Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity in an age of rapid change.
This week: the other kind of network! The kind nobody owns, and why I think it's where the promise is.
My wife and I went for a drive to Port Royal, South Carolina. It's a really lovely little town, worth your day. We called up Google Maps, and Google, knowing our part of Savannah, did what Google does: straight onto the 16, over the bridge, optimized, efficient, correct.
My wife said no. "I want to go down Abercorn."
There was absolutely no reason to go down Abercorn. It's slower. But at this time of year the trees along Abercorn are growing in lush and full, the oaks doing that thing Savannah oaks do, and she wanted to see them.
So we took the dumb route, and it was the right route.
I keep coming back to that drive, because it's a small version of a question I think we should be asking constantly right now:
what exactly are we automating away?
The routing algorithm optimized for time.
My wife optimized for trees. And that's why we like public parks.
Public parks were invented for precisely this human instinct. New York and San Francisco carved green squares out of the most expensive land on earth because people need somewhere to walk, gather, and be unproductive together. Savannah's squares are the anchor of everything lively and vibrant about this city. Nobody's monetizing your stroll through them. That's the point of them.
A park is a network too. It's just a network whose business model is you being fine.
Here's the thought experiment I've been trying out.
Imagine founding a town, and one guy declares himself the road guy. He builds the roads, he owns the roads, and he charges you at the end of your driveway. Of course this is done with surge pricing, a loyalty program, and a mandatory RoadPlus subscription to access the left lane.
This is silly. Every town needs roads, so we build the roads together. Same with the electric grid, the water system, the schools. Yes, these are centralized entities paid through taxes, and yes, government runs them with all the charm of a DMV, but please notice what they don't do. The road doesn't lock you in. The grid doesn't upsell you. Your kid's school doesn't require a Disney account. (Or it shouldn't!) These are public networks: boring, universal, and quietly load-bearing for everything else, including every private fortune ever built on top of them.
So as more of life moves into digital worlds, and as AI becomes something closer to a utility than a gadget, the question writes itself:
where are the digital public networks?
Where are the roads in the AI future?
Because the cost curve is coming. If private AI networks keep enshittifying on schedule, which means more lock-in, more tiered pricing, more tollbooths between you and your own data, then a lot of people are going to get priced out of what will feel, by then, like a basic service. Not a luxury. The thing your job application gets filtered through, the thing your kid's homework assumes, the thing your doctor's office runs on.
When electricity became essential, we didn't shrug and let the road guy handle it. There was a collective mechanism, because there had to be.
We've succeeded at this before, spectacularly, with technology no fancier than paper.
It's called civics, baby. We wrote constitutions. We broke government into branches and factions, set them against each other on purpose, and built reasonable consensus between systems that don't trust each other. That's a public network protocol that's been running, with patches, for centuries. It's slow and it's ugly and it sucks, but man, it works, well ... sometimes... ok maybe not now, but we have to believe.
The failure of one implementation isn't the failure of the idea — it's a reason to keep iterating on the architecture. Especially as the other direction looks pretty bad.
Pick whichever one you fear, be it the socialist agenda or the aggressive capitalist one, the both complicate all of this equally. I'm not arguing for nationalizing the feed. Pure public systems have their own rot: bureaucracy, capture, the DMV of it all. And part one already covered what pure private systems become.
What I actually think is that these two concepts have to collide, and something has to emerge in the middle. There needs to be a hybrid that lets us sustainably distribute and fractionalize whatever comes next.
Maybe I can finally buy my one Dodgers game individually because it travels over a communal network of individual things, a market inside a commons, the way a food truck operates on a public street.
Do those markets work together? I honestly don't know. But the shape I keep sketching looks something like local-first creative sovereignty.
I don't fully know. I told you this was a meditation, not a manifesto.
But I know which instinct I trust. The algorithm wanted the highway. My wife wanted the trees. Like the Lorax warned us, the networks we build next should leave room for the trees.
Make it Happen.
That’s it for this time. I do this every week; if you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. If you like tech-detoxing with a book like I do, I crammed some of last year’s best essays into a printed collection.
My essays begin as an improvisation on a morning walk, that become a voice note in Otter.ai, take shape in Obsidian, and are finished in collaboration with several agentic versions of Claude's fancy AI suite.
For more about me: https://nyewarburton.com
We’ll see you next time.
If this resonated, here are some other scribbles from the Digital Lab that are worth your time:
The Art of Not Making It — on what it costs to stay in the creative life
Authenticity Arms Race — on keeping your voice when the tools get too good
Projects with Purpose — on building things that mean something