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 and 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.