Dreaming of a Networked World: Reflections on the Political Economy of the Internet - Dr danah boyd
Oxford Internet Institute (OII) 25th Anniversary Lecture - 15 June 2026
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Speaker: danah boyd - Geri Gay Professor of Communication, Cornell University
Moderator: Dr Bernie Hogan - Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
danah boyd delivered a sweeping reflection on the evolution of the Internet, tracing its trajectory from an experimental social space grounded in connection and gift economies to today’s heavily financialized and AI-saturated digital ecosystem. Drawing on personal history, Internet studies scholarship, political economy, and new qualitative research with teenagers, she argued against deterministic narratives about technology and urged scholars to resist accepting AI-driven futures as inevitable.
Early Internet Cultures and the Dream of Connection
boyd opened by recalling her own teenage introduction to the Internet in the 1990s, initially through her brother’s modem use and Usenet communities. What struck her most was the realization that “the Internet is made of people.” Early online life was experienced less as infrastructure or commerce and more as emotional and social connection. Even the Internet’s military origins felt distant compared to the interpersonal realities she encountered, including conversations with queer and trans soldiers stationed overseas.
She contrasted this with the later dot-com era, when venture capital and financial logics flooded Silicon Valley. Following the collapse of the dot-com bubble, many technologists briefly imagined they could return to building products focused on connection rather than extraction, though that hope proved temporary.
Her early research on teenagers between 2004 and 2012 focused on how young people used social media as “digital flâneurs” — wandering online spaces to socialize, experiment with identity, and maintain peer relationships. Teens were generally uninterested in the political economy underlying the systems they inhabited. Social media at that stage resembled malls: commercial spaces repurposed by youth for their own social goals.
From Social Media to “Parasocial Media”
boyd argued that the social media ecosystem she studied no longer exists. Platforms gradually shifted from user-directed social interaction toward algorithmically curated attention systems optimized for extraction and influencer culture. Today’s platforms are better understood as “parasocial media,” where users follow celebrities and influencers who do not know they exist, rather than maintaining reciprocal social relationships.
She compared contemporary platforms like TikTok and Instagram less to public squares and more to MTV-era celebrity culture. Cultural participation still occurs, but increasingly through influencer-driven gatekeeping. Meanwhile, meaningful interpersonal communication has largely migrated to private messaging systems, group chats, Discord servers, Reddit communities, Signal groups, and other smaller-scale spaces.
boyd emphasized that sociality online did not disappear; rather, it fragmented and moved away from the mainstream platforms most visible to researchers and policymakers.
Rejecting Technological Determinism
A major theme of the lecture was opposition to technological determinism. boyd criticized both techno-utopian narratives and doom-laden critiques that frame technological futures as inevitable. She argued that scholars often simplify causal stories about the Internet by treating greed, militarization, or technological design as singular explanatory forces. In reality, the Internet’s evolution emerged from entangled systems of infrastructure, economics, governance, ideology, and human intention.
She repeatedly stressed that many harmful outcomes emerged not only from malevolent actors, but also from well-intentioned decisions made within constrained systems. Features such as infinite scroll or algorithmic recommendation systems were often developed with practical goals in mind before producing harmful consequences at scale. Understanding those contextual dynamics is essential if society hopes to intervene more responsibly in future technological development.
AI and the Exploitation of Collective Labor
Turning to artificial intelligence, boyd argued that contemporary generative AI systems are deeply dependent on earlier collectivist dreams of the open web. She highlighted GitHub, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, blogs, and open-source communities as environments built around sharing, gifting, and collaborative production rather than profit maximization.
Large language models were trained on those collective archives, effectively extracting value from communities that never imagined their labor would be repurposed to automate or replace them. She described Stack Overflow in particular as an example of a gift economy in which experienced programmers helped younger developers through collaborative exchange, only for those contributions to later become training data for AI systems.
boyd stressed the need to hold both truths simultaneously:
Open collaborative cultures genuinely empowered people and expanded knowledge sharing.
Those same systems became exploitable raw material for AI-driven capitalism.
Infrastructure Fragility and “Normal Accidents”
Another major section focused on infrastructure dependency and fragility. boyd referenced Randall Munroe’s well-known xkcd “Dependency” comic, which illustrates how modern digital systems rely on obscure, under-maintained components. She used ImageMagick as an example of an invisible but critical piece of Internet infrastructure.
She then discussed later Internet infrastructure diagrams that add layers of AI, cloud dependencies, and physical vulnerabilities such as undersea cables. The point, she argued, is not precision but recognition that modern systems are precarious, deeply interconnected, and dependent on countless hidden relationships.
Drawing on Charles Perrow’s theory of “normal accidents,” she argued that tightly coupled and highly complex sociotechnical systems inevitably generate failures. However, she emphasized that Perrow’s theory is probabilistic rather than deterministic. Complexity increases risk, but societies still possess agency to reduce fragility through:
Redundancy
Transparency
Thoughtful handoffs
Reduced complexity
Institutional resilience
Friction as a Democratic and Technical Value
boyd devoted significant attention to the concept of friction. In both technical and legal systems, friction slows processes down, exposes risks, creates opportunities for accountability, and can function as resistance to harmful acceleration. She criticized contemporary AI discourse for treating all friction as inefficiency to be eliminated.
In contrast, she argued that the Internet’s historical resilience often depended on friction and adaptability rather than speed and optimization. The current push toward frictionless AI deployment risks destabilizing systems by removing safeguards and amplifying vulnerabilities.
Teen Perspectives on Generative AI
The lecture’s most original section presented early qualitative findings from a new study involving American teenagers aged 12–15. boyd explained that the research was originally focused on mental health, but she added AI-related questions to both focus groups and a national survey.
The findings surprised her. Contrary to dominant narratives portraying youth as enthusiastic AI adopters, many teenagers expressed skepticism, discomfort, or outright hostility toward generative AI. Common themes included:
Using AI mainly to cheat on homework because school feels pointless
Feeling emotionally conflicted about relying on AI systems
Believing AI harms creativity, literacy, jobs, and the environment
Feeling embarrassed about using AI for emotional support
Seeing adults as excessively enthusiastic or “AI-pilled”
Several teenagers described using ChatGPT privately to discuss depression or emotional struggles because they lacked access to therapists or supportive adults. Others expressed moral objections to generative AI because of environmental costs or its use of artists’ work without consent.
boyd emphasized how unusual it is historically to find a technology that teenagers use while simultaneously disliking it more than their parents do. Many young people viewed adults as aggressively promoting an AI future that they themselves did not want.
She connected this to recent graduation ceremonies in the United States, where audiences reportedly booed commencement speakers mentioning AI. According to boyd, students are not necessarily rejecting AI as a technology; rather, they are rejecting the political and economic project surrounding it.
Community, Connection, and Social Infrastructure
During the discussion period, audience members raised questions about whether AI disconnects people and whether meaningful online connection can still exist. boyd responded that many forms of online connection remain vibrant but are no longer concentrated in mainstream social media platforms. Hobby communities, messaging groups, Discord servers, and niche forums continue to sustain meaningful relationships.
She also reflected on how many social problems attributed to technology are actually rooted in broader social transformations:
Declining community institutions
Changes in work and family structures
Increased fear and social isolation
Constraints on young people’s mobility and autonomy
She noted that some uses of generative AI still create forms of social bonding, such as friends collaboratively experimenting with AI-generated images or songs. In those cases, the social interaction occurs among the people gathered around the tool, not within the AI system itself.
Parasociality and the Limits of Influencer Culture
Responding to a question about parasocial relationships, boyd explained that early social media primarily involved reciprocal interaction among peers, whereas today’s platforms are dominated by one-sided relationships between audiences and influencers.
She warned that parasocial systems can create dangerous misunderstandings about community and support. Referencing the “It Gets Better” campaign, she recalled tracking LGBTQ youth who posted vulnerable videos online believing they were joining a supportive network, only to experience harassment and, in some cases, suicide.
For boyd, the shift from reciprocal sociality to influencer-centric media fundamentally changes the nature of online connection and weakens the kinds of support systems earlier Internet communities sometimes enabled.
Financialization, Assetization, and the Political Economy of the Internet
In the final exchange, boyd addressed whether commercialization of the Internet was inevitable. She argued that many of today’s dynamics are better understood through broader processes of deregulation, financialization, and assetization rather than through Internet technology alone.
She pointed to the U.S. news industry as an example. According to boyd, private equity and hedge funds acquired local newspapers largely for their real estate assets, burdened them with rents, extracted value, and then blamed the Internet for the resulting collapse.
She connected these developments to broader patterns in Silicon Valley governance, activist investing, and the concentration of ownership and capital. Technologies become vehicles for financial projects rather than sole drivers of social transformation.
Referencing scholars including Manuel Castells, Kean Birch, and Anna Tsing, she concluded by arguing that power increasingly operates through network-making, assetization, and coordinated capital flows. Understanding these overlapping dynamics is necessary if society hopes to imagine and build alternative futures beyond late-stage capitalism and technological inevitability.
RESOURCES
It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens — danah boyd’s book on teens and social media, free to download
Techno-legal Solutionism — paper by María Angel and danah boyd on the limits of regulating children’s online safety
xkcd #2347 “Dependency” — Randall Munroe’s comic on modern infrastructure resting on one unpaid maintainer
ImageMagick — the small open-source image library referenced in the comic’s caption
Normal Accidents — Charles Perrow on complexity and tight coupling in sociotechnical systems
Kean Birch — scholar of assetization in technoscientific capitalism
The Mushroom at the End of the World — Anna Tsing on life after late-stage capitalism
Communication Power — Manuel Castells on network-making power
Technological Determinism and Discursive Closure — Paul Leonardi and Michele Jackson on the rhetoric of inevitability
It Gets Better Project — the Dan Savage campaign discussed in the parasociality Q&A