The Next Digital Divide?

Yesterday afternoon I virtually attended an event organized by New_Public, a non-profit focused on thinking about how to build a better internet. The conference was entitled: “After the Feed: AI and the future of the information environment”. Over the past few years, New_Public has become a central player in the “pro-social”/alternative social media space. Based on years of research, they have been putting out many resources for people interested in designing new online spaces with recommendations on how to make them more virtuous for people and democracy. Earlier this year, they launched their own platform, Roundabout, to experiment with new online designs for local communities.

Like me, the 200 or so people logged into Zoom were probably mostly looking forward to the keynote delivered by the CEO of New_Public, Eli Pariser, famous for coining the term filter bubbles some fifteen years ago. In his presentation, he outlined his vision for the future of the internet, focusing on how AI will disrupt the digital landscape that we currently inhabit.

In his opinion, AI changes everything and the age of large social media platforms and endless feeds is soon to be over. People are posting less, trust in online spaces is down and a more personalized experience of online life is within reach thanks to increasingly powerful AIs. It’s the “agentic interface era” in which feeds are replaced by personalized AI interfaces that summarize the internet for you, sorting what matters from the noise of infinite content.

That new era comes with challenges: AI developers become the new gatekeepers of information (a role that online platforms took on almost twenty years ago). In doing so, these new tools have the potential to disrupt an entire ecosystem of platforms that have remained mostly unchallenged for decades. But Pariser prefers to see this moment as an opportunity to reinvent the internet and make it better for all of us; he claims that we are now in the “1999 of the AI era”.

In this new age, the currency would no longer be attention but trust. People are drowning in content, so much so that they have resorted to using platforms on which the only choice they make is to scroll or not to scroll, on an endless feed of videos, all vying for their attention. Most of what they consume feels meaningless and increasingly, not trustworthy. If reach was the measure of success in the 2010s, the era we are entering will reward content that people can trust. According to Pariser, this thirst for trust can be satiated by new, smaller platforms that are more in sync with what people care about. With the lowering cost of programming, a new network of high trust online spaces could flourish in what he calls an age of “software abundance”. These new online spaces would combine AI’s moderating capabilities with humans’ need for connection, belonging and creative expression, creating a new hybrid online public square.

That presentation left me quite inspired and is rooted in something I personally feel: the social contract of social media is broken and thinking beyond the feed and the platforms we know and use daily is refreshing. Most of what was discussed also resonated with what I’ve been working on for the past five years. I am a PhD researcher at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and my dissertation looks at Front Porch Forum (FPF), a small online platform created in Vermont twenty years ago. FPF, a site that New_Public often cites as a model, resembles the high trust online micro communities that Pariser talks about. Used by a majority of the population, FPF is a trusted source for Vermonters to get local information and has become an invaluable piece of infrastructure to get help and foster more resilient communities.

For my research, I have used FPF myself, have done in-depth interviews with users as well as conducted a survey to understand their experience and why this online forum has been so successful, while many attempts at creating similar spaces elsewhere have failed. Here are a few of my thoughts on New_Public’s vision for the internet of tomorrow based on what I’ve learned from my research.

BBS 3.0.?

If 2026 is the 1999 of the new internet age, then let’s rewind a little and take a look at what the digital landscape looked like then. As New_Public points out in their presentation, the key players of the internet in the early 2000s, those who seemed securely positioned as rulers of the digital world –think AOL, MSN or Yahoo, all became obsolete way faster than we thought. The argument here is that companies like Meta or X won’t rule our screens forever and that there is room for innovation thanks to AI-assisted coding, which makes it easier and cheaper for people with little training to create their own platforms. That is a very uplifting outlook, and one that I hope can be fulfilled.

But if we are looking back at 1999, we must also acknowledge that back then a similar wave of cyber-optimism fell short of its vision of a healthy ecosystem of small, decentralized networks. Starting in the 80s, bulletin board systems, colloquially known as BBS, sprang all across the U.S. and the world, connecting hundreds of thousands of users by the end of the 90s. The BBS scene was characterized by its organic and decentralized nature. Using cheap modems, these systems allowed passionate sysops (short for system operators), to create and sustain networks much more easily than had been possible before.

We all know what happened next. The internet did not become a greenhouse for thousands of thriving micro eco-systems. Instead, it got invaded by a couple of invasive species that took over the entire space. Google, Facebook, Twitter and some others became dominant, thanks to a aggressive business models fueled by a never-ending thirst for data that our content-addicted brains were tricked into giving by powerful algorithms.  

This throwback is proof that even with a wave of optimism and new easily accessible technology, things can go wrong. If we don’t want this to happen again, it is vital to learn from what went south in the mid/late 2000s and understand how a healthy eco-system of small, decentralized networks can be colonized by capitalistic interests. The success of the new age of the internet –that is, the survival of a new wave of smaller platforms—is dependent on our learning from past mistakes and finding ways to protect these spaces from corporate greed, or what Jessica Lingel has called the “gentrification of the internet”.

No one is addicted to trust –or why more information won’t work

If the business model of mainstream social media platforms is surely to blame for the state of the internet today, there is another explanation that is both more and less depressing: our addiction to content. Feeds are designed the way they are for a reason: humans hate to be bored and social media, with its endless feeds, gives the promise of a world without boredom. That is why Americans pick up their phones 205 times a day on average. If anything, the architects of today’s platforms are only capitalizing on our brains’ addiction to the quick dopamine hits we get from seeing a cute cat on TikTok or a hot guy on Instagram.

In his presentation, Pariser declares that this attention economy is now turning into a trust economy. As sponsored and AI-generated content dominate our feeds, we yearn for meaningful content that makes sense and is actually useful to us. The new and improved digital world of tomorrow, equipped with AI moderation, could provide trustworthy information and boost civic learning and participation.

That some users are fed up with the doom loop of scrolling makes sense to me, I am one of those people. But I doubt that this applies to the majority of scrollers. Now we can hypothesize that generations that grew up with social media will teach their own kids how to cope with these addictive tools. What won’t go away, in my opinion, is our natural penchant for entertainment rather than well-curated facts. The success of social media comes from its ability to feed us what we want, and it seems unlikely to me that newer platforms will become successful if their bet is that we will get addicted to trustworthy content.

The reason I am highlighting this is that we’ve made that mistake before. The same cyber-optimists I mentioned earlier had great hopes for the information revolution that the web could have sparked. Although the spread of the internet did revolutionize the way we consume information, research has shown that if anything, our digital information infrastructure has widened the knowledge gap –the difference between how much those who know, know, and how much those who don’t, don’t. In other words, if the “information superhighways” did get built, most people are still parked at the movie theatre.

I understand that the proposed vision for the new platforms is a way to manifest a more virtuous digital future. But I think it’s worth mentioning that the tools that we design need to answer real needs from communities. We can’t be designing tools for communities, centered around trustworthy information only to see them collapse a few years later. There is a ton of research on how communities already use digital tools, like Facebook groups or FPF in Vermont, some from New_Public, that shows that they can work. Designing the tools of tomorrow will have to be done by watching and listening to those who are the pioneers and actors of already existing digitally mediated community networks.  

Farm to table vs. junk food: the haves and the have nots of the new internet

There is a quote that I love to use when I talk or write about Front Porch Forum, the small Vermont platform I study. It’s from a 2023 Rolling Stone article by Anil Dash: “There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally grown, ethically sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet.”

During my many research trips to Vermont I have come to realize that it is not a coincidence that Front Porch Forum became successful in the Green Mountain State. Vermont is known for its local pride, its focus on sustainability and its network of food coops that sell locally grown produce. FPF is locally grown, so it makes sense that people who care about where their food is grown also care about their online diet and prefer to choose local (digital) produce.

I have no doubt that a model similar to FPF could work elsewhere in the country and in the world. It might even be true that with the help of AI, such tools will flourish in many communities around the globe. But there is one thing I worry about: how do we make sure that such tools become available to everyone and not just a happy few?

Research shows that the success of digitally mediated community networks is closely tied to the strength of pre-existing offline connections in the communities they serve. Other factors such as income and education are also strong predictors of success. Vermont is a good example of this: Vermonters are not average Americans, they display higher levels of social capital, higher average incomes and better education levels.

In 2001, Pippa Norris’ famous book, The Digital Divide, made a case for the potential of the internet to divide society into those who would have access to information and those who would not. Although information access has become easier thanks to the internet, the knowledge gap has indeed widened. I fear that a similar dynamic could take shape in the new age of the internet: communities with better access to resources and high levels of social capital could invest and benefit from AI-mediated community networks, thus reinforcing their advantage over other, less privileged communities. Those would be left in a digital no-man’s-land of AI slop and deceitful content. While some will be eating organic produce, others will be stuck with junk food.  

It is essential that we find ways to provide these tools to the communities that need them most. In order to be sustainable, these new platforms will need to grow organically to fit the needs of the places they will serve. The success of these new digital infrastructures will also be dependent on offline investment, in policies that promote education, reduce wealth inequality and build cities that bring people together.   

I don’t know if this new digital divide will take place, but it is a risk worth considering. One might even wonder if we will ever miss the day we all used the same platforms, just like we sometimes now miss the time we all watched the same news on TV. Many people have made predictions about the impact of new technologies on communication, and history has shown that it is hard to be right. Regardless of what happens, it is thrilling to witness this revolution and to see researchers, thinkers and artists coming together to imagine a brighter future.