It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Nuclear energy is anything but clean
The nuclear power industry has successfully rebranded an appallingly toxic energy industry by never mentioning the terrible legacy of nuclear waste, writes Ann Denise Lanes
The Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station on Anglesey, Wales. ‘There is no safe long-term solution for storing nuclear waste,’ says Ann Denise Lanes. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
Over the last decade, the nuclear power industry has successfully rebranded an appallingly toxic energy industry as “zero carbon” and even “clean” (Zero-carbon electricity outstrips fossil fuels in Britain across 2019, 1 January 2020) by never mentioning the terrible legacy of nuclear waste. Nuclear energy is neither clean nor zero-carbon when you consider its complete fuel cycle, from uranium mining overseas to the energy-intensive production of fuel rods to the management of highly toxic radioactive waste products such as plutonium.
The nuclear lobby has done a very effective PR job in diverting attention away from everything other than the electricity feed into the National Grid. It knows that there is no safe long-term solution for storing nuclear waste – how could you guarantee safety from the most dangerous chemical element on the planet for 24,000 years (the half-life of plutonium)? The last thing this industry wants is an open discussion. It would reopen the debate on nuclear waste that it has, up to now, successfully buried in millions of pounds’ worth of rebranding. Hence the secrecy. Ann Denise Lanes Halton, Lancashire
CHESS Interview with IM Sophie Milliet by Tatiana Flores 8/27/2021 – In an exclusive interview with Tatiana Flores, 6-time French women’s champion Sophie Milliet talks about the benefits chess has brought her, some of her most important tournaments and games, her efforts to support female players in chess, and much more.
Interview with IM Sophie Milliet
Sophie Milliet was born on November 2, 1983 in Marseille, France. She received her WGM title in 2004, and her IM title in March 2009. Among several successes, she has won the French Women’s Championship six times, represented her country twice at Chess Olympiads and played for multiple international clubs. In an exclusive interview with Tatiana Flores, Ms. Milliet talks about the benefits chess has brought her, some of her most important tournaments and games, her efforts to support female players in chess, and much more.
IM Sophie Milliet has represented France for several years already | Photo: Yovie Insan Nugraha / JAPFA 2019
I read that you are very sporty. What other sports do you practice? Can you combine them with chess?
Yes, that’s true! I like it a lot, to exercise. I think it is a great addition to playing chess professionally. I believe it’s helpful to also be in a good physical condition when playing tournaments. I play a lot of badminton, and even participate in some small tournaments when I have the time for it. It is true that chess occupies most of my time, so there isn’t much left. Sometimes it’s a great challenge to keep my weekends free for it! But I enjoy it a lot, and I also regularly go to the gym.
Which have been the most important tournaments in your career so far?
Since 2003 I have played for the French team and participated in all the European individual and team championships, as in the Chess Olympiads. I had the chance to play in the World Cup once, and in the very important tournament of Cap D’Agde. I also was invited once to play in the Salamanca Chess Festival, where the world elite participates too, and specially that one was a very nice experience.
Which have been your best or most anecdotal games so far?
I had my best performance in this Cap D’Agde tournament I just mentioned. There I drew against Anatoly Karpov, one of the best players in history, and for that I’m very proud. After that, I also made a draw with Black against Veselin Topalov at the Salamanca Chess Festival. I suffered in that game, but managed to equalize in the end! (Laughs). Those were exciting games.
Which have been the hardest and the happiest moments in your professional career so far?
I’d say the French individual championship every year is a big goal for me. Generally I start as a favourite, and with the years I’ve managed to deal with the pressure quite well. Of course, there were still years in which I didn’t manage to win the title, when I didn’t feel well and couldn’t enjoy the game. Playing under those conditions is indeed hard. The years in which I felt good, I also managed to win the championship. This has already happened six times, and the individual championship is still a very important tournament for me.
What projects do you have planned for the rest of the year?
To my delight, I have a lot of new things in my program, therefore I’ll be very busy for the rest of the year. After nearly a one-and-a-half-year break (which was honestly too long for me), this makes me very happy. First of all, I’ll participate in the European Women’s Championship that starts next week. Shortly after that, around the end of the month, I’ll play in the international tournament of San Cristóbal de La Laguna in Tenerife. After that, I have a lot of team tournaments with the different clubs I play for. Among them is my new Italian club ASD Pedone Isolano, the Belgian club Wachtebeke, of course my German club Schwäbisch Hall, and my Spanish club Manlleu. So I’ll be playing in a lot of team tournaments until the end of the year.
IM Sophie Milliet playing a simultaneous exhibition for her new club Manlleu in Catalonia, 2021 | Photo: Gabri Reyes
How would you describe your playing style?
My playing style… good question! (Laughs). I’d say I’m a very complete player. I generally try to train and improve in all areas, but I’d say that first and foremost I like having the initiative, and that I’m a dynamic player too.
Did you ever have a role model or a referential figure among chess players?
I’m not completely sure about that. It’s true that I belong to the generation in which Kasparov dominated chess (when I was young), and I liked his playing style very much. Thus, I think he was more of a “guiding line” after which I developed as a player and afterwards also progressed. Then, I think Judit Polgar was a great example for every female chess player. She was an exceptional player, and I even had the chance to play against her once, but I lost.
Which advantages has chess brought you in your life?
I think one of the biggest advantages chess has brought me is that it has allowed me to travel a lot. I had the opportunity to play tournaments all over the world, even in very distant countries. Indonesia is one which I fell for, and where I’ve already played several times. This of course makes it possible for me to meet people from different cultures, and at the same time feel very close to them thanks to chess.
IM Sophie Milliet at the Grasse Échecs tournament (Top 12) in June 2021
What would you change or improve in the chess world?
I believe that, generally, the status of women in chess can be extensively improved. We could push female players much more in the foreground in both the international and national scene. After the success of The Queen’s Gambit, someone could have thought that this would’ve helped to put women’s chess in the spotlight, but I think that didn’t happen. The promotion of women’s chess is a matter of heart to me. That’s why last year, in the French Federation elections, I supported Jöel Gautier.
I know you are a fan of the manga “Blitz” by Cédric Biscay. Do you think that art can be a good way to bring chess closer to a wider audience?
Yes! I think that generally chess can be combined with a lot of other areas. When I talk about this with people, we quickly find a lot of similarities between chess and art, and even business. I find it super interesting to follow this approach. This manga came out quite recently, and has been a very nice surprise. I like reading it a lot, and it’s funny to me how good the fight in every chess game is represented. I believe it all fits very well with the manga style, and many things that appear in it (like the chess psychology for example) feel very realistic. The manga shows lots of interesting aspects, and it’s very entertaining. I enjoy it very much!
Thank you very much for your time, Ms. Milliet! The ChessBase team and I wish you a lot of luck at the European Women’s Championship.
The interview was conducted via Zoom on August 5, 2021 in French. Tatiana Flores transcribed it and translated it into English.
The Big Scary ‘S’ Word: why are people so terrified of socialism?
In a new documentary, film-maker Yael Bridge looks back and forward to see why some people have been so repelled by socialism and how things might change in the future
Protesters from The Big Scary ‘S’ Word. Photograph: Greenwich Entertainment
Lee Carter is a US Marine Corps veteran and Lyft driver. He is also a socialist. After he suffered a workplace injury, realised the system was broken and Googled “How do you run for office?”, he stood for election to the Virginia state assembly.
A campaign leaflet from his opponent displayed the faces of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong – and Carter, who told film-maker Yael Bridge: “It’s from another era entirely. I was born in ’87, I don’t remember the Berlin wall falling, so the ‘red scare’ – anybody who uses the big scary ‘s’ word is automatically Stalin – it just doesn’t work any more.”
Bridge took his observation for the title of her soon-to-be-released documentary, The Big Scary “S” Word, which tells how Carter beat the Republican incumbent to become the lone socialist in the Virginia state assembly (though after two terms he lost a primary re-election bid in June) and explores the unexpected history of the American socialist movement.
Her film makes a persuasive case that while America famously embraces capitalism red in tooth and claw, the emergence of the leftwing senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential election was no anomaly but part of an equally proud tradition. Far from contradicting the US constitution, socialism has often been seen as furthering its ideals.
Bridge, based in Oakland, California, said by phone: “When you think about socialism, if you don’t just think about Russia or China or Cuba, people think about social democracies in Scandinavia. But we don’t need to look to all those other countries to find examples of socialism or success stories, so it was important to me to forefront those in the film.”
Few words are more loaded than socialism. It is defined by Merriam-Webster as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”.
Misunderstandings about what socialism means are widespread in the United States. One young person in the film puts it: “It’s kind of like a more mediocre version of communism, I think?”
For Republicans it has become the ultimate trigger word, guaranteed to provoke a visceral recoil. Last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, was themed “America vs socialism” and included sessions such as “Socialism: Wrecker of Nations and Destroyer of Societies”. Senator Mike Lee told attendees: “They’re talking about having the government become your healthcare provider, your banker, your nanny, your watchdog. Having the government lie to you and spy on you.”
So it is remarkable when the origins of the Republican party are outlined by one of the film’s interviewees, John Nichols, author of The “S” Word, a history of American socialism. He argues that the ideology enjoyed a popular high in the United States in the 1840s, when a group of immigrants who settled in Ripon, Wisconsin, started to form a communal society in which wealth was shared. They built communal houses and argued for land redistribution so poor people could have farms.
The people of Ripon formed a new political party that would oppose the expansion of slavery. Nichols says: “When we talk about the history of socialism in America, we certainly would say that the socialist party was founded by socialists, but we should also say that the Republican party was founded by socialists.”
Bridge, 39, adds: “There’s this building called the little white schoolhouse, which is a museum now as the founding place of the Republican party, so there’s Trump and George W Bush and all these big posters for Republicans – but it’s funny also knowing that the little white schoolhouse was indeed a schoolhouse for socialists in the 1800s.”
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Bridge, whose previous film, Saving Capitalism, followed the former labour secretary Robert Reich as he talked to people disillusioned with the political status quo, found another surprise in North Dakota, a Republican stronghold where Donald Trump beat Joe Biden last year by 33 percentage points. It is the only state with a government-owned general service bank.
Lee Carter. Photograph: Greenwich Entertainment
“It was set up by socialists to be more democratic and help the people there and now most of the Republican leadership in that state come out of the bank and they don’t want anything to do with socialism. They don’t like talking about their early days history. But it’s clear today it was socialists setting up that bank and making it so successful.”
Another subject in the film, Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University, testifies that Republican president Theodore Roosevelt’s platform was to the left of Sanders, advocating for a national health service, unemployment insurance and controls over corporations, though he did not call himself a socialist.
In the Great Depression, Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal adopted ideas from the socialist party and provided social security, the first minimum wage, unemployment compensation and millions of public sector jobs – “classical socialist things”, as one interviewee puts it.
The 1963 march on Washington was in fact the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”. Foner argues that the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr increasingly demanded fundamental changes in the economic system, but this radical edge is too often rubbed smooth by today’s efforts to sanitise him as a cosy symbol of racial reconciliation.
Bridge observes: “I don’t think this is an experience unique to the United States in that we whitewash all of our history and we defang it and we make it less radical and then we bring it into the fold.
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“So now everyone loves Martin Luther King and he’s so fantastic and revered and what a wonderful human and we can certainly agree with all of his ideas. But he was certainly not that popular during his day and increasingly over the course of his life, when he saw economic inequality as a great barrier to racial equality and started using language of capitalism and socialism, that was very threatening. It was the beginning of the end.”
Barack Obama was branded a socialist for making relatively modest changes to the healthcare system. But the eruption of Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont and self-declared democratic socialist, in the 2016 Democratic primary shook American politics. Since then membership of the once dormant Democratic Socialists of America has soared to nearly 100,000. Union membership is also growing fast.
We Want Bread protest from The Big Scary ‘S’ Word. Photograph: Greenwich Entertainment
Now 79, Sanders is chair of the powerful Senate budget committee, while his ally the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 31, has built a huge following. In June the socialist India Walton won a Democratic primary that made her virtually certain to become the mayor of Buffalo, New York.
The comedian Bill Maher once noted that the United Nations’ annual world happiness rankings were led by “socialist-friendly” countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada, asking: “If socialism is such a one-way ticket to becoming the nightmare of Venezuela, then why do all the happiest countries in the world embrace it?”
Even within the US, it can be argued that the publicly funded elements of education, healthcare, media, transport and welfare – including a new child tax credit that aims to cut child poverty in half – are inspired by socialism. Yet the ideology is still used as a bogeyman by Republicans and rightwing media who point to the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries to warn that it would destroy America.
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Bridge responds: “I’m not an expert on any of those places but we don’t need to look to those examples as failures; we can look in our own country for successes like the Bank of North Dakota. They are able to have really fantastic public schools and universities and libraries and their infrastructure is really strong because there’s no private interest taking the money out and the people get to have a say in how that money is invested.
“We can look at work-around co-ops and those are incredibly successful. Frequently, they’re shown to be more productive then privately owned businesses because when you are your own boss and you’re able to reap the benefits of your work, you’re going to be working harder and that’s just not what we’re seeing right now at all.”
Polls consistently show a majority of millennials prefer socialism over capitalism. Bridge says: “What I found was that it’s just incredibly generational. The cold war was so powerful in this country and so many resources were spent making that word and those ideas just completely abhorrent and scary.
“People are really scared and so they don’t think, ‘oh, socialism, I’ll have healthcare’; they think, ‘Oh, socialism, that’s horrible, they’re going to come they’re going to take my house and I’m going to be wearing a uniform.’ I saw it so clearly when I would be traveling, meeting with different socialists in different parts of the country and there would be people over 75 or under 35 and such a small percentage in the middle.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
The Big Scary “S” Word also considers the big scary “c” word: capitalism. It is, after all, America’s secular religion; it is as hard to imagine a socialist president as an atheist one. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, declared, “We’re capitalists, that’s just the way it is”, while the progressive senator Elizabeth Warren has called herself a “capitalist to my bones”.
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But Bridge turns the tables: “When people say, oh, name a socialist country that’s been successful, well, name a capitalist country that’s been successful. I look around, I don’t see any country that doesn’t have vast numbers of people starving. Where I live in Oakland, the houseless community is just expanding. I don’t see capitalism solving it in any meaningful way and, if you dig a little deeper, it looks like capitalism is particularly ill-equipped to solve those problems at all.”
The film notes that five individuals own more wealth than 3.5 billion people, half the world’s population. “The profit motive is great at generating a large degree of wealth but it hoards it in the hands of certain people and that is inherently undemocratic,” Bridge says. “If we want to live in a democratic society, which I do and which this country was founded on, you really just can’t have that large amount of inequality.
“I think capitalism and democracy are incompatible. When you have more money, you use your wealth to help write the laws and legislation and put in judges and politicians that are going to protect your interests, and so it becomes a vicious cycle.”
Later segments of the film detail how capitalism has failed to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis. Fossil fuel giants’ addiction to growth and profits took priority over the survival of the planet. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and others endorse a “green new deal” which, naturally, Republicans portray as a radical socialist plot against America.
Bridge reflects: “The profit motive is making it harder and harder for us to organise collectively, and we are all on one planet with the same amount of limited resources. If we are not able to share them and people are only driven by profit motive to succeed, we’re not all going to make it.”
The Big Scary “S” Word is released in US cinemas and on demand on 3 September with a UK release to be announced
To fix social media, we need to introduce digital socialism
Proprietary social media networks need to be transformed into local and global digital commons.
Michael Kwet Michael Kwet is a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. 19 May 2020
Facebook is among the Big Tech companies dubbed the 'frightful five', along with Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft [File: Reuters/Dado Ruvic]
In the past few years, intellectuals across the spectrum have fallen out of love with Big Tech. The “frightful five” – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft – wield enormous power, with their combined wealth exceeding $5 trillion. After years of market consolidation and exploitative practices, critics in the United States are pushing to break up Big Tech monopolies with antitrust law.
Social media networks are a centrepiece in this conversation: they violate privacy, amplify sensational content and “fake news”, and manipulate users to keep their attention.
Breaking up Big Social Media sounds great, but how would this look in practice? A number of legal scholars and politicians have proposed reforming social networks by using antitrust law and regulations to create a more competitive marketplace. Leaving this task to market forces, however, is a bad idea that will not solve the central problem: proprietary control of the networks and the exploitation of user attention for profit.
A solution based on digital socialism is needed to transform social media into a global democratic commons. This would eradicate Big Social Media by placing ownership and control directly into the hands of the people. The antitrust proposal
Various scholars have put forward two main ideas to break up Big Social Media, neither of which can sufficiently accomplish their goals.
The first one seeks to dismantle past mergers and acquisitions. Facebook, for example, bought up Instagram and WhatsApp years ago, and is now seeking to integrate all three platforms into a seamless communications network.
Scholars like Tim Wu, Sarah Miller, and Matt Stoller have suggested breaking Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp into three separate companies. They hope these companies would then compete for customers, which would compel them to treat users with respect.
Yet there is no good reason to believe this would do much for privacy and competition itself does not necessarily curb harmful behaviour. Even if these companies are broken up, given that their business model is based on serving ads and the exploitation of user data, they would have no serious incentive to change their behaviour.
Furthermore, these companies are able to monetise surveillance because the data is running through their platforms, and they force people to be a part of their networks in order to interact with their friends and family. For example, a user who does not like Facebook’s privacy practices can leave for another network, but then they have to convince their friends to join them.
The second idea proposes a solution to this problem: make social networks interoperate. Social media platforms would be forced to allow members of one network to interact with members of another. For example, a Facebook user would be able to post a comment under a YouTube video while logged into Facebook, and vice-versa. Users’ data would also be “portable” so they could move their profile to a different platform.
Interoperability exists in other communications services, such as telephone networks and email.
However, the “competition through interoperability” antitrust proposal is deeply flawed.
The reason Big Social Media firms are able to raid everyone’s data and mistreat users is that they are centralised, cloud-based intermediaries. If I want to share a photo with you, I first upload it to, say, Facebook’s servers, and then you download it from Facebook’s servers. The user experience is then determined by Facebook’s network software.
This form of cloud-based centralisation gives corporations power over the platform and the data. Proprietary network ownership provides corporations with the coercive power to monetise user data and force ads on users. Making proprietary networks interoperable does not change this power dynamic. The companies will simply compete to collect more data and serve more ads so they can generate profits.
Some antitrust scholars have also suggested social media networks can solve this problem by charging people to use their networks. Users who do not like spying and ads can pay out of pocket for social networking instead.
A subscription-based social network might sound great for the middle and upper classes, but it is a non-solution for the billions living in poverty. Those with little or no income are not going to “pay for privacy” or any other “exploitation-free” benefits, such as ad-free access.
This same conundrum plagues the mobile app ecosystem, where 70 percent of apps spy on users through hidden trackers. Proprietary control of the apps prevents the public from stripping out the trackers, and competition among millions of apps does nothing to prevent app publishers from mistreating users. Building a social networking commons
The new antitrust proposal will fail to remedy social media ills because it is wedded to competition in a capitalist system. A genuine solution must, therefore, eliminate the profit incentive and give people direct control over the means of computation.
To fix social media, activists and lawmakers need to press for digital socialism – a commons-based solution embodying libertarian socialist principles of self-governance, decentralisation, and federation. Social media would be transformed from a profit-seeking enterprise into a global democratic commons. A technological foundation has already been created (as I detail below).
To see this through, we need to pass laws imposing decentralised, free and open-source technology solutions on the social media ecosystem. Big Tech corporations would be forced to relinquish user data, and social networking infrastructure would be owned and controlled by the users. The platform software would be open source so the public can inspect the code and customise the user experience.
To ensure the network infrastructure will be well developed and maintained, governments would subsidise public interest technology. Technologists could be paid to develop software at public universities and non-profit organisations. Developers across the world would collaborate and borrow code from each other, while individuals and communities would join networks or form new ones as they see fit.
Governments could also subsidise the rollout of broadband internet and personal cloud infrastructure. Inexpensive FreedomBox devices could be provided to lower-income households and small server farms could be operated by local communities.
Corporations might participate in some form, but the new laws and technology would effectively cut off their ability to privatise control, generate large profits, push ads, or spy on users.
Funds for implementing social networks can be raised by taxing the rich and Big Tech firms. Resources for infrastructure and development should be extended to people in the Global South as compensation for colonialism, including recent revenue extraction through digital colonialism. Social media decentralisation
The foundation for a commons-based social media system was laid in the establishment of the Fediverse – a set of interoperable social networks based on free and open-source software. Fediverse platforms include Mastodon (akin to Twitter), PeerTube (akin to YouTube), and PixelFed (akin to Instagram).
The Mastodon social network, which has more than four million registered users, is the most polished example to date. Its feature set resembles Twitter: you can post to your wall, “like” and “share” other posts, follow user accounts, and so on.
However, there are a few crucial differences.
For one, there is no central server or administrator through which all user activity, data, and membership flow. Instead, you join one of many servers, called “instances”, which host and transmit user data. Each instance sets its own terms and conditions: it might ban hate speech and pornography, or focus on a shared hobby or interest.
To open an account, you simply sign up with an instance. Let us say you pick the username Alice at an instance called instance123.social. Your social media handle would be: @alice@instance123.social. Alternatively, you can pay to host your own instance and set the code of conduct to your liking.
The Fediverse uses shared communications protocols like ActivityPub so that users can interact across platforms. For example, a user from Mastodon can post a comment or follow a user from the PeerTube social network without ever leaving Mastodon. This is similar to email, where you can send messages from a Gmail account to a Yahoo account.
With Twitter, you have one timeline that displays posts and activity from other users. With Mastodon, you can pick from three timelines. The first is your home timeline that displays content (such as wall posts or videos shared) by the people you follow. The second is a local timeline that displays content from members of your instance. The third is your federated timeline, which displays content from other instances. Each timeline provides a different way to interact and discover content.
To make sure the experience is safe and enjoyable, Mastodon builds in a variety of content moderation policies. Individual users can filter out other users and instances that they do not want to see or interact with. Instance moderators can also filter out other users or instances. For example, if another instance is loaded with white supremacists, then you or your instance administrator can block that instance.
The ability for individuals to create their own instances, interact across networks, and set their own code of conduct undermines the centralised ownership and control model of Big Social Media. And because the server software powering Mastodon falls under a strong Free Software licence, the public can modify it to make it work as they wish.
For example, some developers created Glitch, a modified version of Mastodon which has its own set of features built in. In Glitch, you can set your posts as local-only so that they will not show up in outside instances.
The open sourcing of the network software also creates direct accountability to the public. If the Mastodon developers tried to, say, place banner ads inside their platform, an outside developer could take the code, strip out the ads, and release an ad-free version to the community.
The current Fediverse model is mostly decentralised, but there is room for improvement. Server administrators still possess the authority to surveil users and impose content moderation decisions on instance members. This means users have to trust the server administrators they interact with. To address this feature, Free Software developers are creating peer-to-peer technologies that fully distribute power and privacy down to the end users.
The LibreSocial network offers a glimpse of how this can work. There is no need to trust server administrators because the peer-to-peer architecture eliminates them altogether. Instead, the social network is operated by the community of end users through the LibreSocial software. The network is free and open-source, easy to use, and allows for customisation of the user experience – such as how to visualise a user wall, or social games – through the use of plugins that anyone can create or download.
While LibreSocial is still in a testing phase (which will soon be open to the public), the developers have built an impressive model for a fully decentralised social network. Replacing digital capitalism with digital socialism
The ingenuity of the free software community is central to the struggle for tech rights and equality. Solutions like the Fediverse and LibreSocial prove that a world in which users are not exploited is possible. But they alone cannot pull away the billions of users stuck inside Big Social Media.
Ultimately, activists will have to push for new technologies, laws, and regulations that eradicate Big Social Media and transition the world to a social media commons.
Unfortunately, current legislative proposals by US legal scholars and Congress promote a capitalist model where “many Facebooks and Twitters” compete to capture data and user attention. This will not solve our problems.
Just as we cannot fix the climate crisis with “clean” coal, “all of the above” energy solutions, or cap-and-trade market-based reforms, we cannot fix social media with corporate owners, proprietary technology, centralised clouds, and market competition. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
A genuine solution requires digital socialism: a decentralised social media commons based on free and open-source technology, supported by laws and the public purse. The foundation is already set, but a popular movement is needed to see it through.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Michael Kwet is a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He is the author of Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South, and hosts theTech Empire podcast. His work has been published at Motherboard, Wired, BBC World News Radio and Counterpunch. He received his PhD in Sociology from Rhodes University, South Africa.
