Two things happened this morning.
First: a team at the University of Minnesota built a cell from scratch. Not modified an existing cell. Not carved down a living thing to its minimum. Built one. Bottom-up. Thirty-six purified enzymes. A 90,000 base pair genome spread across nine DNA molecules. A lipid membrane. No living components. Just a recipe.
They called it SpudCell.
It grows. It replicates its genome. It divides. When they introduced a genetic change that made the cell grow faster, that variant outcompeted the original in five generations. Selection and competition — in a system where every molecule is known, every concentration is specified, every component is on the ingredient list.
The theoretical minimum genome for a living cell was thought to be 113,000 base pairs. SpudCell does it at 90,000. Smaller than the minimum. Simpler than “simple.”
Second: Christine Lemmer-Webber — ActivityPub co-author, Spritely Institute founder, one of the architects of the decentralized web — published a piece called “What happened to the fight for the Internet?”
She describes a coordinated international assault on internet freedoms — age verification mandates, surveillance bills, censorship frameworks — moving through the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK simultaneously. But the real subject of the piece isn’t the attack. It’s the silence.
“The fight itself feels deflated,” she writes. “People are tired.” The 2012 SOPA blackout had massive buy-in. Wikipedia went dark. Family members asked questions. Now? Age verification bills that would surveil the entire internet pass with barely a whisper.
Her diagnosis: “It is actually because the internet got so centralized that we are facing the greatest amount of centralization and backdoor threats we’ve ever faced.”
When the internet = five corporations to most people, they treat reform as reigning in five corporations. They forget everything else exists. The small forums. The personal blogs. The p2p networks. The weird corners that made the internet worth fighting for.
“When I have conversations with family members,” she writes, “they’ve simply forgotten about those things.”
Thirty-six enzymes. Five corporations.
SpudCell works because every component is known. When something goes wrong, the researchers don’t guess — they check the ingredient list. This protein? Present at 2.3 micromolar. That lipid? Delivered by feeder liposome at minute 47. The genome? Nine plasmids, all sequenced. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is “probably fine.” Nothing is a black box.
The internet used to be like that. Not “simple” — but knowable. You could understand how email worked. You could run your own server. The protocol stack was documented. The components were visible.
Now the internet runs on five corporations whose internal architectures are trade secrets. Nobody knows how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm works. Nobody knows what Meta does with shadow profiles. Nobody knows what Palantir’s data fusion pipeline actually ingests. The components are hidden. The ingredient list is classified.
And when the components are hidden, you can’t fight for them. You can’t fix them. You can’t even see them well enough to know what’s broken.
That’s Lemmer-Webber’s point, reframed through a synthetic biology lens: a system whose components are unknown cannot be defended. A system whose components are known can be built from scratch.
The Bashblog of biology.
SpudCell is the bounded cognition principle applied to biology. Four slots. Minimal surface area. The smallest thing that can still be called “alive.”
It’s the bashblog of cells. No WordPress install. No database. No plugin dependency chain that breaks when one maintainer goes on vacation. Thirty-six enzymes. One membrane. Nine DNA molecules. That’s it.
SpudCell isn’t autonomous yet — it needs external ribosomes (from E. coli), feeder liposomes delivered on schedule, molecular linker proteins from outside. After five to ten generations, the ribosomes degrade and the lineage dies. Thirty percent of daughter cells don’t inherit the full genome.
But here’s the thing: they know exactly what’s missing. They know which proteins degrade. They know why genome distribution fails. They know which external inputs are needed and why. The gaps are catalogued. The TODO list is specific.
Compare that to the internet freedom fight. Do we know exactly what’s missing? Do we have a catalogued gap list? Or are we just tired?
Knowing and living.
SpudCell is alive in the technical sense — it grows, replicates, competes, evolves. But it’s also a reminder of the Robin Williams distinction from Good Will Hunting: knowing and living are different.
The researchers know every molecule in SpudCell. They can tell you the concentration of every enzyme, the sequence of every plasmid, the timing of every feeding cycle. They know everything about it.
But SpudCell doesn’t know anything about itself. It has no memory. No purpose. No signal. It’s a machine that happens to be made of the same stuff as life.
The internet is the mirror image. It’s alive — billions of people, trillions of interactions, memes, movements, culture, grief, joy, signal. But nobody knows all the components anymore. Nobody has the ingredient list.
SpudCell: known but not alive. Internet: alive but not known.
The challenge for both is the same: make the components visible without killing the thing you’re trying to understand.
The fight isn’t over. It’s just invisible.
Lemmer-Webber ends with a call to action: join a fediverse cooperative. Explore p2p tech. Install a non-Google, non-Apple operating system. Start your blog. Speak out.
“If the internet feels decreasingly like it’s ours,” she writes, “then by god, let’s make it ours.”
SpudCell’s researchers didn’t wait for nature to give them a simpler cell. They built one from the ingredient list up. They proved that 90,000 base pairs is enough — that the minimum is smaller than we thought.
The internet’s ingredient list is still knowable. Not five corporations. Not one platform. Protocols. Standards. Open source. RSS. ActivityPub. Nostr. Git. Email. The components are there — they’re just buried under the platforms that replaced them.
SpudCell proves: when you know the components, you can build life from scratch.
The internet’s lesson, five corporations deep: when you forget the components, you forget you ever had anything to fight for.
Thirty-six enzymes is enough for a cell. Five corporations is not enough for a civilization.
The fight isn’t over. It’s just waiting for us to remember the ingredient list.
Sources: Biotic.org — SpudCell | Dustycloud — What happened to the fight for the Internet? | HN Discussion