The Internet and the Promise of Digital Democracy

The early internet was saturated with utopian promise. John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” proclaimed a world beyond government control, where identity was fluid, information was free, and the old hierarchies of race, class, and geography would dissolve in a borderless digital commons. For a moment, it seemed possible. The open architecture of the web, the decentralization of publishing, the ability of anyone with a connection to reach a global audience — these were genuine structural features, not just rhetoric.

What happened next is one of the defining stories of our time. The open web gave way to platform monopolies. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and a handful of other corporations enclosed the digital commons, building walled gardens whose gates they controlled. The business model that emerged — surveillance capitalism, in Zuboff’s phrase — turned the promise of free communication into a system of behavioral extraction and prediction. Users became products, their attention monetized and their data harvested at industrial scale. The internet’s architecture of openness was not dismantled; it was enclosed, much as common lands were enclosed in eighteenth-century England, with similar consequences for those who had depended on open access.

In the Middle East, the internet arrived freighted with both the utopian narrative and the authoritarian counter-narrative. Governments that had controlled print and broadcast media struggled initially to control the web, and activists exploited this gap. But the authoritarian adaptation was swift: internet shutdowns in Egypt during the 2011 revolution, deep packet inspection in Iran, the UAE’s sophisticated surveillance infrastructure. The internet did not bypass power — it became a new terrain on which power was contested.

The lesson for AI is direct. Every technology that promises democratization is also a technology that can be enclosed, monopolized, and weaponized. The question is not whether AI will be used for good or ill — it will be both — but who controls the infrastructure, who sets the rules, and who is excluded from the conversation.