I Write (and Care) About the Internet, and What So Many People Get Wrong

Brennan Brown argues that the Internet is not a characterful, independent story agent but a setting where timeless human behaviors play out: flirting, arguing, grieving, organizing and creating. Critics who call some contemporary books "Internet novels" mistake scenery for subject; the real narratives remain human ones. Brown invokes digital dualism to insist that online and offline lives are continuous, admits the medium reduces the fidelity of face-to-face contact, but stresses that the web is now where people socialize, mobilize, and sustain empathy - citing moments like the Arab Spring, viral fundraisers, and collective games as evidence of real-world consequence and shared care.

Brown warns that this communal space faces enclosure as a handful of tech corporations and opaque algorithms concentrate power, monetize user labor, and gentrify communities, displacing marginalized users. In response he practices and recommends practical digital resilience: redundant backups, decentralized protocols (Gemini), personal websites, pubnixes, fediverse instances, and small-scale community building. His concrete advice: create daily, tend human-scale communities, welcome newcomers, fund and host independent infrastructure, and use simple acts - comments, emails, blog replies - to sustain the commons. The future of the Internet, he insists, depends on people showing up and caring enough to resist enclosure.