The liberal fantasy of reforming the #dotcons, ten years on

The working path of reform isn’t simply difficult because the platforms resist it, it’s structurally contradictory. The #dotcons make money by enclosing the social value that reformers want them to release. The liberal mistake is treating this as a problem of corporate behaviour rather than a problem with the underlying economic paths. We are now ten years on from the mess we solidified with the #dotcons, we have had a decade to watch the platform economy develop and see where the original arguments about reform have led. The question remains unresolved, who owns and governs our shared social data? This was never simply an argument about advertising, subscription prices or better algorithms, it was about the economic model and social purpose of the infrastructure itself. Ten years on, we need to ask a harder question, was the push to reform the #dotcons ever anything more than a liberal fantasy? The reform fantasy of 2016 – there was a debate about taking back control of our social…

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