information as infrastructure

Five companies that privately own the public communications and commercial operating system that increasingly write the rules of society

• We have outsourced the management of our critical informational pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand in glove with governments,

• Centralized clearinghouses of news, messages, and content.

A free and accessible press “provides an essential infrastructure for democratic society. The ability for a people to govern itself depends on the independence and accessibility of its media.

The digital network is an environment, we're incorporated into as components: nodes, continuously receiving and transmitting signals. Our actions are stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and deployed in real time to modulate the outcomes and behaviors of people, machines, and organizations. The ethos of the system is one of

Any decline in the force of institutions makes people vulnerable to information chaos. Institutions govern information and attentional flows. We've lost control of our information ecology and it has led to epistemic and narrative collapse -- cultural incoherence. As communication speeds up, once-stable social structures and relations become as