🌐 The People Holding Up the Internet

Sheets.works: People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003". We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC. It's great to see the people doing this work called out in this piece. It's less great to see how little they're appreciated or compensated for it. Knowing how much of the digital world is held together by people who do many years of hard work for little to no reward—beyond the satisfaction of doing the work itself, of course—makes me hopeful that the moneyless future utopia depicted in Star Trek is, in fact,…