The Last Good Day on the Internet, and The Internet We Could Have Had: How it started vs how it’s going

The Last Good Day on the Internet: Finding Hope and Humanity in a Superhuman World Author: Mark LittleISBN-13: 978-1399755825Publisher: Hachette IrelandGuideline Price: £17.99; 344ppThe Internet We Could Have Had Author: Christopher M. KeltyISBN-13: 978-1509574506Publisher: PolityGuideline Price: £20; 228pp “If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here,” goes the old joke about a tourist asking for directions in Ireland. On first consideration, that framing might seem an appropriate metaphor for how, in just a few decades, the internet has journeyed towards its current perilously dystopian state. We’ve travelled from cheerful “You’ve got mail!” notifications and Facebook friend pokes to deepfake election videos and AI bots hacking national health systems. Surely it must have been something in the surprisingly ramshackle way the internet was thrown together in the distant past that has left us in this desolate online arrivals hall? But the answer is no, according to two different takes, entrepreneur and former RTÉ correspondent Mark Little’s The Last Good Day on the Internet, and University of California at Los Angeles professor Christopher M Kelty’s The Internet We Could Have Had. Both believe the foundations and early ethos of the internet had great promise to take us somewhere different – perhaps radically, excitingly different – than where we are now. But of course, the internet we have emerged out of those early structures. Little and Kelty have divergent views on what happened and why, and what “there” might look like in the future. But both are adamant that we started from an extraordinarily good “here”, in the way-back construction days of the internet. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, go back.Little’s book is the more traditional take, looking first at what Kelty might define as the standard version of the internet’s early, erratic history (so many separate projects and intents that nonetheless merged into something coherent, and that actually worked). The meat of Little’s book comprises a close look, with many insider takes, at what has gone wrong, concluding in a set of chapters with ideas about what might be done to counter or remedy this dire situation, including a (perhaps surprisingly accommodating) look at AI. READ MOREHe offers the insights of his personal experience as a journalist, then tech company founder (Storyful, Kinzen) and big tech employee navigating the impacts of this high-speed, always-on, enthralling, alarming global phenomenon. That professional combination – including his encounters with key business, political, press and technology figures such as Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch (whose News Corp acquired Storyful) – drives sharp, unique insights into an internet gone increasingly sour.Little’s framing of the book around the idea offered in his title, a “last good day on the internet” before it became a shocking mess, is risky and will probably work for some but not others. He’s precise about that Last Good Day: February 26th, 2015, a Thursday, when a pair of llamas escaped from handlers on a visit to an Arizona retirement home and were vigorously pursued for 90 minutes as people all over the world followed a live feed of the chase. Twitter users chattered about the llama drama in 220,000 tweets. [ Mark Little: ‘Protests against data centres is the biggest wave of civic activism since the 1960s’Opens in new window ]Hours later the internet was again in a frenzy over whether an image of a dress showed a garment that was blue and black, or white and gold. People argued over its colour at the frantic pace of 11,000 tweets a minute. Buzzfeed called it the “internet’s greatest day” because a global audience lost its collective head, twice. Little agrees, but also invites readers to imagine their own “internet moment that had the feel of an epic night out with new friends”, or introduced an exciting new idea, or changed their perspective. Those moments, he argues, are gone.Are they, though? People still find community and discover fresh perspectives and exciting ideas online, and the notion of an identifiable day that provides a before and after does not quite work as a structuring device for me in an otherwise solid, perceptive book packed with fascinating insights. Only 18 per cent of Irish people had a Twitter account in 2015. I did, yet missed the llamas, and the dress barely registered. “Once there was a great, big global us,” Little asserts, but “our” experiences online, even on the same platforms, can be wholly different. That said, his opening third of the book also delves into much else, identifying critical moments in the net’s development, such as the widespread use of free and open-source software, facilitating new features and capabilities, and Tim Berners-Lee’s coding breakthrough that enabled the worldwide web, something he gave to the world, for free. Now anyone could create a web page and link to other pages. A technological revolution rapidly followed. Unfortunately, so too did the growing privatisation and commercial control of much of the internet. The middle section of The Last Good Day tears into what these forms of containment, manipulation and exploitation are – the algorithms that shape behaviour, the walled-garden tech environments that chain people to particular devices and companies, the tech “innovations” that keep people scrolling, posting and watching, and allow wide-ranging data collection and surveillance. [ Location tracking: ‘I can easily see where 80% of the people I know currently are’Opens in new window ]Where the book really triumphs is whenever Little goes autobiographical. His career and personal experience provide so many penetrating understandings into why the internet is now inseparable from that state formerly known as real life, and how it has come to be dominated by a handful of recklessly powerful companies. As a journalist with the national broadcaster, covering war zones, and then the US, he could see how the internet was transforming war coverage, protest, democratic rebellion, elections and campaigns. Events such as the Arab Spring were inseparable from the accessible technologies used to organise and report them. Brexit and Trump’s election were beholden to new ways of harvesting personal information from internet users and effectively targeting ads and social media posts. With his company Storyful, Little and his employees pioneered ways of verifying video and images. Then, joining Twitter just as the platform was in various forms of meltdown, Little gets – and here, gives readers – a front-row seat on big-tech chaos. This is a centrepiece of the book, honest, deeply engrossing and full of “if onlys” as to how this important social platform (and others) might have developed. Little also ends up at Spotify for a time and builds a second internet-focused company, Kinzen. All this enables him to show, not just tell, how the internet veered from “how it started” into “how it’s going” (to utilise a popular meme). The book’s final third looks at where we are now, and where multiple online worlds might be going, from the challenges facing traditional media to that difficult and daunting newcomer, AI. This tendency for internet and tech-focused books to end with a “how to fix this” conclusion is an approach rejected by Kelty’s The Internet We Could Have Had, in a book that vigorously spurns much received wisdom and standard views. It’s a very different and challenging read, as might be expected from someone with a joint appointment in UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics, Department of Information Studies and Department of Anthropology. Unapologetically academic (in a punkish sort of way), and also delightfully playful and, occasionally, laugh-out-loud funny, this is a book that requires close (re)reading and is unlike anything I’ve read before on the internet and technology. It’s exhilaratingly different. “It’s hard to argue that the internet has gone to sh*t,” Kelty suggests from the start, but adds that the many diagnoses of what’s gone wrong are “missing a section, like the 18 minutes of the Watergate tape, or maybe just a drunkard’s blackout. It’s just not clear how we got here.” He therefore presents this “forensic” book to look at the internet we could have had, if (such a critical if!) we had gone a different direction with the profoundly inventive, open-ended internet we originally had.This is not a relaxing, summer beachtowel read, but it’s a terrifically rewarding and unusual one. Kelty namechecks philosophers and theorists from Arendt to Lyotard, Popper to Hayek (even William Morris has a moment). Kelty has an expertly deep knowledge of the net’s building-block technologies and the individuals behind them too, and knows net history inside out. No surprise there; he has written a widely cited book on the history of free and open-source software and was active in the development of the groundbreaking Creative Commons licences for online content. So we also get Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth, Lawrence Lessig and Linus Torvalds, Eben Mogen and Tim O’Reilly, not simply namechecked and referenced, but understood.Interestingly, Kelty considers a kind of “last good day on the internet”, offering a selection of moments that might have been when we lost the internet we could have had, but they begin as early as 1993 and end as recently as 2024. “The victim was last seen by hundreds of millions of people, and yet the time of death is uncertain” is his usefully open-ended take.Kelty’s analysis of the many-headed monster that is Amazon is particularly astute, exposing how it might seem these giant tech companies are doing one thing – selling books or vitamins or garden hoses – when they are turning into online behemoths. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai and Tesla, X and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk at the inauguration of Donald Trump, 2025. Photograph: Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty “Amazon created the internet we do have by capturing labor, land, market and infrastructure all at once, and then figuring out a way to quickly rent it back to the people still invested in the promise of the internet we could have had.” From the company’s point of view, “Monopoly was for suckers. Why bother monopolising the market for a single good or service when you can control all the markets for all the goods?”Perhaps we need new ways to talk about these mammoth companies, too, to begin to address the harm they cause. “The term ‘platform’ is not up to the job … whatever these entities have become, they combine elements of both capitalism and governance in forms we have never seen before,” Kelty says.Perhaps the most provocative argument in this provocatively stimulating book is that “[w]e killed the internet we could have had … everyone is the murderer.” Not any one individual, company, nor Silicon Valley. Despite so many wanting something else at the start, and building a structure that could – should? – have allowed it to emerge, we got the internet we have. However, if we pay attention to how that happened, Kelty offers the parting shot that we might stand a chance with the next big promise/threat: AI. But, tough luck: we aren’t getting back the internet we could have had. If it’s any consolation, he’s sure we will eventually get an internet different from what we have. Because we’re all shaping it right now.Further readingThis is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir from the Inventor of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee (Macmillan, 2025) The creator of the worldwide web looks back at how it came to be and its future.The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity by Tim Wu (Knopf, 2025) A masterly work for understanding the power of the big tech platforms.The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor (MacMillan, 2015)A clarion call at a pivotal point, warning that the people would need to take back the net for it to reach its democratic potential.