The Broken Social Contract of the Internet

By Cliff Potts, CSO, Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

The Promise of the Early Internet

The early internet carried an implicit social contract. It promised access without gatekeepers, voice without permission, and connection without coercion. In the early 1990s, the prevailing belief—shared by engineers, educators, and early users alike—was that a decentralized network would expand knowledge, strengthen civic life, and allow individuals to publish and collaborate on equal footing. That promise was not naïve; it was grounded in the network’s technical affordances and in a culture that valued openness, experimentation, and reciprocity.

That contract has been broken.

From Decentralization to Consolidation

The break did not happen all at once, nor did it occur because users suddenly became worse people. It happened as incentives changed and as control consolidated. What began as a network of networks gradually transformed into a small number of privately owned platforms optimized for scale, engagement, and monetization. The logic of these systems shifted from enabling participation to extracting attention. The result is not merely disappointment with social media, but a structural failure of the internet’s civic function.

Architecture Meets Incentives

Historically, the internet’s architecture was built for resilience and survivability. Early packet-switched networks emphasized redundancy, routing around damage, and maintaining communication under adverse conditions. These design priorities were later civilianized and celebrated as features of openness and robustness. What was not adequately addressed was how those same properties—scale, anonymity, and noise—would behave once coupled to advertising markets and algorithmic amplification.

As platforms grew, they replaced chronological order and user intent with engagement-maximizing feeds. Content that provoked outrage, fear, or tribal affirmation traveled further and faster than content that required patience or nuance. Over time, users were trained—implicitly and explicitly—to perform for algorithms rather than communicate with one another.

The Collapse of Reciprocity

The social contract shifted: participation no longer implied reciprocity, and visibility no longer implied value. Users were encouraged to invest time, thought, and identity into systems that offered no obligation in return. When engagement was minimal or hostile, the implied message was not that the system was misaligned, but that the individual had failed to adapt.

This inversion—where structural failure is personalized—has significant psychological and civic costs. It corrodes trust, discourages depth, and normalizes withdrawal.

Diplomacy Fails at Scale

One of the most consequential outcomes of this shift has been the erosion of diplomacy at scale. Online spaces removed many of the social brakes that govern face-to-face interaction: consequence, context, and mutual recognition. In their absence, cruelty became cheap and performative.

Trolling emerged not as an aberration but as a rewarded behavior—an efficient way to gain attention in an economy that prizes reaction over understanding. The harassment of individuals during moments of tragedy, the coordinated degradation of those who create or speak earnestly, and the routine dismissal of expertise are not accidents. They are predictable outcomes of incentive structures that reward disruption.

Who Bears the Cost

Importantly, this degradation is not evenly distributed. Those who attempt sustained creative or analytical work bear disproportionate costs. Their labor is easily consumed, rarely compensated, and frequently attacked. Meanwhile, platforms externalize responsibility by framing these dynamics as matters of personal resilience or content moderation at the margins.

The deeper issue—an economic model that profits from conflict while disclaiming its social consequences—remains intact.

Why Withdrawal Is Rational

None of this requires nostalgia for an idealized past. Early internet spaces had their own exclusions and failures. But there was, at minimum, an expectation that participation served a purpose beyond data extraction. Today, that expectation is difficult to sustain.

Withdrawal, under these conditions, is not antisocial. It is rational. Choosing not to participate in systems that reward degradation is a form of boundary-setting, not retreat. Reclaiming attention from platforms that do not reciprocate care or value is an act of self-preservation.

What Repair Would Require

This essay does not argue for abandonment of the internet, nor does it propose a singular remedy. It documents a failure and names its mechanisms. The first step toward any future repair—technical, cultural, or civic—is acknowledging that the contract many people believed they were signing has already been violated.

What comes next will require more than new platforms or better moderation. It will require a re-examination of incentives, ownership, and the purposes to which shared infrastructure is put.

Until then, clarity matters. So does restraint. And so does the right to step back from systems that ask much and give little in return.

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For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

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APA Citations

Brin, S., & Page, L. (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1–7), 107–117.

Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin Press.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.