Open Social Media
The information landscape has changed. More people are online, for more hours per day, at increasingly younger ages. Journalists, authors, professors, and politicians are no longer the gatekeepers of media. All information is injected into the algorithm and the tech companies pull the levers.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 was the public’s introduction to the power accumulated in Silicon Valley. By this time it was an open secret that we are the product. But it wasn’t clear exactly how our information environment would change.
Would you prefer an environmental metaphor or a feudalism metaphor?
Silicon Valley is like the coal industry. In order to turn a profit, they must manufacture engagement, which creates waste products. An atmosphere of outrage increases the political temperature and causes extreme social events.
If you were addicted to Twitter on the 10th of September 2025, you were probably irradiated by the nuclear fallout of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. For You pages were almost entirely filled with content related to the event. The most inflammatory discourse floated to the top of the pile. Many users were exposed to footage of the brutal killing through Twitter’s autoplay feature. The site was flooded with speculation, misinformation, AI “enhanced” images, political extremism, doxxing and cancellations. Anyone naive to the attention economy might have thought America was about to implode. The victim of the killing was a culture warrior and the perpetrator was terminally online, and so the cycle continues.
Silicon Valley are like feudal lords. They make money by simply owning all the servers. They rent them out to the peasants who create all the information but own none of it. The peasants could revolt, but they don’t, and it will take some catastrophic event like the Black Death for the lords to lose power.
I like the analogy of a feudal manor, because the internet truly is a place where we live now. On the internet we work, play and learn. But this is rented space. There is no freedom of speech on a server owned by someone else. We don’t get to vote on the terms of service. They don’t even tell us what algorithms they’re using. We celebrated the death of the legacy media but we are now standing idly by while the new media is consolidated in the hands of a small group of unelected billionaires.
Will we unionise, by banding together under a browser extension? Or will we leave these sites and form cooperatives on the AT Protocol? If we do nothing, the government will surely subsume this democratic institution before it begins.
The fallacy is that it is up to the steamroller. It is up to the object whether it will be flattened or not.
