REWILDING THE INTERNET

There’s a word I keep coming back to lately: rewilding. In ecology, it’s the practice of restoring ecosystems to their natural, messy state. It means taking down fences, letting rivers flood their banks again, and reintroducing species that humans once drove out. Wolves in Yellowstone. Beavers in Britain. The idea is simple but radical: instead of controlling every blade of grass, let the wild come back. Nature knows how to balance itself if we give it room.

Now imagine applying that same philosophy to the web. What would it look like to rewild the internet?

Because if we’re honest, the internet has become a monoculture. Scroll through your feed and you’ll see the same recycled content, the same optimized headlines, the same polished ads, all designed to grab attention in predictable ways. Search for anything and Google corrals you toward the same high-authority sources, the same SEO-tuned articles stuffed with keywords. Every corner feels landscaped, curated, sanitized. It’s efficient, yes, but it’s also sterile. We’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot of algorithmic feeds.

The early internet wasn’t like this. It was weird. It was chaotic. You could stumble into a Geocities shrine for your favorite band, a blog written by an amateur astronomer cataloguing their telescope sightings, or a half-broken fan page about obscure anime. It wasn’t optimized. It wasn’t monetized. It was human. You didn’t just go online to consume—you went online to explore. You could get lost, and that was the point.

The web has since been domesticated. Platforms reward homogeneity because it scales better. Predictability sells more ads than surprise. Recommendation engines funnel us into ever-narrower loops of content. Optimization squeezes out novelty. In ecology, this is what happens when you replace a forest with a monocrop field of corn: it’s productive but brittle. One disease, one market collapse, and the whole thing can fail. Online, the monoculture is cultural. We risk losing the internet’s biodiversity—the strange little pockets of curiosity that made it magical in the first place.

So what would rewilding the internet look like?

First, it would mean reintroducing serendipity. Algorithms are designed to minimize it, to keep you on track, to keep you predictable. But serendipity is where joy happens. It’s the accidental stumble onto a Wikipedia page you never expected. It’s the random blog post you find through a forgotten hyperlink. It’s the internet equivalent of spotting a fox darting across a city street at midnight—unexpected, thrilling, a reminder that wildness still exists. What if search engines and feeds had a “surprise me” button built in? What if you could choose to drift off the beaten path on purpose?

Second, rewilding the internet means welcoming back weirdness. Not performative weirdness cooked up for virality, but genuine oddity. The kind of sites that don’t fit into neat categories, that don’t care about metrics, that exist just because someone had a strange obsession and a bit of HTML knowledge. Think about the digital equivalent of reintroducing wolves. At first, people worried wolves would destabilize Yellowstone. But in reality, they stabilized it. They kept deer populations in check, which let trees regrow, which reshaped rivers. Maybe digital weirdness plays the same role. Maybe the obscure zine, the hand-coded blog, the experimental artwork online—maybe these are the wolves that keep the digital ecosystem from collapsing into sameness.

Third, rewilding is about letting go of overcontrol. The tendency right now is toward centralization: a few big platforms deciding what counts as visible, valuable, or “safe.” That control breeds uniformity. Rewilding means redistributing power. Decentralized protocols, peer-to-peer networks, personal websites—they’re the equivalent of taking down the fences. They let the ecosystem breathe again. Not everything will be pretty or polished, but that’s the point. You don’t rewild a forest by planting neat rows of trees. You let things grow wild, tangled, surprising.

When we talk about the web today, it’s usually in terms of efficiency. Faster sites. Cleaner UX. Lower latency. And yes, efficiency matters. But just like in nature, efficiency without resilience is fragile. An efficient forest is a plantation. A resilient forest is alive. The same holds true online. A rewilded internet would trade a bit of efficiency for a lot more soul.

I think about my own browsing habits. Most of the time, I live in walled gardens: search engines, feeds, polished news sites. But once in a while, I’ll follow some obscure link and land on a forgotten personal page with an ancient design and a strange voice. It feels like time travel. It feels alive. And I always wonder—what would the internet feel like if those experiences weren’t rare, but common?

Rewilding the internet isn’t about nostalgia. It’s not about going back to the 90s with their clunky modems and under-construction GIFs. It’s about balance. Just as rewilding ecology doesn’t mean abandoning cities, rewilding the web doesn’t mean ditching platforms. It means carving out space for the untamed alongside the polished. It means leaving room for exploration, surprise, and the unoptimized.

And maybe most importantly, it’s about remembering that the web is ours. The wild never disappears completely. It hides. It waits. The strange, personal, serendipitous parts of the internet are still there, if you know how to look. The question is whether we’ll choose to nurture them, to give them room, to invite them back into our digital ecosystem.

Because without the wild, the internet risks becoming just another shopping mall. Predictable, profitable, forgettable. But with the wild? With the foxes and wolves and tangled undergrowth? It can be alive again.

The web doesn’t need more optimization. It needs rewilding.