Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity in an age of rapid change.

This week kicks off a two-parter I've been chewing on while traveling:

private and public networks.

Basically, what the difference is, and what it might mean as AI wires itself into everything.

Part one is about the private side, which means part one is a complaint. (A useful one, I promise.)

My wife and I decided to switch carriers. AT&T to Verizon. This should have been the easiest transaction in the history of commerce. Here is a customer walking toward a company, money already in hand, saying please, take it, let me in.

We had every advantage. Our son's Gizmo watch was already on Verizon. The phones were unlocked Apple hardware. This was a layup.

It took six hours.

An hour and a half in the Apple Store just to buy the phones. A trip to AT&T to extract some magic account information. Then Verizon, where my number got stuck in a liminal porting hell somewhere between two multi-billion-dollar networks, tangled up (I swear this is true) in my son's watch plan. Nobody could tell us where the number went. Two competent adults, one trivial task, six hours.

This is just what my life is now. This is all of our lives now.

Increasingly, my world runs on resetting passwords, or begging Apple to send a message to myself so I can prove I'm me to some other system. I wanted to watch a single Dodgers game last month. One game. That required the MLB app, which has been ingested by the ESPN app, which upgraded me into a Disney account, which is billed through Apple because that's where my apps live. I am now four subscriptions deep into a corporate org chart, and I genuinely do not know how to get out.

None of this is a bug. It's the F'N architecture.

Cory Doctorow has a word for this: enshittification.

The pattern is consistent enough to state plainly. A private network starts out genuinely good to its users, because it needs you. Then you get locked in. This means your contacts, your data, your habits, your kid's watch are locked in and it starts extracting value from you. Eventually it extracts from everyone, because by then your exit costs more than your patience.

I want to be fair here. A capitalist private network is a perfectly good way to build something satisfying and make a lot of money. This is where the business models are. The early walled garden is usually a lovely garden. The problem comes when these networks scale and lose focus, when the person standing at the counter stops being the point. The friction I felt in that Verizon store wasn't designed by a villain. It's just what's left over when convenience stops being the goal.

Lock-in isn't a side effect of the private network. Lock-in is the product.

Once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere. The streaming service that raised prices three times and added ads to the tier you already pay for. The airline that turned a seat assignment into a la carte revenue. The printer that bricks itself over third-party ink. Different industries, same math:

• acquire you cheap,

• wall you in,

• then charge rent on the walls.

Every one of these started as a genuinely better deal than what it replaced.

Ok, so here it is.
Now add AI to this picture, because everyone is about to.

If you think bolting AI onto these bureaucratic mega-networks makes them better, I have a bridge on the 16 to sell you. AI doesn't reverse the incentives; it turbocharges them. More data gathered into centralized actors.

More surface area for tiered pricing. The cheap onboard to get your own information in, pay again to get it out. More clever, personalized, machine-learned ways to make the exit ramp just a little longer than your patience. The same companies that can't port a phone number in under six hours are now promising that an agent will handle my life for me.

Handle it where, exactly? Inside whose garden? Under whose terms of service?

This is kind of what I am driving at with private networks.

We can't fully opt out.

The infrastructure of ordinary life has been quietly rebuilt on top of these private networks. The school PTA runs on Facebook. The kids' tournament schedule posts exclusively to Instagram. Your two-factor code goes to a phone number that belongs, functionally, to a carrier that treats it like a hostage.

Oh yes.
I've fantasized about the clean break. I am a sucker for the Light Phone, the local-first stack, the landline and the filing cabinet. But you can't unilaterally exit a network that everyone around you is still standing inside. Deleting your account doesn't free you.

When the platform becomes the town square, leaving doesn't make you free. It makes you invisible to the town.

As much as I loath a certain social network, I need to log in to see where to drive my kid for practice.

That's the real trap of private networks at scale. Not that any single company is evil. Most of the humans inside them are kind, competent, and structurally forbidden from helping you. The support rep who couldn't find my number wasn't lazy; she'd been designed into powerlessness, because giving her real authority costs the company money. The trap is that things which used to be genuinely public like the bulletin board, the little league schedule, the phone number itself are now pulled into having a user ID and password to a company database.

So the short-term forecast is not great. Private networks will keep consolidating, AI will make them stickier and more expensive, and more of us will get priced out or locked in (probably both at once.) The pursuit of money isn't going to pause and reconsider. These networks will keep doing exactly what they're built to do.

Which raises the question I actually want to ask, the one this whole six-hour ordeal was scratching at:

What's the alternative?

Because we already have networks that don't work this way. You drove on one today. It didn't ask you to link your Disney account. Nobody in your town is "the road guy," charging a toll at the end of your driveway. There is another model which is older, less glamorous, and weirdly resilient.

I think it has something important to say about what we build next.

That's part two!

Next week: public networks, my wife's detour down Abercorn, and why the trees might matter more than the traffic.

Make it Happen

Thanks for reading. I do this every week, (even when I am on vacation - Go Dodgers) If you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. We'll see you next time!

These essays start in Nye's Digital Lab Brain Vault, which is a collection of research and improvisations on a local hard drive. From here, ideas are refined and developed with Anthropic Claude, and sweetened with old fashioned human labor.

For more information visit: https://nyewarburton.com

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• The Two Currencies of Creativity - On the two parallel economies of creative work.