Regulating Big Tech is not enough. We need platform socialism

The internet needs new rules — designed and agreed by democratically elected institutions — and technology companies need to make sure their products and practices are designed in a responsible way that takes into account their potential impact on society. That starts — but by no means ends — with putting people, not machines, more firmly in charge... See more

We need platforms that monitor our world for the sake of collective management of a shared commons—not platforms that measure our world for the sake of profiting from the data created from it, extracting value from the digital layer the same way that value is extracted from the mines, forests, and soils of our physical world.

In this Article, I adopt a genealogical methodology to trace the evolution of digital platform regulation efforts and controversies. I connect current efforts to 1990s debates around the regulation of cyberspace: contestations on the meaning of freedom, law, power, and democracy in digital spaces. I isolate three paradigmatic views, or moments, in ... See more

This is not so crazy. The more I look, the more I find activists, lawyers, investors and entrepreneurs around the world who are exploring options along these lines, often while seeking to address some of the deep problems of internet culture. Community ownership could be a way of rooting out the abuses that we often see with the billion-dollar “uni... See more

The very fact that we are so concerned over a change in ownership of Twitter, and the impact that that may have on the digital public sphere, highlights the complete lack of regulatory oversight and the lack of any set of ethical norms that have been established for social media.