One of my firmest beliefs about the web as it emerged was that it could be a force for peace: learning happens, I argued, when contexts collide. People who didn’t know or understand each other would meet, talk, and connect. We would all have a deeper understanding, rooted in justice and empathy.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the incorrectness of that original utopian vision for the web, but I’m still not sure that belief was entirely wrong: the internet helped give birth to restorative justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and movements for justice around the world, which I truly believe are a prerequisite for a just peace.

It did, however, undeniably also bring together some of the darkest aspects of society: bigotry, nationalism, violence. It helped hate find hate; white supremacist organizations and thinkers were able to grow their communities too. Propagandists were able to share mis and dis-information swiftly for their own ends. Viral content became an integral part of statecraft, movement-building, and the manufacturing of consent.

Nationalism is a fundamentally toxic idea that can only lead to division. The simple idea that humans who were born inside one arbitrary diplomatic division are somehow superior to those who were born inside another is ridiculous on its face, and archaic to the core. We’re all part of one single, connected open graph; the internet should have shown us that. Everyone is connected to everyone else. We’re all just people, doing our best, trying to live our lives.

That we should fight each other based on where we were born or where we live or which deity we choose to believe in is absurd 17th century stuff. And the thing is, the people who sew these divisions know that. They’re created in the name of profit: to help secure energy rights, or a section of coastline that empowers a trading route, or to boost the shares of some corporation or other. It all comes down to cynical manipulation in order to establish dominance.

Faced with this landscape of internet-enhanced manipulation, those of us who build platforms for information and sharing have a choice to make. It’s not dissimilar to the choices made with respect to disrupting any incumbent industry. We can either choose to put a nice new face on existing power dynamics, or we can disrupt them entirely. A fintech company must decide whether it should works with incumbent banks and simply provide a shiny app that sits on top of the existing financial system, or build an entirely new system that serves people better. An information company must decide whether it should work with the existing dynamics of power, or build an entirely new system in service of truth and justice. Not nationalistic truth or justice, in service of a single nation’s interests above others, but truth or justice in the name of all people.

The web is for everyone.

That’s the only way it works.

It will have reached its potential when we can look at each other, or think of another country, and see the humans in their individual beauty and nuance over any tribal allegiance; when we can consider them all to be neighbors, and when their well-being is important to us.

Conversely, if that never happens, if we think in terms of diplomatic friends and foes and choose to accept the dehumanization of those our leaders deem to be the latter, then it will have failed, and maybe even made the world worse.

The internet is people. It’s all about interrelatedness and interdependence. We’re all connected. And if we can’t see that, I don’t know what hope there is for us.