I have spent a lot of my career trying to envision and build better versions of the tech industry. To my face, people often say that I’m optimistic, though I suspect what they mean is that I’m engaged in an act of futility. I consider this work neither optimistic nor futile; I think of it more as a matter of persistence.
The dominant tech industry, after all, is not patient. It works on the logic of a phenomenon we know well in Colorado: grass fire.
Grass fires are fast, nearly impossible to stop, and devastating. They feed on the smallest, quickest-burning plants. One of these burned a thousand homes in my area a few years ago. They’ll skip one house and vaporize the one next door. But they don’t last long, and new things become possible once they are gone.
In what follows, I will outline a grass-fire theory of the internet, and suggest why this narrative offers some reason for hope that, after the burn, a better internet economy is possible.
Before the fire: old growth and primitive accumulation
A grass fire needs fuel. The fuel is grass. It is the field that has been growing for many years, not to fuel a fire but simply for the sake of growing, and hosting a reasonable ecosystem of plants and critters. In the economy, the fuel consists of the interconnected trades and companies that communities have accrued over the years. They do not exist to serve as fuel for internet-enabled disruption, but they come to serve that purpose. Perhaps the conditions become ripe: a wet spring of growth followed by a dry summer that leaves the grass dry; an industry of badly regulated taxis or dull hotels or local professions that have lost their dynamism.
This also has something to do with what Karl Marx called, in the old translation of Capital (and in Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, where I first learned the concept), “primitive accumulation.” This is the bedrock of capitalism, when entrepreneurs contrive to turn what was not a commodity into one. Maybe it happens through the colonization of others’ land by sword or gunpoint or legal decree. Maybe it happens by turning human relationships into a social graph that can be bought and sold. Maybe it happens by turning users’ thought processes into training data for large-language models. What once was a habitat turns into fuel. What once was a community turns into an inefficiency to exploit.
Early adopters—or more precisely what Andreas Hepp calls “pioneer communities”—are the spark. They tinker, they try things out, but most of them don’t end up catching fire or making much money at it. What makes a grass fire really dangerous is the wind.
During the fire: strong winds and venture capital
The wind is what turns a grass fire unstoppable. Without wind, it would burn the local fuel out fast and give fire crews a chance to put it out. But strong winds blow the embers too fast for anyone to stop them.
For the internet economy, the wind comes from capital markets. Most often it comes in the form of venture capital, specifically—a type of investment that pours huge sums into high-risk ventures in the hope that some of them will spread wildly across the economy. When this money blows their way, startups can spread their technology across the economy faster than policy or culture can catch up. It spreads the forgetting that I call “innovation amnesia” across society. It can feel like a force of nature. The fire spreads, burning through its fuel and everything near it.
Then, with time, the winds change. In tech, Cory Doctorow has called this moment “enshittification”—the once fast-moving, world-transforming startup grows into something sclerotic and extractive. We find ourselves not in the thrill of the fire but in the ashes, now lacking the benefit of institutions and inheritances that the startups burned through. Main street is empty. We no longer know our neighbors, but we all watch the same viral videos.
Mark Zuckerberg said last year in an antitrust trial that Meta was no longer a social media company, because it had “turned into more of a broad discovery and entertainment space.” This was not mere evasion; apparently the percentage of “friend” content users see on Instagram is in single digits. The vast majority is influencer content and AI slop. The media scholar danah boyd has declared the end of social media in exchange for the rise of parasocial media.
The apex social-media company stopped doing social media. What else could fill that niche?
After the fire: new growth and healing
It doesn’t take long before new growth begins to come up after a grass fire. The ash leaves behind good soil. There is no more fuel for fire, just charred dirt in which to grow. We might have lost a great deal in the inferno, but we can build differently—including in ways that will make the land less likely to burn again. Even if we couldn’t have stopped the fire, we don’t need to repeat it endlessly. Let it burn somewhere else.
Social media has that chance right now. As the tech industry pivots to AI, chasing the primitive accumulation of thought, our relationships are no longer so valuable. With open protocols like ActivityPub (e.g., Mastodon) and ATProto (e.g., Bluesky), we have a chance to rebuild social media in a way that won’t burn so easily—that is simply harder to commercialize and better for the humans who use it.
Governments are increasingly investing in alternatives to many kinds of digital services, such as the “EuroStack” that would enable independence from US operating systems, cloud providers, and other infrastructures—often through supporting open-source software and open standards. This isn’t competing with venture capitalists; their attention is elsewhere. But it could make the land harder for them to burn again.
Even AI will get to this point. Already, the models that led the world six months ago are now possible to download and run for free. The cutting edge turns into commodity very quickly. The winds are especially brisk, and new growth can come up very quickly as a result.
This has happened before
A lot of my alleged optimism comes from history. Grass fires surprise recent settlers, but Indigenous communities have been managing them for centuries. Past gilded ages bear lessons for the present one.
The industries that enriched the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, like steel and oil, became heavily unionized, at least by US standards. Companies went from shooting workers to setting a high bar for worker power. In telecom, the Bell monopoly eventually got broken up by regulators. It’s not all happy stories, of course. But collective power and collective imagination are capable of transforming industries in the aftermath of a fire.
On the tech-critical left, lately, the Luddites have been having a moment. People take inspiration from the well-organized northern-English workers who, in the early nineteenth century, raided textile factories and smashed the industrial looms. This was during the grass fire of early industrialization, and they fought fire with fire.
Less celebrated are the textile workers who, a few decades later, built the English cooperative movement in the middle of that century. Starting with cooperative stores like the one founded in Rochdale in 1844, they built enough power to own and govern their own textile mills. They didn’t grow big enough to reverse the trajectory of capitalism, of course, or stop its future fires. But they strengthened the position of millions of workers, and inspired other workers around the world to build cooperatives, too.
After a fire, it’s possible to rebuild in in better ways. Whenever capital burns through our lives and communities, we have a chance to study what happened and cultivate the land differently. Don’t assume that the fire, however hot, will burn forever.