The internet you experience daily—endless scrolling, algorithmic feeds serving content you didn't ask for, AI-generated slop clogging search results—isn't the only internet available. It's just the one that's easiest to stumble into.

You're not stuck with the internet that has evolved alongside the rise of hegemonic platforms. We're 20-plus years into the social internet, and the winners of the last round of audience capture have made clear they're shifting to optimize for social broadcasting instead of networking, to maximize market share and market cap. 

They are not optimizing your experience. Only you can do that.

Each individual act of internet self-determination aggregates into something larger—a distributed resistance to the corporate enclosure of digital space. Think of it like a ladder. Each rung represents a different level of engagement with how you consume, curate, and create your corner of the internet. You don't have to climb every rung, but knowing they exist changes what's possible. And every step you take moves you away from the grip of corporate algorithms and toward an internet experience you can put to use for your own interests and needs.

Level 1: Conscious Consumption

The algorithmic feed—that endless scroll of content chosen by platforms optimizing for engagement over everything else—is optional. You can opt out. Any of these steps will reclaim your attention as the finite resource it is, rather than letting it become a commodity that platforms extract through sophisticated design.

Awareness: The first thing you can do is know your baseline. Just like physical health can be understood through nutrition and fitness vitals, you can track your "internet vitals." How many times a day do you pick up your phone? How much time do you spend on social media? The average American checks their phone 186 times daily and spends 2 hours and 16 minutes on social media. You can check your own numbers in Screen Time (iOS) or Digital Wellbeing (Android). If that kind of specific tracking feels too intimidating, you could start by just educating yourself. Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism, Tristan Harris' work on ethical design, or Renée DiResta's Invisible Rulers are good places to start.

Escape the algorithm—get off Big Social: This is hard. Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and X are where you've spent years curating connections and actively following people.

Escape the algorithms within Big Social: These same platforms offer options that are less algorithmically driven. Some offer chronological viewing if you dig into settings. Or you can make a point to just engage with lists of pre-chosen accounts, like your friends' Stories, and not engage with the Feed. You can set your Facebook app to open directly to specific Groups or Marketplace instead of the general news feed. Or sign up for broadcast channels in Instagram where you get direct messages from creators you like, though you will need to check which creators you already follow have these semi-private spaces.

The real key is avoiding the "reels-as-rabbit-hole dynamic" where you start viewing one vertical video and quickly swipe your way down a hole where innocent browsing becomes a long block of passive TV-like consumption.

Level 2: Active Curation

Once you've established some control over what reaches you, the next step is actively building what you want to see. This means moving from defense (blocking what you don't want) to offense (constructing information sources you trust). Doing so creates demand signals for the internet you want to exist. Every subscription, every intentional comment, every creator you support tells the market what's valuable. You're not just consuming differently—you're funding and amplifying alternatives—both within the 'algorithmic marketplace' of the platform and, at a macro level, the larger marketplace of all digital products—or any product within the attention economy. 

Newsletter subscriptions: Pretty much anything you find on the social internet, you can find through newsletters—from news curators like Tangle or Dave Pell's NextDraft, to conveners like Hunter Harris around culture or Anne Helen Petersen around intentional living. There are aggregators of local news, professional news, sports news. When you subscribe, you're voting with your attention (and sometimes your dollars) for sustainable creator economics. You are asking for a finite ending to your consumption, not infinite scrolling.

RSS feeds: For those less familiar, RSS lets you subscribe directly to websites, blogs, and news sources, receiving updates chronologically rather than algorithmically. Tools like Feedly or Inoreader aggregate these feeds into readable interfaces—much like an email inbox. You can build a feed of local news sources, niche blogs, and independent journalists—a personalized newspaper that updates throughout the day without anyone else's thumb on the scale.

Comment intentionally: The "commenting for the algo" refrain you see from Gen Z creators isn't cynical—it's strategic. Genuine engagement (not just likes but comments that spark conversation) helps surface content to others who might value it—and back to you. Every action you take, from skipping to lingering over content, makes an impact. But nothing does more than commenting. You're not just consuming; you're actively participating in what gets amplified. If you're trying out Threads and think it's a ghost town, you have to start commenting to train your algorithm. If you think LinkedIn pushes overly vanilla, self-congratulatory professional news, try to lean into comments and threaded comments about professional questions you do want to see filling up your feed instead—even with looser connections.

Level 3: Building Alternatives

The highest level involves participating in infrastructure explicitly designed to resist corporate enclosure. This doesn't require technical expertise—just a willingness to try platforms organized around different principles that, frankly, take a little more time to set up or understand.

Engage in smaller networks: I happily check in on Swarm (formerly Foursquare) and keep up with the approximately 40 friends of mine who are still on there too. That fits my elder millennial social graph; there are others for other cohorts. Gen Z folks are still congregating on BeReal. Photo-minded folks seem to be really rallying to Retro. You don't even need to join a "social network"—join Discord servers around specific interests. Follow niche subreddits. Participate in specialized forums or wikis. Through my kids, I've learned to navigate Pokémon and anime forums and wikis to keep up with their interests. For myself, I'm active in far-flung music forums and have preferred destinations for home improvement and men's fashion. These spaces operate at human scale, where reputation and reciprocity matter. They're also where you'll find people doing the most interesting work in specific areas of expertise.

Join the Fediverse or ATmosphere: There are smaller, more customizable, interconnected social platform alternatives to X, Instagram, and TikTok. Mastodon, the most well-known federated social network, lets you join a server (or run your own) that connects to thousands of others through the ActivityPub protocol. Bluesky offers a similar model through its own AT Protocol, with growing momentum and easier onboarding for newcomers through features like "starter packs." Apps like Pixelfed replicate Instagram; PeerTube replicates YouTube.

Join platform cooperatives: These spaces represent a burgeoning future that applies cooperative ownership models to digital platforms. The Drivers Cooperative in New York City is worker-owned, competing directly with Uber and Lyft. The U.K.'s Bristol Cable operates as a reader-owned journalism cooperative. MintStars offers a creator-owned alternative to OnlyFans using blockchain technology. Subvert.fm is doing the same for musicians to replace Bandcamp. These prove that platforms can be owned by the people who create value on them, not just distant shareholders.

The Aggregate Effect

None of these individual acts is revolutionary. Subscribing to a newsletter, joining a Discord server, tracking your screen time—these are small, personal decisions about how you spend your time online. But that's how structural change happens on the internet. The marketplace is driven by the aggregate trends of your individual micro-actions. 

The platforms that dominate your digital life today won through network effects. Each new user made the platform more valuable for everyone else, creating a feedback loop that eventually felt inescapable. The same mechanics work in reverse. Every person who opts for RSS over algorithmic feeds, every creator who builds an audience through owned channels rather than rented platforms, every community that forms around shared protocols instead of corporate silos—these choices compound. What starts as your personal internet gradually becomes a viable alternative internet that others see value in joining.

It's already starting. Mastodon went from 300,000 monthly active users in October 2022 to over 2 million by December 2022, driven largely by individual decisions to leave Twitter/X. Substack hosts over 50,000 publications that make money from subscriptions.. The next wave of media companies are already building this way, with intention.

Perfectly Imperfect is a sceney downtown NYC newsletter that also operates a slow-feed social app with MySpace design vibes. Dave Jorgenson became known as The Washington Post TikTok guy, and five months into independence has a bigger footprint on YouTube than the Post, and he's just as focused on the two-way conversation with his audience via newsletter.

The corporate enclosure of the internet happened gradually, platform by platform, as we traded convenience for control. The reconquest of digital space will happen the same way—individually, incrementally, but aggregating into something substantial. With each act of conscious consumption we each make, we fight enshittification and take steps to build a human-centered internet.

The post How To Build Your Own Internet in 2026 appeared first on Reason.com.

We miss the slide rule. It isn’t so much that we liked getting an inexact answer using a physical moving object. But to successfully use a slide rule, you need to be able to roughly estimate the order of magnitude of your result. The slide rule’s computation of 2.2 divided by 8 is the same as it is for 22/8 or 220/0.08. You have to interpret the answer based on your sense of where the true answer lies. If you’ve ever had some kid at a fast food place enter the wrong numbers into a register and then hand you a ridiculous amount of change, you know what we mean.

Recent press reports highlighted a paper from Nvidia that claimed a data center consuming a gigawatt of power could require half a million tons of copper. If you aren’t an expert on datacenter power distribution and copper, you could take that number at face value. But as [Adam Button] reports, you should probably be suspicious of this number. It is almost certainly a typo. We wouldn’t be surprised if you click on the link and find it fixed, but it caused a big news splash before anyone noticed.

Thought Process

Best estimates of the total copper on the entire planet are about 6.3 billion metric tons. We’ve actually only found a fraction of that and mined even less. Of the 700 million metric tons of copper we actually have in circulation, there is a demand for about 28 million tons a year (some of which is met with recycling, so even less new copper is produced annually).

Simple math tells us that a single data center could, in a year, consume 1.7% of the global copper output. While that could be true, it seems suspicious on its face.

Digging further in, you’ll find the paper mentions 200kg per megawatt. So a gigawatt should be 200,000kg, which is, actually, only 200 metric tons. That’s a far cry from 500,000 tons. We suspect they were rounding up from the 440,000 pounds in 200 metric tons to “up to a half a million pounds,” and then flipped pounds to tons.

Glass Houses

We get it. We are infamous for making typos. It is inevitable with any sort of writing at scale and on a tight schedule. After all, the Lincoln Memorial has a typo set in stone, and Webster’s dictionary misprinted an editor’s note that “D or d” could stand for density, and coined a new word: dord.

So we aren’t here to shame Nvidia. People in glass houses, and all that. But it is amazing that so much of the press took the numbers without any critical thinking about whether they made sense.

Innumeracy

We’ve noticed many people glaze over numbers and take them at face value. The same goes for charts. We once saw a chart that was basically a straight line except for one point, which was way out of line. No one bothered to ask for a long time. Finally, someone spoke up and asked. Turns out it was a major issue, but no one wanted to be the one to ask “the dumb question.”

You don’t have to look far to find examples of innumeracy: a phrase coined by  [Douglas Hofstadter] and made famous by [John Allen Paulos]. One of our favorites is when a hamburger chain rolled out a “1/3 pound hamburger,” which flopped because customers thought that since three is less than four, they were getting more meat with a “1/4 pound hamburger” at the competitor’s restaurant.

This is all part of the same issue. If you are an electronics or computer person, you probably have a good command of math. You may just not realize how much better your math is than the average person’s.

Gimli Glider

Even so, people who should know better still make mistakes with units and scale. NASA has had at least one famous case of unit issues losing an unmanned probe. In another famous incident, an Air Canada flight ran out of fuel in 1983. Why?

The plane’s fuel sensors were inoperative, so the ground crew manually checked the fuel load with a dipstick. The dipstick read in centimeters. The navigation computer expected fuel to be in kg. Unfortunately, the fuel’s datasheet posted density in pounds/liter. This incorrect conversion happened twice.

Unsurprisingly, the plane was out of fuel and had to glide to an emergency landing on a racetrack that had once been a Royal Canadian Air Force training base. Luckily, Captain Pearson was an experienced glider pilot. With reduced control and few instruments, the Captain brought the 767 down as if it were a huge glider with 61 people onboard. Although the landing gear collapsed and caused some damage, no one on the plane or the ground were seriously hurt.

What’s the Answer?

Sadly, math answers are much easier to get than social answers. Kids routinely complain that they’ll never need math once they leave school. (OK, not kids like we were, but normal kids.) But we all know that is simply not true. Even if your job doesn’t directly involve math, understanding your own finances, making decisions about purchases, or even evaluating political positions often requires that you can see through math nonsense, both intentional and unintentional.

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry] was a French author, and his 1948 book Citadelle has an interesting passage that may hold part of the answer. If you translate the French directly, it is a bit wordy, but the quote is commonly paraphrased: “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

We learned math because we understood it was the key to building radios, or rockets, or computer games, or whatever it was that you longed to build. We need to teach kids math in a way that makes them anxious to learn the math that will enable their dreams.

How do we do that? We don’t know. Great teachers help. Inspiring technology like moon landings helps. What do you think? Tell us in the comments. Now with 285% more comment goodness. Honest.

We still think slide rules made you better at math. Just like not having GPS made you better at navigation.

Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google's plan to "onboard kids" into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem "leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime," as reported earlier by NBC News.

The heavily-redacted documents, which surfaced earlier this week, are linked to a massive lawsuit filed by several school districts, families, and state attorneys general, accusing Google, Meta, ByteDance, and Snap of creating "addictive and dangerous" products that have harmed young users' mental health. (Snap settled earl …

Read the full story at The Verge.

I’m not sure how long it will take you to read this article. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe you take a little longer and give it a close read. Either way, I’m confident however long you take to read this will not come close to the amount of time it took me to write it. And that’s a good thing. That is how communication should work.

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Category: AI and Humanoids, Technology

Tags: LLM (Large Language Model), Communicate, Thinking, Human, GPT

A few years ago a teacher in my school brought in a curriculum they’d bought online called “All Things Algebra,” created by Gina Wilson. It quickly spread from teacher to teacher. I considered it a niche product, just another thing being sold on Teachers Pay Teachers. Then I was talking to someone at a different school—their colleagues used it too.

It took me a while to realize just how popular these materials were—or how popular they must be, given how often I hear about them. And yet when people talk about the direction that American math teaching is going, Gina Wilson’s name never comes up. She must be the most influential person in math education that nobody knows anything about.

Because it comes from the bottom up, it’s hard to measure Wilson’s influence. Even now, I’m doubting myself—have I overstated the case? There are numbers, though: on Teachers Pay Teachers, she has over 167,000 happy customers.

We don’t talk about Teachers Pay Teachers much anymore, do we? In its heyday in the early-2010s it was the paywalled, cutesy outpost of a freewheeling ecosystem of teacher blogs. Natasha Singer covered it in 2015 for the NYTimes:

As some on the site develop sizable and devoted audiences, TeachersPayTeachers.com is fostering the growth of a hybrid profession: teacher-entrepreneur. The phenomenon has even spawned its own neologism: teacherpreneur.

“Teacherpreneur”—that’s quite a word.

While it’s tricky to figure out how widely Wilson’s curriculum has spread, we can get a bit of a hint from survey results. American Instructional Resources Surveys is a carefully designed survey performed by researchers at RAND that tries to shed light on what resources teachers are using to teach math, ELA, and science. They ask about textbooks and curricula, but also about supplementary materials.

In the most recent results, a full 43% of respondents said they use resources from Teachers Pay Teachers. Those aren’t all using Gina Wilson’s materials, but a lot, maybe most of them are.

Who is Gina Wilson? There is remarkably little public information about her. There is a blogpost from 2013 and a brief interview from 2014. She grew up outside of Buffalo, NY and is a huge Bills fan. In 2006 she graduated college, followed her boyfriend to Virginia Beach, and began teaching Grade 8 mathematics at Great Neck Middle School.

Like so many of us, Gina didn’t like the textbook she was assigned and began searching for materials. She was an avid Pinterester, collecting the free materials that others shared online. At some point, she began making her own sheets and posting them on Teachers Pay Teachers, where she found a following.

What happened next isn’t clear. But now, “All Things Algebra” is a full-fledged curriculum company. It offers full curricula from Grades 7 through Precalculus. How many people work for this company? I don’t know. Based on the pictures Wilson has posted on Instagram, she seems to write these materials entirely on her own, scanning textbooks to find and modify questions for her own sheets. Licenses for her course materials cost several hundred dollars.

Wilson is no longer listed as an employee of Great Neck Middle School. Doing a bit of quick math—hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of dollars per course—she must be f***ing rich. I assume she, uhh, is no longer hanging out with 8th Graders? If she is, respect.

What can we say about the quality of Wilson’s materials? Whatever—that’s actually the wrong question, because it doesn’t matter. What’s more interesting is why they’re so popular, and that’s clear to any teacher who’s seen them: they are ready to print and use, with answer keys and plenty of white space after each question.

PLENTY of white space. Oh my god. The hours I’ve lost to white space. There is currently a nationwide effort to get teachers to actually use vetted curricula—“high-quality instructional materials”—and I swear that if people were actually serious about this all they’d have to do would be to ADD WHITE SPACE to these things and make them READY TO PRINT. It doesn’t matter how good your textbook is if it’s annoying to use. The powers that be just don’t get this, but you know who does? Gina Wilson.

There are other things that Gina Wilson understands. Her curricular materials are simple and straightforward, with common structures and routines. The answer keys are important to many teachers. (Not me, but I’m a mess, figuring out answers in realtime.) When there are variations on a typical lesson—activities like “Madlibs” or “Relay Races”—they don’t ask kids to use different mathematics but vary the surface-level activity. I don’t love this personally, because I’m boring and scared of cuteness, but I get that most teachers like these twists on the daily grind.

Last summer, Sarah Schwartz wrote for Education Week about the RAND survey. “Regardless of state or district requirements,” she wrote, “teachers mix and match the lessons and resources they use in their classrooms.” But this reporting doesn’t dig into the actual nature of these supplemental resources, their qualities, or the people who make them. No reporting does, as far as I can tell.

The biggest mistake people make in following education is assuming that classrooms reflect the official requirements. People—even people who should know better—read position papers and state mandates and say things like, “New Jersey is moving in the wrong direction!” or “Finally we’re seeing some changes in Suffolk County.”

If there is anything to understand about education, it’s this: learning happens in classrooms with teachers and little oversight, except from overstretched administrators who, often despite their best efforts, cannot keep track of everything going on in their schools.

43%—that’s a very significant number. That’s a lot of space. It’s the space between curriculum and the classroom. It’s where ed school professors lose their influence, where consultants can’t reach, where state initiatives fizzle away into nothing.

American education will either live with this space, learn to engineer around it, or try to destroy it. I wouldn’t be shocked if, some years from now, the latest technology is used to automate oversight—maybe the next gen textbook will be watching the teacher. But until then, or maybe until that fails, this space will exist—right now it belongs to people like Gina Wilson, and without making much of a fuss, she’s dominating it.

As AI’s endless clichés continue to encroach on human art, the true uniqueness of our creativity is becoming ever clearer

- by Richard Beard

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