Toward a Nomad Web

A Brief History of the Internet's Enclosure and the Conditions of its Release

Author

Ven Gist

Published

July 7, 2026

Language

English

Grounded in Deleuze & Guattari's concept ot smooth and striated space, the essay covers a brief history of the internet and how it has oscillated between these two types of spaces. It traces its lineage from genesis as a smooth protocol web, its striation as it became a platform-State, to the modern resmoothing as protocol response. It diagnoses the vectors of enclosure and lays out a strategy for how the web can once again become a smooth space, a nomad web.

The internet wasn’t born free but became so in short order, sedimenting into an open commons of protocols, a nomad space of free association. Then platforms came in to enclose it layer by layer, function by function. The web became dominated by a platform-State that restricts movement, where exit is ruinously expensive — an abandon of your community, your audience, your livelihood. The publics that exit the platform-State, nomad publics, aren’t migratory by nature but forced into that mode by the unceasing capture of territory. Toward a Nomad Web traces a brief socio-technical history of the internet as a study to diagnose the many vectors of enclosure and elucidate a strategy for freeing internet life into nomad space — a nomad web where enclosure is an assumed phenomenon and portable coherence is engineered as primary feature, now with the gift of hindsight unavailable to the early web.