview with Gizmodo that “we’re really not one Internet,” noting, “it’s become very
what I call ‘balkanized.’”
While monetization has played a major role in destroying the fun of the internet — one
only has to attempt to watch a YouTube video without an adblocker to see my point — it is
how the internet has been balkanized throughout the world that has set the present-day
internet’s dangerous precedent.
The constant pop-ups and paywalls have been a convenient distraction from how the
internet has separated the masses into distinct echo chambers, but...
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