Take Back Our Digital Infrastructure To Save Democracy

Culture

from the a-time-to-build dept

Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you’ll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they’ve built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power.

This isn’t about technology being inherently dangerous—it’s about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove us toward digital infrastructure that mirrors authoritarian power structures. Through bullying, threats, and coercion, Trump moved to turn the chokepoints of the centralized internet to his advantage. The MAGA world discovered that when digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions will follow.

But here’s what the oligarchs don’t want you to understand: the same underlying technologies enabling this power concentration can be architected to resist it. The key isn’t begging for better billionaires or smarter regulations—it’s recognizing that decentralization isn’t a technical preference, it’s a democratic necessity.

The same authoritarian capture that took over centralized social media is already threatening AI systems as well. Just as we’ve watched Musk morph Twitter’s algorithms into X’s non-stop amplification of his personal political preferences, we’re seeing AI systems designed to reflect the biases and political agendas of their corporate owners. But this pattern isn’t inevitable. We need to understand that AI doesn’t have to be another tool of oppression. Designed correctly, it can be a weapon of liberation.

How Concentration Breeds Control

The concentration of digital power wasn’t an accident—it was the inevitable result of Wall Street incentives that rewarded greater centralized control over user empowerment.

Here’s how it happened: investor demands required tool builders to seek ever-greater returns, which meant transitioning from building user-empowering tools to controlling infrastructure. The most successful companies stopped building ever more useful services and started focusing on how to better extract rents from digital chokepoints—the equivalent of privatizing roads, then charging tolls.

These companies colonized the open internet, turning their services into necessary but proprietary infrastructure. They erected barriers to entry, barriers to exit, and tollbooths for everyone else, with your attention as the price of admission.

The result is what Cory Doctorow famously called the enshittification curve: platforms start by empowering users, evolve to capture them, and end by exploiting them. Wall Street’s demand that only investors matter as stakeholders strips away user agency with each step and hands it to corporate overlords.

And corporate overlords, it turns out, are natural allies for authoritarians. When you control the digital infrastructure that shapes how people communicate, learn, and organize, you become an attractive partner for anyone seeking political control. The promise of regulatory capture, government contracts, and protection from competition makes the bargain irresistible.

This convergence wasn’t inevitable—it was a choice made by people who confused convenience with empowerment, scale with value, and engagement with democracy.

The consequences are everywhere: platforms that enabled the Arab Spring and #MeToo are now coordinating genocides and undermining trust in elections. Tools that connected marginalized communities are promoting fascist agendas. And the tech oligarchs who built these systems are now literally standing behind authoritarians at inaugurations.

Digital Infrastructure Is Democratic Infrastructure

Most people still don’t understand the core insight: digital infrastructure and democratic infrastructure are the same thing.

Democracy is the ultimate decentralized technology. It distributes power away from kings and aristocrats to the people—imperfectly, through struggle, but fundamentally. The early internet promised to do the same for information, communication, and commerce. Anyone could publish, reach audiences, and break down barriers between producers and consumers, experts and amateurs, the powerful and powerless.

But Wall Street’s demand for exponential returns required fencing off the digital commons. The billionaires rebuilt the old gatekeeping systems in digital form, turning tools of value creation into mechanisms of value extraction. They offered convenience in exchange for control, scale in exchange for agency, connection in exchange for confinement within their walled gardens.

As Taiwan’s former digital minister, Audrey Tang, explained, democracy and digital freedom aren’t separate concepts—they’re the same thing. When digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions follow the same pattern. When we surrender control over our digital lives, we surrender control over our political lives.

The concentration of digital infrastructure inevitably leads to the concentration of political power. That’s why the battle for decentralization is fundamentally a battle for democracy itself.

The Path Forward: Protocols, Not Platforms

The solution isn’t building better platforms—it’s making platforms an obsolete concept.

Platforms concentrate power; protocols distribute it. Platforms extract value from users; protocols enable users to create value for themselves. Most importantly: platforms can be captured by bad actors, but protocols resist capture by design.

This resistance isn’t theoretical. We’re seeing it emerge across multiple projects—from the AT Protocol to ActivityPub to nostr. The key insight is architectural: when you separate identity, data storage, and algorithmic curation into different services, no single entity can control the whole system. Users can choose their own moderation services rather than trusting corporate decisions. They can customize their information diet rather than accepting engagement-maximizing feeds. They can control their own data and move between services without losing their social connections.

They have choice. They have transparency. They have their own intentions controlling things, rather than some unseen entity driven by unaligned incentives.

The same architectural principles apply to AI—perhaps the most critical battleground for digital power today. Centralized AI services don’t just mine your data for corporate benefit; they can shape your thinking, limit your capabilities, and make you dependent on their infrastructure. But it doesn’t need to be that way.

We’re already seeing the emergence of open source models, opportunities to control your own system prompts (as DuckDuckGo recently introduced), and smaller distilled models that work in decentralized environments. Projects are emerging to give people more power over their own data, letting you decide how AI can interact with your information, rather than the AI system slurping up everything it can about you.

This isn’t about technical preferences—it’s about the difference between renting someone else’s vision of how you should think and work versus building your own.

The Technological Poison Pill

The beauty of truly decentralized systems is that they’re extremely resistant to capture.

This is what I call the technological poison pill: systems architected so that growth makes them harder to capture, not easier. Traditional centralized platforms become more valuable targets for authoritarians as they scale. Properly designed protocols become more resilient against capture as adoption increases.

Protocol-based systems demonstrate this principle by distributing different functions across services that no single entity controls. Even if one implementation gets captured by bad actors, users can retain their data, connections, and digital identity while moving to alternative services. The architecture makes takeover attempts self-defeating—the very structure that creates value also prevents consolidation of control.

The same principle applies to AI infrastructure. When you control your own models, data, and computational resources, no corporation can unilaterally change terms of service or start mining your conversations. The more people control their own AI infrastructure, the less valuable centralized AI services become as tools of control.

Breaking the Helplessness Loop

The concentration of digital power has trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords—and that learned helplessness may be more dangerous than the concentration itself.

Every week brings demands that tech giants “do better” or that governments “crack down” on platforms. But this approach assumes we need permission from powerful entities to fix the internet. It transforms what should be user empowerment into a performance of powerlessness.

This helplessness isn’t accidental—it serves the interests of concentrated power. The more we believe we need tech giants to solve our problems, the more indispensable they become. The more we focus on regulating existing platforms instead of building alternatives, the more we entrench their dominance. The more we beg politicians to save us, the more attractive these companies become as partners for authoritarians seeking control.

The tech oligarchs standing behind Trump at his inauguration represent the logical endpoint of this dynamic: when digital infrastructure owners become kingmakers, democracy becomes a performance staged on their platforms.

But this endpoint isn’t inevitable—it’s the result of choices we can still change.

The Choice Before Us

The underlying infrastructure that enabled our current digital dystopia can enable something radically different: a genuinely democratic digital ecosystem where users control their own experiences, data, and tools.

But this future requires active choice. It means learning new tools, supporting new protocols, and building new habits. It means moving beyond the comfortable convenience of corporate platforms and taking responsibility for digital sovereignty.

The alternative is continued concentration of power in the hands of billionaires who literally stand behind authoritarians at inaugurations, viewing democracy as an obstacle to their vision of control.

Yes, decentralization creates challenges—technical complexity, potential for abuse, fragmentation. But these aren’t arguments against decentralization; they’re arguments for designing it thoughtfully. Democratic institutions have always grappled with similar tensions between distributed power and effective governance. The solution isn’t to abandon democratic principles but to architect systems that embody them while addressing their practical challenges.

The same principle applies to digital infrastructure. Tradeoffs exist, but they don’t justify accepting concentrated control any more than political tradeoffs justify accepting authoritarianism. We can build decentralized systems that address concerns about complexity and abuse without centralizing power in the hands of corporate oligarchs.

Digital Democracy or Concentrated Control?

The choice before us is stark: do we build democratic digital infrastructure, or do we accept permanent concentrated control?

Digital democracy means building systems that embody democratic values—transparency over opacity, user agency over corporate control, distributed power over centralized authority. It means using AI as a tool of personal liberation rather than corporate surveillance. It means supporting protocols that resist capture rather than platforms that court it.

Most importantly, it means rejecting the learned helplessness that treats concentrated tech power as inevitable rather than recognizing it as a temporary arrangement we can change.

The tools exist. Open protocols are maturing. AI models are being democratized. Decentralized infrastructure is becoming viable. The question isn’t technical capability—it’s political will.

Will we choose the difficult work of building democratic digital infrastructure? Or will we continue asking permission from oligarchs and authoritarians?

The battle for the open internet and the battle for democracy aren’t separate fights—they’re the same fight. The future of our digital lives is the future of democracy itself.

We can accept concentrated control over our digital lives, or we can build democratic infrastructure of our own. The choice is ours, but the window for making it won’t stay open forever.

Filed Under: concentration, control, decentralization, democracy, empowerment, enshittification, extraction, fasism, institutions, protocols not platforms, social media