In the nearly 50 years since media theorist Gene Youngblood called for “a total inversion of the structure and function of the centralized mass media,” it could be argued that humanity achieved his desired revolution. The shape of media is no longer only centralized, unidirectional, and top-down; in fact, our current media landscape seems to contain all the hallmarks of Youngblood’s “cybernetic organizing principle”: two-way, feedback-style communication that is (at least partially) user-controlled and reaches specialized audiences. Still, echoes of Youngblood’s “global ecosocial crisis” continue to threaten human agency and access to information, with new players wielding even more nefarious tools of “perceptual imperialism.”

It has once again become necessary for humanity to decentralize power within the landscape of mass communication. The decentralized web community has outlined a set of principles that harmonize across time with Youngblood’s late-’70s revolutionary provocation and the Whole Earth Catalog’s value of access to tools and information. Their vision advocates for open and interoperable online ecosystems where users, contributors, and maintainers see the benefits of their labor flowing back to them; where individuals and collectives have agency over their own data, ensuring better security and privacy; and where ecological awareness, mutual respect, and accessibility are culturally enshrined as strong values. By synthesizing a reality in which technological development can be a people-first process, the decentralized web community opens a pathway of desire, so we, too, can desire, and thus demand, this new version of life online.