Date

Author

Капи Бара

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DOXA

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Internet Archive

Translated material

"Socialism of platforms"

How to democratize social networks and why you can’t just take and everything is nationalized

On January 25, 2024, Doxa was recognized as an “unwanted organization”.

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In the spring, Elon Musk announced that he was ready to buy Twitter for $ 44 million. Despite the long bickering of the billionaire with the company, the transaction seems to be close to the conclusion: the board of directors of the company unanimously recommended the shareholders to agree to the offer of the mask. The news of the sole purchase of a huge platform, which many use to express political opinions and exchange stories from personal life, makes you think again about whether the platforms can become democratic spaces that are not controlled by the whim of people with great money.

James Maldon is a researcher of social technology politician. In his last book "Socialism of Platforms" James Muldoon. Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech (Pluto Press, 2022) He shows that modern platforms can be arranged differently. From the modern model, when private companies and charismatic oligarchs control the platforms, it is necessary to refuse in favor of the model where creators, employees and users participate in the development of platforms, and the platforms themselves are built into the Federation of independent guilds. In this article I will share Maldon's main theses that will allow you to present a different future of the Internet.

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Caps Bara

What is a platform?

Modern Internet economics are built on platforms. These are more or less large systems that combine people by accessing any services or services. Facebook and Twitter are platforms, but also Uber, Amazon or Airbnb. Maldon defines the three characteristics inherent in all platforms. Firstly, the profit of the platforms is a profit of the Rantier, that is, the profit from ownership, and not the creation of content (the creators on the platforms are primarily users). Secondly, platforms tend to simultaneously concentrate profits and scatter risks. The profitability of platforms is growing The S&P stock index, showing the total cost of shares and, accordingly, the power of a market economy increased by almost 5% only thanks to six technological giants: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google/Alphabet. The cost of their shares increased by 43%; Without these companies, the index would fall by 4.2% of the previous value. Even during the period of stagnation of the economy due to the fact that the platforms transfer control over resources and labor on formally “independent” performers: for example, Uber employees themselves pay for the costs of insurance and maintenance of cars, and the company thereby relieves most of the worries. Finally, the platforms use the network effect to quickly reach a position close to a monopoly. The network effect occurs when a critical number of users who attract new users are assembled on the platform. Platforms that have not reached the network effect as quickly as their competitors cannot cope with the involvement of new users.

Modern platforms often become the subject of criticism. The creators of large platforms concentrated in their hands a huge power, which allows them to appoint the “rules of the game” and ignore user and society's requests. In the Russian context, the death of the Yandex.Dera courier Artyk Orozaliev can be given as an example. In 2019, Artyk died of a heart attack directly on a work shift. Despite the indignation of the public and colleagues of Artyk, Yandex.Deus and other delivery services continue to threaten couriers in the case of the slightest violations and pay them meager salaries. The same operating model is used by European services Uber.EATS or DELIVEROO. Doxa has already written about the ethical problems that accompany META and its products: despite the company's declarative desire to unite the world, in fact, its model of work encourages the polarization of society. The same applies to Twitter. Google is regularly criticized for opaque data collection schemes (Amnesty International in one of the reports called the Facebook and Google business model “Human Rights”).

Today it seems to us that the vertical system for managing platforms, when the actions of millions of users are operated in order to enrich the grave of beneficiaries, is the only possible form of organizing public space on the Internet.

However, Maldon notes that the critics of platforms today, both on the right and on the left, turn their attention to individual problems: control over personal data, surveillance and the desire for monopolization. At the same time, they ignore the problem that private companies and oligarchs manage the platforms that perform socially important functions. It is proposed to solve these problems by creating effective measures of state control, such as crushing large platforms to destroy their monopoly or develop an exhaustive data protection policy. At the same time, there is practically no well -thought -out policy of democratization of platforms, which is not reduced to the projects of enhanced state regulation or full nationalization of technological companies.

Concentrating on individual problems like privacy, critics ignore fundamental issues: who owns the platforms, who controls them and who benefits from the idea of the constant essence of platforms?

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Maldon claims that the nationalization of platforms is not a way out, firstly, because the company’s transition from private ownership to the state does not change its structure. The new leadership may well leave users in the position of rhyeric oppressed, only now oppression will be ensured by the forces of not only private capital, but also the state.

In addition, in some cases, nationalization is inconsistent or inappropriate. Despite the general name and several general principles, the platforms are quite different from each other both in monetization methods and in the place of functioning. If some platforms act locally (for example, Uber, whose activities are somehow attached to specific cities), then others function at a global level (like Facebook, the action of which cannot be reduced to a particular city, country or even continent). Such a gap between the platforms does not allow them to throw them all into one basket called “state regulation”. We need a new approach to talking about platforms.

What is platform socialism?

As a democratic solution to problems with platforms, Maldon offers the policy of “socialism of platforms” - as if as an alternative to “capitalism of the platforms”, which dominates right now and was described in the book of the same name by the British researcher Nika Srnichek.

Platform socialism involves the active participation of various parts of the company - users, workers and legislators - in the creation and development of platforms through constant decentralized management.

Maldon identifies three complementary strategies that form the path to achieving this alternative:

Resistance to platforms. Support and development of lower resistance to technological companies and how they conduct business without looking back at the needs of employees and users.
Platform regulation. Work with communities and government agencies of different levels in order to strengthen user safety and coercive platforms for compliance with legislation.
Flashing. The creation of alternative systems and processes of democratic interaction that will replace the existing forms of organizing platforms.

The implementation of these strategies requires the expansion of the protest potential of users and platform workers and transfer to them to use (that is, socialization) of the platforms themselves. It is important that it does not say about the transfer of the platform “workers”: in the modern economy, many self -employed fall out of this category, and specifically in the case of some platforms, their value is created not so much by employees as ordinary users who create content for the platform. It is these groups that are now excluded should be (of course, along with workers and other groups) are included in the collective management of the platforms.

What can the socialism of platforms look like in practice?

In practice, the socialism of the platforms will not be a system that can be described in one sentence. In his vision of the future platforms, Maldon relies on the idea of “guild socialism”, formulated at the beginning of the last century by the British economist George Douglas Howard Colel. Cole sought to reduce the central power of the state by transferring a number of functions assigned to it by self -organized communities, which he called the guilds. According to Cole, the guild should include all persons involved in a particular enterprise - from managers to low -qualified personnel - and jointly make decision -making.

Since the guild communities would have formed around a wide variety of industries, the management forms in different guilds would certainly be different from each other: the university management has little to do with the management of the paper factory. This attracts Maldon, who rightly over and over again emphasizes the differences between the platforms.

The communities that control the platforms will differ in size and control practices, as well as different guilds. At a minimum, democratic platforms of the future can be divided into those that are controlled locally, and those that require cooperation at the national and interethnic levels.

Local platforms

The platforms that local services provide are appropriate to divide into zones of functioning, so that they are controlled by the city authorities in cooperation with users and working platforms. At the same time, the platforms themselves can be reorganized as cooperatives of employees and users. Despite the fact that the customers of the platforms get used to low prices, secured by poor working conditions, a more fair model is possible. Today, most Uber users say that they would like to use a more ethical analogue, while more than half add that they are ready to pay more for trips.

An example of such a local platform is a taxi municipal aggregator. In the book, Maldon offers a hypothetical platform called Ridelondon, which is controlled by the London Department of Transport. The service must replace existing aggregators and organically integrate into the existing network of public transport in London. The service should take the place of aggregators, while the task of the authorities will be to motivate residents to use other types of transport, where it is possible for the new aggregator to become an addition to the city transport network and unload it, and not be its competitor, as happens today.

The Ridelondon service must manage the advisory body where representatives are elected from authorities, employees and residents of the districts where the service operates.

At the same time, employees must have a vote in regard to the process of work, their workers' rights and salaries, and residents should be able to express criticism and proposals for the work of the service.

Thus, the state is partly involved in the reform of the platform, but we are talking about help in coordination, and not about the complete transfer of management to the hands of bureaucrats.

Some platforms require wider coverage, but still remain more or less local. For example, a system of cloud computing Cloud computing is a technology that allows you to interact with programs and services via the Internet, without starting them on a computer. In practice, this works so that the application of the social network or the search bar does not contain all the programs and databases necessary for its work, and turns to the remote server where the necessary operations are performed. Cloud computing systems are located today on large servers, which, as a rule, belong to private companies. It is logical to create at the country's level with the cooperation of municipalities and the national government or even at the interstate level. When the cloudy and other necessary Internet infrastructure is socialized, and is not provided for a fee with half-watering companies, it becomes possible to launch new small and experimental Internet projects that are not aimed at making a profit: for example, new social networks or local ethical delivery services. Today, such projects run the risk of failing immediately after launch due to the inability to pay for access to the infrastructure.

Global platforms

For the democratization of individual platforms, cooperation will be required at the international level, because often it is impossible to affect the local. For example, social networks successfully elude regulation and taxation, moving headquarters and an official place of their activities to new countries with less strict regulation.

Technological companies contribute to a prevailing digital colonialism, filling out countries of the global south with “free” services and infrastructure and pumping out an infinite amount of user data in return. The creation of international groups that confront these practices is a necessary step towards the socialism of the platforms.

In addition, the management of some platforms is completely unimaginable at the local level.

Facebook or Google will lose their meaning if you try to break them into smaller services: they will not have resources to connect people and information around the world, as companies do today.

Therefore, the call to “reduce” Facebook, leaving its principles of work unchanged, hits the goal, despite the true feeling that too much influence is concentrated in the hands of one platform today.

It is not necessary to maintain one global platform, just changing the control style in it. Rather, this is even impossible, as this would require a direct participation in the decision -making of billions of people. Even with representatives who are delegated a number of questions, such a system is unlikely to be viable. Instead, Maldon offers to contact the Fediverst protocol - a decentralized unification of social networks, whose users can communicate with each other, even having accounts in different services.

A successful example of a federal network today is a free analogue of Twitter Mastodon. Mastodon users can create their own servers with local rules of conduct and maintain their work on their own, while users of a particular server can interact with users of other servers living according to their own rules. Due to this, the Fediversal structure resembles the guild of Cole. Using the federal system of social networks, we will not have to create a global network, we only need to ensure the interaction of existing and new networks with each other.

Today, such interaction is impossible, since technological companies consider users and their data their resources and do not give access to these resources to other companies. This leads to a situation when users remain in uncomfortable or unsafe, but large platform, because all their friends are also here. However, one can imagine a system that would provide the ability to transfer data from one network to another, more suitable for the user - the governing bodies that ensure the obligation to use the transfer protocols in all platforms can help in this. Creating such protocols is a problem that requires technical and legal solutions: how to ensure compatibility of completely different platforms, what to do with users in the portable contact list, if these users themselves do not switch to a new platform, how to protect data at the world level as much as possible? However, now these questions remain unanswered not by virtue of technical difficulties, but due to the concern of companies to preserve their power.

In addition to federal networks, more homogeneous projects are required. For example, the Google alternative should be similar in scale to the search engine, only deprived of the operation of users, and not dozens of small search engines. Maldon considers it the most promising way to implement such a search engine is not to create it from scratch with the involvement of a number of states, but the reform of Google itself in NPOs, which provides gratuitous access to knowledge.

To manage a non -profit search engine, it will be necessary to create an international fund working on ensuring the rights and freedoms of users and the development of infrastructure in developing countries. Maldon does not dwell on the idea of the International Fund in detail, and remains a little incomprehensible what ways he sees the ways to finance such an organization and its projects, in addition to initial revenues from Google and other socialized companies. However, he sees the structure of the fund similar to the UN structure, and it can be assumed that such an organization will not do without the financial participation of participating countries.

Thus, partly the idea of socialism of platforms still is based on the need for state support and regulation of digital projects.

The key difference from the usual requirements for increasing the state regulation of platforms is that under the socialism of platforms, power is transferred not into the hands of the state, but to the communities of users and platform workers.

State institutions are one of the participants in this process, and the groups of users and employees must restrain it. Unlike the transition to the national management of platforms, when users and workers may turn out to be powerless against the power of the state, under the socialism of platforms in communities in equal terms with the state, there is a chance to successfully withstand its will.

The plan proposed by Maldon is attractive to this this: touching directly the struggle for free Internet and digital rights, it is actually connected with the global struggle for exemption from corporate and state oppression and strengthening communities in their combating with them. The fight against the practices of inhibition of platforms is a good starting point for any future resistance.

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