Social Platform Ownership & Governance

Infrastructure is public in nature even when it isn't publicly owned and operated. However, while public actors have a key role to play, I believe that a successful digital sovereignty strategy will overall end up relying more on private and commons actors. The first role that public actors have here is to disperse power and to help coordinate the... See more

When you bring together the facts that these companies operate in a largely lawless environment (the supranational environment) that offers no checks and balances, impacting more lives than the largest democracies, and with an explicitly authoritarian mode of governance (which has been the case for years but has become harder to ignore) then you... See more

Structural power isn't always a problem, for instance there is no reason to complain that a game designer will pick the rules of their imaginary world, but there is a large set of cases in which this structural power gives corporations " coercive powers like the state but (...) not subject to the kinds of democratic constraints and accountability... See more

When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.

This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.