The #OMN and the fight against the dotcons

The internet didn’t just accidentally become shit. Yes, the #dotcons are responsible for plenty of it: surveillance, advertising, addictive algorithms, platform lock-in, spam, fake reviews and the endless extraction of human attention. But focusing on a few companies misses the bigger story, that the mess is the outcome of decades of wider #deathcult worshipping political and economic choices. Yes, we allowed enormous platforms to buy competitors, capture markets, privatise public communication and turn common infrastructure into private profit machines. We then acted surprised when the resulting system prioritised extraction over any public value. But the problem is bigger than Facebook, Google, Amazon or whatever company is currently being hated. The market structure is the machine, companies are collective organisms operating within that structure. Changing one corporation without changing the conditions that produce the next one simply gives us another version of the same problem.…