Social Platform Ownership & Governance

Seams can enable governance by delineating space, thereby creat-ing the separation necessary to establish legitimate rules and norms and to perform management, oversight, and enforcement. 39 Territorial bor-ders, the physical architecture of a home, anonymous grading systems, CAPTCHAs, passwords, and other authentication mechanisms serve these... See more

Part of what prevents people from starting their own software company is the pervasiveness of a singular popular narrative: the idea that money is the primary reason to do so. That the way to make software profitable is to scale, and the way to scale is to get investment from VCs. Software, for better or for worse, plays an increasingly primary... See more

Social media differs from note-taking apps. Users provide content and interaction for free. "Why should I pay when I'm the one creating value?" Fair question.

But maintaining the space where that expression happens costs money. Playing in a park is free. Maintaining the park requires taxes.

On top of this, much of the digital regulatory work of the past two decades has used an unhelpful consumer goods framing. Thinking in terms of consumer goods limits the space of interventions: you will mostly consider safety concerns. But regulating structural power needs itself to be much more about creating the kind of structure that supports an... See more

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