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| Now screening on MUBI |
The End of the Internet arrives burdened by the weight of its own title. To announce “the end” of something as omnipresent, abstract, and structurally embedded as the internet is to promise revelation, catastrophe, or at the very least a coherent diagnosis. Dylan Reibling’s documentary, however, is less interested in apocalypse than in excavation. The film wanders through the physical, ideological, and emotional infrastructures that undergird the web, tracing the uneasy fault lines between decentralization and power, community and capital, resistance and techno-utopianism. What emerges is not a manifesto, nor even a complete argument, but a restless and often fascinating cinematic inquiry into who controls digital life — and who imagines they still might reclaim it.
The documentary’s greatest strength lies in its instinct that the internet is not virtual at all. Reibling repeatedly returns the viewer to material places: an anarchist squat in Berlin, an Indigenous community in the Brazilian rainforest, church basements in Northern Spain, neon-lit futurist enclaves in Taiwan, parking garages in Miami occupied by crypto-libertarian dreamers. The internet, the film insists, is geography. It is cables, servers, zoning laws, state violence, language, labor, and land. In a media landscape saturated with abstract conversations about “platforms” and “algorithms,” this emphasis on physical infrastructure feels refreshing and politically urgent.
Reibling understands that one of the central tricks of modern digital capitalism is invisibility. Platforms function best when users no longer perceive them as systems designed by human beings with economic interests, but as neutral environments — weather patterns rather than corporations. The film repeatedly punctures this illusion. It reminds us that today’s internet, once imagined as a democratizing commons, has calcified into an extraordinarily centralized structure controlled by a handful of companies whose influence extends beyond commerce into governance itself. Search, communication, memory, and identity now pass through private chokepoints.
Yet where the film becomes more intriguing — and more frustrating — is in its treatment of decentralization as a response. The documentary assembles a broad coalition of dissidents, hackers, mutual-aid organizers, Indigenous technologists, and anti-censorship activists who seek alternatives to corporate platforms and state surveillance. Some build community-owned mesh networks; others preserve data sovereignty for vulnerable populations; still others attempt to create entirely new protocols outside the architecture of Silicon Valley. Their projects are compelling precisely because they emerge from concrete local needs. In underprivileged or politically threatened spaces, decentralization appears not as ideology but survival.
The Berlin commune sequences are particularly evocative. Here, technology is framed less as innovation than as stewardship. The inhabitants speak about networks with the language of care, mutual aid, and interdependence. Their vision of decentralization is deeply social: technology should distribute power horizontally and reinforce communal resilience. In these moments, Reibling captures something genuinely moving — the lingering hope that the internet could still become a civic space rather than merely a marketplace.
But the documentary struggles to connect these isolated experiments into a larger analytical framework. The various initiatives rarely converse with one another, either literally or intellectually. The result is a film rich in atmosphere and anecdote yet curiously diffuse in argument. One leaves with admiration for the people involved, but also with an unresolved question: what exactly scales here? Can these fragmented alternatives meaningfully challenge the immense concentration of power held by multinational tech corporations, or are they ultimately local acts of symbolic resistance?
That tension becomes impossible to ignore with the inclusion of Urbit, the controversial decentralized computing project associated with Silicon Valley accelerationism and billionaire technologists. Reibling clearly positions Urbit as a counterpoint to the grassroots activism elsewhere in the film, but the contrast is so stark that it almost destabilizes the documentary’s internal logic. On one side are organizers attempting to democratize infrastructure for marginalized communities; on the other are wealthy techno-libertarians building parallel systems in anticipation of institutional collapse. Both invoke “decentralization,” yet they mean radically different things by it.
This is the film’s most provocative idea — and also the one it engages too late and too briefly. Decentralization, the documentary gradually reveals, is not inherently emancipatory. It can describe cooperative networks rooted in solidarity, or it can describe elite exit strategies designed to evade collective accountability altogether. One version disperses power downward; the other fragments society into privatized enclaves governed by wealth and technical expertise. The fact that these opposing political imaginaries share the same rhetoric is not incidental. It is the central contradiction of internet politics in the 2020s.
Reibling gestures toward this contradiction but hesitates to interrogate it fully. The Urbit material is undeniably fascinating because it introduces discomfort into a film otherwise inclined toward moral clarity. The tech founders speak in the language of sovereignty, freedom, and anti-centralization, but beneath their rhetoric lurks a familiar Silicon Valley fantasy: that social problems can be solved not through democratic struggle but through technological escape. The documentary eventually confronts one of these figures, yet the exchange arrives so late that it feels less like culmination than afterthought. One wishes the film had foregrounded this ideological conflict from the beginning.
There is also a subtle conceptual vagueness in how the film approaches centralization itself. Reibling frequently invokes the early utopian promises of the internet — openness, democracy, distributed communication — contrasting them with today’s platform monopolies. But the documentary occasionally treats decentralization as though its meaning has remained stable since the internet’s Cold War origins. In reality, the relationship between centralization and decentralization in 2025 is profoundly different than it was in the ARPANET era. Contemporary digital systems thrive through hybrid models: decentralized participation feeding centralized extraction. TikTok, YouTube, and Meta rely on billions of users generating distributed content while ownership, visibility, and monetization remain tightly controlled. The problem is not simply that the internet became centralized. It is that centralization now operates invisibly through systems that appear participatory.
Still, there is value in a film that refuses easy solutions. If The End of the Internet ultimately “tables more questions than it answers,” that may reflect the enormity of the subject itself. The internet is no longer a discrete technology but the invisible operating system of modern life, shaping politics, economics, intimacy, and memory simultaneously. Any attempt to diagnose it comprehensively risks collapsing under its own scope.
What the film does accomplish — and accomplishes well — is restoring moral and political visibility to infrastructure. Reibling forces viewers to recognize that the internet is neither inevitable nor neutral. It is designed, owned, contested, and governed. Behind every frictionless interface lies an architecture of power.
And perhaps that is what the film most convincingly foreshadows about the future of the internet: not its end, but its fragmentation into competing visions of society itself. The battle ahead may no longer be between centralized and decentralized systems in any simplistic sense. Rather, it will concern what decentralization is for, and whom it serves. One future imagines networks as commons — locally rooted, collectively governed, imperfect but democratic. Another imagines them as escape pods for the wealthy and technically literate, insulated from public obligation. Reibling’s documentary catches these two futures colliding in real time.
The internet, the film suggests, is entering its ideological phase. The infrastructure wars of the coming decade will not merely determine how information moves, but what kinds of communities remain possible in a digitally saturated world. That realization lingers long after the documentary ends — unsettling, unresolved, and impossible to entirely dismiss.
