Nation implies membership and belonging, which is useful for anything with users you want to keep. It also implies territory, and the argument about who governs online territory has become a real political subject. Web Nation reads as a community with a shared space that happens to be digital. That framing has far more purchase now than it did a decade ago, with digital rights, platform governance and online civic life all under active contest.

Negation is underused in naming and distinctive when it’s done well. Unweb is memorable in a way a positive-sounding name simply wouldn’t be. The idea inside it is live rather than novel. Digital minimalism, the small web movement, local-first software, and the general reaction against platform consolidation have all produced real communities and real projects, and none of them has a name this clean. It suggests everything the web isn’t or has stopped being: the small internet, the local-first internet, the web without surveillance, the web you leave.