Alexander Rolfe
Reibling, D. (Director & Executive Producer). (2025). The End of the Internet. Video Project. 88 mins. This video reduces "the cloud" to a physical reality, and shows it's less benign than the metaphor suggests. It explains the physical infrastructure of the internet, its origin as a decentralized communication network, and the growing centralization and control that has since developed. Governments and large corporations control most of the data centers that make up the cloud. We're introduced to people around the world chafing under that centralization, and developing ways around it. Near the end, the video takes us to the annual convention for Urbit, an operating system that makes each computer a server, in an effort to return to a decentralized peer-to-peer internet. One of the attendees remarks that decentralization is something terrorist groups do really well, and wonders if full decentralization is really what people want. This keeps the film from being a simple manifesto in favor of decentralization. It has more educational value than that, prompting the viewer to think about the values at stake on both sides and the trade-offs involved. It should provoke fruitful discussion. It also does a commendable job of informing that discussion, with excellent material about Paul Baran of RAND Corporation in the 1960s, all the way up to the Urbit conferences of today. One can quibble here and there. There has been some oscillation between centralization and decentralization over the history of the internet, rather than a simple linear increase in centralization. Not much is said about why it happens either, even though that would help us assess the decentralizing movements afoot. There's also no mention of Starlink, which would have solved at least some of the problems depicted in Catalonia, and which has sometimes been a means of defeating government control.