I recently attended and very much enjoyed Bread&Net 2025 in Beirut, hosted by SMEX. It was a great pleasure facilitating the workshop on the "Public Interest Internet" in the MENA region. Bread&Net, this time, was a deep dive into the realities of our digital infrastructure for me. It felt like navigating a complex, vulnerable ecosystem. We are trying to patch vulnerabilities in real time—whether state surveillance or algorithmic bias—while the political and digital environment around us constantly shifts.
After the conference, I realised that we often mistake connectivity for community. Sitting in the sessions, I was reminded that the systems we build require constant maintenance. We expect the internet to run indefinitely, but we rarely stop to evaluate the human cost of its upkeep.
The sheer velocity at which generative AI is moving is staggering, but what truly gave me pause was the fragility of our safeguards. We build detection systems expecting them to act as firewalls against synthetic media and deepfakes. The experts demonstrated how these tools are easily compromised by a simple crop or a drop in resolution. We are relying on automated tools to protect the truth, but truth is too nuanced for a binary algorithm. It demands human curation, robust media literacy, and a fundamental rethink of how we verify reality during conflicts and elections.
Then came a stark reminder regarding accessibility. If our digital infrastructure is not accessible, it is not truly public. Experiencing the web through the lens of motor disabilities or dyslexia is a humbling reality check. It takes mere minutes to ensure a document is accessible. Yet we routinely neglect this basic protocol by designing for the "ideal" user while ignoring the millions who are systematically locked out. We need to preserve access and agency for everyone to achieve true digital archiving.
Finally, the discussions on censorship laid bare the biases baked into major social platforms. When content about regional crises or digital safety for marginalised communities is quietly throttled, it is a feature of an opaque algorithm prioritising sanitised engagement over harsh realities. Fighting this shadowbanning requires strategic, cross-border partnerships to rewrite the rules of digital safety.
I leave Bread&Net with a renewed perspective. My renewed belief is that the public-interest internet is a shared space we must all actively architect, day by day and community by community.