A World Splitting Apart — The Future of a Fracturing Net

The internet was born without borders. Packets fly no flag, and they converse as equals with any counterpart — that was the ideal of this net. Yet at the present point in our story, that ideal faces its greatest trial. The net that was supposed to bind the world into one is beginning to fracture — nation by nation, ideology by ideology. In its finale, the series looks at how a wire that carries freedom can turn into a wire that carries surveillance, and closes in on the true nature of the internet.

The Great Firewall

The phenomenon of a net that was meant to connect the world breaking into pieces is what people call the splinternet — a word that fuses splinter with internet. Through politics, commerce, and nationalism, an internet that had no borders is dividing into national islands. The largest living example of this is China.

In 1998, as part of the Golden Shield Project, China began building a system to censor and block domestic information. This is what the world came to know as the Great Firewall. Major foreign sites — Google, Facebook, much of the international press — were blocked, and cross-border internet traffic was throttled down to a mere few percent of the whole. But this is not simply a story of blocking. Inside the wall, China raised its own vast ecosystem: Baidu for search, Weibo for social media, WeChat for messaging, Alibaba for e-commerce. This space, home to some seven hundred million people, became another parallel world, severed from the global internet. The wall shut the outside out and, at the same time, created a self-contained universe within.

It Was Not Only Authoritarian States That Were Watching

Division and surveillance are problems for despotic states alone — one would like to believe that. But in June 2013, that easy line collapsed.

Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), exposed the reality of planet-scale surveillance carried out by the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance centered on the United States and Britain. Most shocking of all was a program called PRISM. The NSA was collecting user data directly from the servers of giant tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple. The very infrastructure of surveillance capitalism we saw in the previous episode — the vast troves of personal data companies had gathered — was being diverted, intact, into a machinery of state surveillance. The journalist Barton Gellman summed it up as a surveillance apparatus that had cast aside its historical constraints in the wake of the September 11 attacks of 2001.

Even nations that raise the banners of freedom and democracy were watching their citizens on a sweeping scale, in the name of security. This fact poses a heavy question. Division and surveillance are not tales of some distant, foreign land. The temptation of surveillance lurks within every state, under every system of government.

The Wire That Carries Freedom Is Also the Wire That Carries Surveillance

Following China, Russia too is tightening state control over the net. The Sovereign Internet Law, enacted in 2019, granted the government the power — in the name of preparing against cyberattacks — to physically cut the domestic network off from the world’s net whenever it saw fit. China, for its part, is exporting the very technology of censorship and surveillance to other countries. Documents leaked in 2025 revealed that the technology of the Great Firewall had made its way to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Myanmar, and beyond.

Here lies the coldest truth about the internet. Blocking, censorship, surveillance — pressed to their core, all stand upon the same single technical foundation. The technology that blocks a particular site becomes, unchanged, a tool to surveil dissidents and censor speech. In other words, the wire designed to carry free information is, exactly as it is, also the wire that carries surveillance and control. When a state fractures the net, the greatest thing lost is the rights of its citizens — their privacy, and their freedom of expression.

And so the series returns to the question of its starting point. Born as a distributed net to survive a nuclear strike, so that no one could dominate it. Raised as an open language owned by no one, released to the world for free, opened to all humankind. Yet the same network effects gave rise to enclosure by Big Tech, and the same structure of the net made surveillance and division by the state possible. The internet is a device in which the ideal that no one owns it and the power to control everything live side by side within a single wire.