Take Back the Internet is a joint effort by staff in Butler Library, the Journalism Library, and Open Scholarship Services.

As library workers and researchers, we spend more time than most searching the internet and evaluating the results. We reflect on changes within CLIO or Google Scholar. We analyze how market consolidation affects the cost of information access at Columbia. We discuss lawsuits that reveal the mechanisms influencing the information stream. We battle with the ever-increasing numbers of bots that flood our platforms. We note how one’s previous behavior online narrows what was meant to be the expansive open field of internet information, letting historic actions determine future research and planning. And now, with the mass adoption of generative AI tools, flirtations with Dead Internet Theory feel less fringe and a rise in unabashed, though sometimes uncritical, Luddism is no surprise. 

For Take Back the Internet, we have compiled a selection of books and other library resources that tell the story of how online networked information evolved and raise the alarm about today’s landscape of enshittified websites, addictive social media feeds, and rampant disinformation. The book display, which readers can find in Butler 214 this Spring, is the collaborative work of librarians aiming to suggest a more complicated path through this muddled internet landscape than total technological refusal. 

From its inception, the internet was at once a defense technology and an infrastructure for sharing information quickly and widely. This contradiction remains unreconciled, but the relationship between the internet’s surveillance capacity and the liberatory promise of free-moving information has generated myriad projects and lost futures. We claim that the internet is knowable as a material technology, and even occlusive AI intercessions rely on the accretion of human work. Rather than slipping into a New Dark Age where we treat the internet like a big data-enabled scrying tool, we hope to suggest paths forward.

Engage

We will be taking back the internet in a thematic Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon on Tuesday April 28th from 11 am-2 pm in room 214 in Butler Library. Please join and browse some of the titles in the displays to either build or create more context for a number of Wikipedia articles related to our display. Registration is encouraged, but not required.

Featured titles

• A History of Fake Things on the Internet – Search for this item in CLIO
• Algorithmic Culture Before the internet – Search for this item in CLIO
• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism – Search for this item in CLIO
• Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days That Built the Future of Business – Search for this item in CLIO
• Computer: A History of the Information Machine – Search for this item in CLIO
• Cyberfeminism Index – Search for this item in CLIO
• Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology – Search for this item in CLIO
• Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize our Information – Search for this item in CLIO
• Data Feminism – Search for this item in CLIO
• Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy – Search for this item in CLIO
• Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are – Search for this item in CLIO
• Free Culture: How Big Media UsesTechnology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity – Search for this item in CLIO
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism – Search for this item in CLIO
• How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web – Search for this item in CLIO
• Internet for the People: The Fight for our Digital Future – Search for this item in CLIO
• Internet Histories – Search for this item in CLIO
• New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future – Search for this item in CLIO
• Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society – Search for this item in CLIO
• The MARC Pilot Project: Final Report on a Project Sponsored by the Council on Library Resources, inc – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Social SemanticWeb – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World – Search for this item in CLIO
• The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia – Search for this item in CLIO
• The World and Wikipedia: How we are Editing Reality – Search for this item in CLIO
• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy – Search for this item in CLIO
• Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its Inventor – Search for this item in CLIO
• Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness – Search for this item in CLIO

Learn more

We hope that this display sparks conversation and that readers – even those already well-versed in Internet history – learn something new about the complex World Wide Web. To provide feedback on this display or continue the conversation, we can be reached at openscholarship@library.columbia.edu. 

Curators

Take Back the Internet is brought to you by: 

Madiha Zahrah Choksi, Digital Learning & Emerging Technologies Specialist

Esther Jackson, Head, Open Scholarship

Sydni Meyer, Teaching and Undergraduate Services Librarian

Kathryn Pope, Digital Repository Manager

Emily Schmidt, Journalism & Government Information Librarian