Fight for the Future and Exposure Labs present:
Take Back Our Internet
Help create an Internet for people, not corporations.
We can’t just fight the harmful impacts of the Internet, we need to actively reclaim and rebuild the Internet to shift power back into the hands of everyday people. We must mobilize our lawmakers to pass “good Internet bills”—policies that put an end to the exploitative, oppressive practices plaguing our Internet. Good Internet bills legislate digital rights into law. These bills protect privacy, prohibit censorship, stop discrimination, and encourage a free and open Internet. The movement is growing—fill out the form below to add your voice and call on lawmakers to pass good Internet bills.
The Internet: A Public Good
With every keystroke, algorithms are determining who we are, where we are, what we do, and how far we’ll go. This three-part short explainer video series below uncovers the realities of algorithmic bias, its IRL consequences, and how we can return to determining our own outcomes.
When we talk about the Internet, it’s easy to think about the bad. Big corporations mining our data, using manipulative and biased algorithms to determine what we can, and can’t, see. But we can’t forget all the good the Internet does, and the potential it has to be truly liberating. The Internet should be a tool that brings people together, allows us to connect and grow, and breaks down the barriers that Big Tech has erected.
We must mobilize to make a difference.
Corporations design technologies to capture our attention and data. Today, these technologies are often designed and released to the public without considering the dangers they pose. As a result, human rights issues like discrimination and inequality are getting worse. But there are reasons to be optimistic. Policies like data privacy rights and bans on discriminatory technologies can stop abusive, oppressive corporate practices. The only reason it hasn’t happened already is because Big Tech, data brokers, and their armies of lobbyists are drowning the voices of everyday people out. We have to get louder and pressure lawmakers to pass good Internet bills for a just, equitable, and open Internet.
We must encode justice, connection, and equity into the design of technology.
Thoughtless harms are encoded into the technology controlling major aspects of our lives, including whether we’re hired for a job, what healthcare we receive, if we get approved for a loan, and what we see online. These harms can and should be designed out of technologies. Alongside that, we need to mobilize everyday people, especially people from impacted communities, to work with policymakers to ensure that rights-protecting safety features, like end-to-end encryption, are designed into new and existing technologies. Coding these values into new technologies, applications, and platforms that fuel the Internet is how we build a more just and equitable world for everyone.
We must create a human-centered, people-powered tech future.
A handful of corporations have monopolistic chokeholds over our data, attention, and lives. They exploit our personal information and intimate details for profit. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can disrupt this corporate stranglehold through anti-monopoly policies, digital rights legislation, and building new people powered Internet technologies. And we don’t even have to start from scratch. From the Arab Spring to Marriage Equality to Black Lives Matter, people have been using the Internet to forge connections and organize uprisings. We just need to take the next step to empower everyday people to create and contribute to new technologies that are based on what people want to do online, not what corporations want people to do. We can have a new Internet with decentralized, interdependent power that’s devoid of hierarchies. With intentionality and care, we can design and develop an open Internet, a place of freedom.
Join the Movement: Three Ways to Take Back the Internet
We can build the liberative Internet spaces we deserve, but we need policies in place to help protect it. Take action now to demand lawmakers pass good Internet bills and legislate a just, equitable, and open Internet into law.
Take Action
Petition Congress to pass good Internet bills that give us digital rights, data privacy, ensure free speech on the Internet, eliminate discrimination, and mandate protective measures like end-to-end encryption.
Share
Share this site on whatever social platforms you use and get the word out. Post in your discord servers, group chats, on TikTok—everywhere you can think of!
Here are some sharing images to get you started. Click though for the full-size versions!
More Ways to Fight
The more actions you take, the more noise we make, the more policymakers legislate good Internet bills into law.
Supporting Organizations
About Exposure Labs
Exposure Labs is an award-winning social impact film studio based in Boulder, Colorado, ancestral home of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho people. Exposure Labs embraces storytelling as an essential driver of cultural transformation. Creating Our Tech Futures was produced and directed by the Exposure Labs Short Form team.
About Fight for the Future
Fight for the Future harnesses the power of the Internet to channel outrage into action, defending our most basic rights in the digital age. We fight to ensure that technology is a force for empowerment, free expression, and liberation rather than tyranny, corruption, and structural inequality. We are an intentionally small, fierce team of technologists, creatives, and policy experts working to educate and mobilize at an unprecedented scale, achieving victories previously thought to be impossible.
