The Internet Lives! — Page A8 — The Internet Tribune

THE COMPANY THAT BUILT THIS TOWN did not begin with a mission statement or a PowerPoint presentation or a pitch deck. It began, according to the people who were there, with a question.

The question was: “What if the internet were actually good?”

It was asked at a dinner table in Milwaukee in the spring of 2025, by a person who had spent the previous eight years working in consumer AI and who had reached, in their early forties, the specific professional despair of someone who is very good at making something they have started to believe they shouldn’t be making.

“I had built things people used every day,” this person said. This person asked not to be named in this article, which they agreed to give, and will be referred to, at their request, as the Founding Technologist. “Things that were technically impressive. Things that worked. And I had watched what happened to those things once they got into the market. Once the engagement metrics got involved. Once the advertiser goals got factored in.” A pause. “I had watched good tools become bad machines, and I had helped that happen, and I decided I was done helping that happen.”

The question — what if the internet were actually good? — was answered, over the course of the following six months, by the Founding Technologist and five colleagues who had reached similar conclusions at similar points in their careers. The answer, as the company now describes it, was: start over. Not rebuild the existing internet. Start a new one. A real one. In a real place.

“The decision to build a physical town was not metaphorical,” said one member of the founding team, who was more willing to talk and who works, as of this morning, in the factory’s second-floor operations suite. “We genuinely believe that the internet needs to be rooted somewhere. That it needs to have a community. That the reason the old internet felt different was that it was made by specific people in specific places with specific relationships to the people they were making it for. We wanted that back. And you can’t have that back on the cloud. You have to have a place.”

The site selection process, which began in the summer of 2025 and lasted four months, evaluated forty-three potential locations in the Midwest: former industrial towns, post-mill communities, places where the infrastructure of manufacturing existed but the manufacturing had stopped. The criteria included access to the Great Lakes — “non-negotiable,” the founding team says, because “people who grew up near big water have a different relationship with scale and with patience” — a population with significant manufacturing history, affordable and restorable industrial real estate, and what the site selection team described in their report as “civic personality.”

“Civic personality” is a phrase that the founding team has used repeatedly and which, when pressed, they define as something like: a community that still believes in community. That still does the things — the town councils, the church suppers, the high school football — that require people to show up for each other in physical space and act as if the place they live together is worth investing in.

“A lot of places have the buildings but not the culture,” said the founding team member in operations. “The Lakeland plant site had both. The people here remember what it was like when it worked. And they’re still here. That means something.”

Part V: Why Here, Why Now

In the months after the site was selected, the founding team spent considerable time in town before the town technically existed. They walked the streets. They ate at the diner. They attended a meeting of the Oshkosh-area Chamber of Commerce — which Mayor Voss had addressed a year earlier about his vision for regional economic development — and they sat in the back and listened, and what they heard, they said, was exactly what they had been looking for.

“People were talking about what they needed,” said the operations team member. “Not abstractly. Not in the language of economic development reports. They were talking about jobs for their kids. About whether their kids could stay or would have to leave. About what the town could be if something came back to it.”

Gerald Voss had been talking about those same things for years. He grew up in Kenosha, studied political science at UW-Oshkosh, worked in county government, ran for city council twice before winning, and developed a reputation as someone who got things done in the specific, low-drama way of Midwestern civic officials who understand that the goal is always the outcome, not the credit for it.

“Gerry Voss is the best argument for why small-d democracy works,” said Alderwoman Connie Haertl, who has known him for eight years. “He doesn’t give speeches. He doesn’t do press releases. He calls people. He asks what they need. He writes it down. And then he does it, or finds someone who can. That’s a politician. That’s what a politician is supposed to be.”

Voss was recruited to be the town’s first mayor by the founding team in January 2026, eight months before today’s opening. He says he asked for a week to decide. He actually decided in about forty-five minutes.

“I called my wife,” he said. “She said, ‘Is this the thing you’ve been waiting for?’ I said yes. She said, ‘Then you already know.’”

He knew. And now, standing on the street where the ribbon fell, watching his town begin to fill in around him — the shop fronts lighting up, the first cars turning into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, the Badgers practice schedule being taped to the window of the Civic Center by an intern who looks to be about seventeen — he seems like a man who has arrived at a place he had been trying to reach for a very long time.

“You want to know what the internet from the before times feels like?” he said. He gestured down Commerce Avenue, toward the factory. “It feels like that. It feels like something somebody made. On purpose. For you.”

He pulled his coat against the September wind off the lake.

“It feels like home,” he said. “Even if you’ve never been here before.”

“You want to know what the internet from the before times feels like? It feels like something somebody made. On purpose. For you. It feels like home, even if you’ve never been here before.”

Mayor Gerald “Gerry” Voss • Outside the factory, Thursday afternoon

Part VI: The Date

There is one more thing about today that must be said, and it is a thing that Rod Black — who communicates, as noted, in column inches, and who provided this reporter with a statement equivalent to approximately eight column inches before this morning was over — said should not be elided or glossed over in the enthusiasm of opening day.

Today is September 11, 2026. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington and a field in Pennsylvania. A date that, for Americans of a certain age, carries a weight that doesn’t fully go away regardless of how many other things happen on that date in subsequent years.

Mayor Voss paused the ribbon-cutting ceremony at 8:46 a.m. — the moment the first plane struck the North Tower, twenty-five years ago — and read the names from a list. All 2,977 names. Which took almost an hour. The ribbon waited. Three hundred people stood still.

“This town is being born on a day that should not be forgotten,” Voss said, before the reading began. “And I want this town to be the kind of town that doesn’t forget. That makes time for the things that are hard and the people who aren’t here anymore. And then goes back to building.”

The crowd was quiet for almost an hour.

Then the mayor picked up the scissors.

And the town began.

How This Town Came to Be

Part V: Why Here, Why Now

Part VI: The Date