Tech Won't Save Us - Envisioning Platform Socialism w/ James Muldoon

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by James Muldoon to discuss his vision for platform socialism and the different ways we could reorganize platforms to serve the public good over corporate profit.James Muldoon is the author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech. He’s also a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and the Head of Digital Research at Autonomy. Follow James on Twitter at @james_muldoon_.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:James wrote about why web3 won’t save the internet.Paris wrote about what’s wrong with discourses about decentralization and why we should nationalize Amazon.Francesca Bria was interviewed by Crypto Syllabus about web3, decentralization, and her experience with municipal tech projects.Facebook’s Project Amplify ensured users saw positive stories about the company.Antonio Negri and Dalla Costa were among the Italian Autonomist Marxists thinking about the social factory. Karl Marx wrote about the concept of surplus value.G.D.H. Cole wrote about guild socialism. James also mentions the work of Otto Neurath.Support the show

Corporate platforms as they exist today are essentially value-captured devices. They'd rather be the troll under the bridge than the kid with the lemonade stand. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is James Muldoon. James is the author of Platform Socialism, How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, and it comes out on January 20th from Pluto Press. You can find a link in the show notes if you want to pre-order or buy it. He's also a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and the head of digital research at the Autonomy Think Tank. As you can probably guess, our conversation today revolves around James's book, Platform Socialism. We dig into the concepts that he discusses in the

book and what a better approach to platforms that serves the public good over the profit motive of these major corporations might look like. And that involves, you know, a lot of important topics, whether these platforms are really serving the community, as they often claim, whether antitrust and competition is the best way to approach this problem, and what dealing with the issue of platforms looks like on several different levels, you know, the municipal level and what happens in cities, the national level, and also the international level, recognizing that while many of the platforms that we rely on are based in the United States, just having the U.S. and people in the United States decide what happens with them if they continue to be international is not, you know, an equitable or just approach to the governance of platforms. That international question needs to be dealt with. So this is a really great conversation, and I really enjoyed James' book.

I would highly recommend picking it up if you're interested in these topics, which I think many of you will be. So definitely consider grabbing a copy. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about the other shows in the network by going to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, you can leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and you can also share the episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And this episode, like every episode of Tech Won't Save Us, is free for everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making it every single week. So if you want to ensure I can keep having great

conversations like this one with James, you can join supporters like JBG and Harry from Brilliant by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter, join our discord, get stickers and help ensure I can keep making the show. So with that said, enjoy this week's conversation. James, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having keep making the show. So with that said, enjoy this week's conversation. James, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I'm a big fan. I always listen to it and I'm on my morning walk with my Daxons, Kyle Barks and Barker Sorelius, and they're going to be very excited to hear me on the show. So I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to meeting these Daxons. I know different pronunciation. I'm in North America. Maximum community is happy with either pronunciation. platforms that we use every single day that many of us rely on, but also how these ideas and how

we approach platforms can be improved for a different kind of society, a socialist society that puts people before profit. And so I am really excited to dig into this with you, but I want to start with some of the criticisms that you make of the platforms themselves and some of the ways, I guess, of seeing them that maybe is not the general discourse that we have around platforms. And you write that platforms are not neutral, despite some of the discourses that say that, but actually serve to shape the way that we use them, by extension, you know, how we live, how we conduct ourselves, the way our society operates to serve their interests. You call this a form of world building. Can you expand on that and

explain why it is important for us to recognize that detail? Yeah, so my basic take is that corporate platforms as they exist today are essentially value capture devices. Their role is to appropriate the value creating activity of their users. And so the way they do this is often acting as an intermediary or a gatekeeper. You know, they'll tell you that they're connecting people, they're bringing people together, building global communities and all that. But the reality is they've basically decided that they'd rather be the troll under the bridge than the kid with the lemonade stand. It's much more profitable for them to let other people do the work and charge them for

things like transaction fees or subscription fees or just like collect their data for advertising products. And so Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb has this famous line where he says, the community is the product. A platform business is about attracting a loyal user base so you can find a way to profit from the things that they're doing. I think this value capture mechanism is really central to all of that. And so if you think about how platforms operate, there's really kind of two main problems. There's exploitation and control. And the first one is about how value is extracted from communities. And the second one is about how

our actions are kind of influenced and controlled by the user interface design and small forms of like digital nudging. I think the control element has received far more attention. This idea of like algorithmic management and platforms being designed to promote engagement and attention. This is where we can see that they're really not neutral and technical devices at all, right? You know, when Facebook talks about itself and tries to describe what it's doing, it often alludes to this idea of opening up a space, you know, allowing people to connect. And it really gives this impression of neutrality or it's just this kind of like beneficial party that's connecting people.

And we already know, right, with their ranking algorithms that social media apps can exercise this control over public debate. And it's not always just what the company thinks people want, right? Sometimes it is playing an active role in this. So Facebook, for example, approved a system called Project Amplify, which pushed positive news stories about the companies in users' news feeds. And it's not all just about the ranking algorithms either. It's really about the entire user interface design that's trying to guide people's behavior in certain digital choice environments. So there are all these subtle techniques they have about creating artificial scarcity when you want to click on a button and it's like, oh, there's only three left.

You only have X number of seconds to decide to having certain pre-selected settings on the apps to creating this like fear of missing out, having these exploration cues to kind of keep you interested, staying on the platform, all of these things that is there to try and control our behavior. But what I find most interesting isn't really the control element as much as it is the exploitation, because I think ultimately the exploitation is the main game, right? How do you extract as much value as possible from users? And the control part is kind of just like a stepping stone. And if they needed to give up on it, but could still maintain

the value extraction, then they would, and they'd be absolutely fine with that, right? Because that's really the main game in town. So I think there's those two devices. And in the book, I use a couple of different frameworks for setting that up, but I'll save that for another question. Perfect. I think that gives us a great overview of your approach to the platforms, the way that you understand them, looking at them through the lenses of control and exploitation. But I want to return to the point about world building just for a second as well to kind of make a connection to the past that I think is a really important one. And you talk about how the Italian autonomous Marxist had a certain way of understanding the role of the factory in the community and how we can see kind of parallels to what the platform economy is doing today. Can you expand on that? Yeah. So the Italian autonomous Marxists were kind of writing in the 1970s. And one of their big ideas is this idea that you mentioned, the social factory. And, you know, writers like Antonio Negri and Maria Rosa della Costa are kind of writing at really one of the early stages of the rise of what

used to be called information societies. This is kind of like a, almost like a pre-internet term, right? When people were starting to see the ways computers and other forms of communication technology were changing the world. And this idea of a social factory is really thinking about how it's not just the workplace or the factory as the arena in which people are being exploited. It's a much broader field of social life. So some of the first people to see this are feminists like Della Costa, who really focuses attention on the sphere of reproductive labor, often done by women at home, which is also appropriated by capitalism. And at the same time, kind of denied existence as a true form of productive work. So when you

want to look at how the field can be expanded and to think about not just the factory, but really the community who's exploited by capital. And I think if you use this as a starting point, you can start to look at how digital communities that exist online are being exploited in kind of some of the similar ways or using a similar framework. So it's not necessarily going to be about the old categories that we're used to talking about. So if you think back to, for example, like Marx's chapter on the working day in Capital, you know, he talks about how workers' time can be divided into two periods. You know, at the start of the day, theoretically, you know, you're working for yourself, you know,

insofar as you get a wage and you receive the value that you're producing. And then there's a second part, which is kind of, you know, shorter or longer, depending on how exploited you are. But all this extra value you're producing is effectively just being stolen by your employer. This is the kind of idea of surplus value. You're kind of working free for someone else and they're just taking the value that you're producing. Now, if you think about online communities, it doesn't really make sense to say that they're laboring, right? You don't work on Facebook, although, you know, some people run their businesses there. People aren't receiving a wage. It's not really the same thing, but you can still see this idea of exploitation. And I think you can use some of the same ideas and metaphors, but you need to look at it from a different lens. And Marx liked to

describe capitalism using certain gothic metaphors. You know, these are kind of like, you find these all through his writings. And one of the analogies he uses in this chapter on the working day is that he liked to depict capital as like a vampire, you know, sucking value out of workers. Now, it's important to remember that the vampire is like dependent on their victim, right? So many of the platforms exist in order to extract value from communities, but the communities are also their main source of profit. I think this perspective is really important because even though these companies have huge market valuations, they've got this huge political power, the platforms are often

little more than software through which we connect with others. And the real source of value, I think, is in our activity, is in the kinds of social activity we have with each other. And we need to know that we could connect in other ways. We could connect through other systems and devices. And so really this idea of the power of our communities and the power of our social activities is a reminder that we can use this to reclaim ownership and control over the technology and to repurpose it for our own use. When you were talking about the Italian autonomous Marxist and the social factory, what came to mind for me was Henry Ford in, I believe it would have been around the 1920s, when there's actually like a department of the Ford Corporation that's trying to shape the way that workers live, promoting certain means of

dress, certain types of living environments, promoting for them to have a particular type of home, to live in a certain way, like, you know, trying to shape the society that is around the factory. And so that is something that really resonated to me. And that reminded me of as I was reading that section of the book. But I think what you're talking about there, in terms of the way that community and the way that our interactions on these platforms create the value, reminds me of something else that you wrote in the book about community washing, right? The way that these platforms act like communities or say that they are promoting community when really they are

taking advantage of it and using it for branding purposes. Yeah. So one of the stories I tell in the book is how from about 2015, 2016 onwards at the beginning of what's now called the tech lash, a lot of these platforms start to pitch themselves as global community builders. Trump has a lot to do with this, right? And broader kind of the rise of populism and this broader shift in politics where you start to see a little bit of left versus right and a little bit more of like open versus closed societies, you know, various ways in which people are trying to like rebrand politics and pitch new kinds of movements and new kinds of parties. And amidst

all of this stuff that's going around, this real seismic shift, like Facebook in particular, Airbnb is falling not far behind, but they really start to promote this feel good story of how they're going to be global leaders in creating these new forms of tech-enabled social life. And so this idea of community washing is a kind of concept I talk about in the book to show how these companies use a marketing strategy of framing their business through the language of community empowerment and fulfilling a social mission. I think the reality, on the other hand, is that the very infrastructure that the companies are developing is designed to be as extractive as possible. It's designed to feed off communities, often with very little concern for the very communities

that they're claiming to serve. So I think what you really see is this entirely cynical PR campaign that in reality is just this post hoc rationalization of what the company is doing and a kind of polish of the image of the company to really just try to recreate, I sense, a new purpose in the public's mind for what the company is about. I think it's really relevant that these stories of what the company is purportedly doing, their mission, are developed years after the founding of the company, right? So it's almost like the stories are developed in response to PR backlashes. The stories are developed as a way of basically glossing over what begins to look like very extractive forms of business models.

I wrote this in, it was probably like 2019 when I actually wrote most of these books. It's kind of at the end of what people are now calling Web 2. And I think this in, it was probably like 2019 when I actually wrote most of these books. It's kind of at the end of what people are now calling Web 2. And I think this lens of community is only becoming more and more relevant given all of the more recent transformations about Web 3 and the metaverse, because you can just see all the language coming up again. Oh, we're going to decentralize communities. Oh, we're going to empower users. And it's like, mate, did you remember Web 2 2 that's exactly what they told us the first time these

like do you remember the sharing economy who's sharing stuff anymore it's madness so i think i'm kind of glad i right at first i thought it was going out of fashion because all these new kinds of ways of describing tech started coming up but then then thank you, Web3, community's back. And I think it's become relevant again. I think we can see like these narratives are continually recycled to promote technology again and again. And we have a tendency to forget, you know, the promises that were made in the past and how they were broken effectively. And as you say, were more marketing tools than anything real. You know, I wonder if you also think that the desire to frame technology and, you know, these platforms in particular, but you could talk more broadly, as you were just saying, around community is also a response to, I think, a general kind of public feeling that community has eroded in the sense that

people are more individualistic, that communities have been atomized after, you know, years of suburbanization and other kind of trends in society. You know, I think we can see with the way of life that neoliberalism has promoted that, you know, is so focused on work, so focused on the individual that there's kind of this erosion of social relationships that people have. And I wonder if the technology companies are recognizing that and then saying, oh, look, our platforms are providing this community that you're missing in the rest of your life. So just come to us and we'll provide it, even though that is not in reality what they're doing, but they're benefiting

from claiming that they're filling that void. Yeah. I mean, I think you've already hit the nail on the head with that one, right? It's completely what's happening. And it really was about flipping the script because it's not something you really hear anymore precisely because so many people's lives are spent online so much and so much of what we consider community today is with our Twitter friends or whoever it is that we are, you know, connecting with. But like much early, you know, like over 10 years ago, there was this real moral panic that the more people spent their lives on computers, the less social they would be. They would become outcasts, right? Like remember the comic book guy on The Simpsons, like of that era, like being into computers and stuff like that was kind of considered a little bit antisocial.

And so I think this idea of like showing how technology enables new forms of community was very much about trying to have a new PR angle. But I also think it raises a very interesting question of how do real life communities, many of which are online, actually regain control over the kinds of tech products they use. And I think this really opens up some quite difficult but very pressing questions about, you know, what are online communities? How are they formed? What kinds of user groups do they have?

What kinds of rights could communities be given over, let's say, the platforms they use or other services and goods that they use? What boundaries those communities have? Whether there are kind of different tiers of like, should developers have more power than ordinary users? Should there be kind of people who use it every day versus people use it, you know, once a year? Raises a lot of questions about that as well. And, you know, I think that question leads really well into another topic that I wanted to explore, right? Because in the book, you talk about how

there's a lot of discussion around worker control of platforms or full nationalization of platforms, but each of those approaches has its own issues, right? It is not fully the solution to potentially what we would want to see happen with these platforms. And you provide the framework of guild socialism as something that could potentially provide a response to this or a means to approach platforms. So can you talk about how you see the means of how we would retake control of these platforms and what might be the best way to structure it? So this is kind of like a pretty difficult multi-part question, basically. I want to talk about guild socialism because that's really central to my whole approach. And then after there's a little bit of a historical detour, I'm going to then get

back to how it might apply to some of these pressing questions today. That sounds good to me. Yeah. Well, one of the main contributions of the book is to revive the ideas of guild socialism. And one guy in particular, a guy called G.D.H. Cole. And I think he really provides some interesting ways for us to rethink digital platforms and how we could democratize platforms, how we could foster new forms of decentralized governance. So Cole was a guild socialist. He is around during the late 19th and early 20th century. And he was a member of the Fabian Society, which is a British socialist organization

that helped found the Labour Party, among other things. And they founded the LSE, the London School of Economics. And they're really a huge force on the left in the UK at the time. And Cole became a critic of the Fabians' tendency to think in terms of top-down and state-led forms of nationalisation. So the Fabians, being the kind of progressive left-wing society that they were, were very much in favour of ways in which the public could take control of forms of enterprises and services. And Colt occupies a kind of more, slightly more libertarian, slightly more decentralized position within the sphere of the left. And he thought that the Fabians lacked what

he considered forms of self-government in the workplace. So we might talk about local forms of decision-making. So how we could actually empower people in their workplaces and in their municipalities that weren't solely thinking of socialism in terms of state-led nationalization. And so this is a kind of minor tendency on the left, particularly in the UK at the time. And you might be able to call this like an associational socialism. I think I use the term associational democracy in the book, but I mean the same thing by both. And I think what Cole is really interested in doing is thinking about how we could create a more participatory society, how we could create organizations and institutions that themselves have an internal democratic structure, right? So how do we have these kinds

of associations that have their own representatives that give people a say in how social life is organized? And so think of things like museums, art galleries, universities, schools, churches, all these organizations that might make up various aspects of different people's life. And the thing that makes this for Colin associational socialism is that the role of the state is vastly decreased and that it's reduced to really just a coordinating institution such that the way in which we live our lives becomes much more dependent on these kind of meso-level associations, maybe producer associations, workplaces, local municipal associations that might be run by councils or regional or state-level authorities.

And so it's really about trying to create these more participatory structures. This is really what coal is getting at. And it's this kind of like much more federalist, much more local alternative on the left that isn't really given as much airtime today because the centralising tendencies both within the British Labour Party and within the left more generally really won out. And so it's interesting to kind of go back and look to some of these more forgotten ways of thinking about organising social life. So that's kind of, this is the coal. How do you bring coal to the digital sphere? Because one of the chapters is called Guild Socialism for the Digital Economy.

And it looks like a bit of a joke, right? Because guilds are these weird medieval institutions for organizing workers. And what could that have to say about politics or digital life today? Well, we could think about the way in which digital platforms act as associations that bring these communities together. And of course, there's going to be a diverse range of communities. But what Cole would kind of want us to do is looking at the function that the community performs and thinking about how we can democratize platforms and how we can build these democratic structures to reflect the role that the platforms play.

So how can we empower communities of users and how can we do so by thinking about a different approach to governance and thinking about how we can cultivate alternative ecosystems of digital platforms, ways in which ownership of the platform could be distributed amongst its members and how governance could actually be changed to reflect this too. And there are aspects of this that do actually start sounding a lot like some of the things that the advocates of Web3 are talking about, right? Like I've had people write to me and say, oh, this, you know, sounds a lot like a Dow. It sounds a lot like this web three project I have. And I think there are overlaps here. I think when you talk about the kind of left tradition in socialism, and by that,

I mean like the more, slightly more libertarian, slightly more federalist tradition. I think there are some overlaps, but I think context is everything, right? Decentralization isn't a kind of end in itself. And Cole never thought that. His idea wasn't to get rid of the state because he thought that that would instantly lead to a better society. That's not going to be the case at all. The idea for him was to empower individuals to have more control over their lives. And the best way to do this, he thought, was through these local communities, through these associations that

would give them voice and give them power through collective forms of organizing. I think that's a really good description of, you know, guild socialism and trying to extend those concepts to today, to the digital platforms that we're dealing with. And, you know, I think that in making that description, you kind of illustrate how this more associational participatory means of governing these platforms would be preferred in your perspective, rather than like a full nationalization controlled by a state bureaucracy, or just simply worker control fully, instead of having, instead of having other stakeholders or people who are involved in the use of the platform, involved in that democratic governance as well. I wonder though, you talked about how Cole really kind of sees guild socialism as something that

reduces the role of the state and focuses it on these really kind of local associational groups. What role do you see for the state in creating a platform socialism? And do you think that we need to go so far as what Cole is talking about in moving to such a local level? This raises some really interesting questions. So Cole at the beginning of the 20th century is a really big critic of the state, right? But I don't think we need to necessarily adapt everything that he said word for word for how we should treat digital platforms today. The approach of platform socialism is to think about the complex ecosystem of various forms of alternative ownership that needs to exist in the platform economy. So we need to think of platforms that are most suitable to kind of be

owned by workers at a very local level, right up to national and international platforms that only really make sense as the function that they perform is one that necessarily needs to be at a much broader scale. And so here I talk in the book about using the principle of subsidiarity. You know, platforms should be owned and operated at the most local and proximate level that would enable them to carry out their services in a kind of efficient and sustainable way. So we need to think about the question of scale. So I'm not necessarily anti-nationalization. I just think it makes sense to look at different platforms from a different perspective, depending on what they're doing. So I really think we need to get over this kind of

binary framework of either state ownership on the one hand, or solely workers' cooperatives or worker-owned platforms on the other. I think there are many different types of communities. They have different structures. They serve different purposes. And so one of the reasons I drew on what many people consider to be the pluralist socialist tradition of people like GDH Cole and another author that I mentioned in the book called Otto Neurath is that they don't necessarily reduce things to this one size fits all model. And there's a degree of tolerance to different ways of organizing associations. And there's this real emphasis on this ecosystem of alternative models. So how do we think about that in practice? So I think for some of the smaller platforms, we could imagine things like a courier service or a domestic cleaning service or something that's

really location-based, it's done in a local level, we can kind of imagine that being carried out by like a platform cooperative. So by workers owning a platform, democratically running it together and kind of offering their services to a local neighborhood or a city, right? But there are some other platforms that it would be really hard to run as workers cooperatives or sometimes unfair, right? Because they're not just about organizing the activities of a small group of people that are offering really discrete services. Sometimes platforms, firstly, they require a lot of investment and digital infrastructure. So this might be software, it might be, you know, data centers, or it might be big infrastructure, like, for example, a ride hail service might require things like, you know, data centers, or it might be big infrastructure, like, for example, a ride hail

service might require things like, you know, ownership of the cars or like the, you know, very complex software to run the system. And so in these kinds of instances, it might make more sense for a municipality or a city to kind of administer that service. And maybe even in the case of ride hails to integrate it more properly into a public transport system, right? So, you know, obviously ride hail and cars are, you know, environmentally unsustainable and there are a lot of problems with that. Perhaps it would be good if such a service had to exist at all for it to kind of be shown to operate alongside and as a public transport system to kind of supplement more sustainable

forms of transport. Anyway, so the goal of the transformation is to organize platforms more democratically so that you can look at the function of the platform and then look at the kind of democratic structure that would be best suited to it. And I think the following coal in the turn towards a more local level is really just following this insight that many democratic theorists have had, which is democracy operates most effectively at what kind of looks like the level of the city. It doesn't always make sense for services to be run on a global scale or even a national one. But you did mention, what is the role of the state in all of this? Now, I think we have to be a bit more realistic about this. Part of what I was

doing in the book was kind of really sketching a vision for what the platform economy could look like if organized in a more democratic way. But looking at the transition towards that, I think we can't neglect the important role of the state and what kind of role that would have to play, both in terms of regulating platforms, but probably funding and setting up alternatives. I think that's when the small anarchist sitting on one shoulder has to give way to the small social democrat sitting on my other shoulder and say that there is still an important role for the state to play in these, but the final result will depend a lot on the kind of platform you have in mind. Making that distinction between the type of platforms is really important, right? Because

we can see how some platforms would work a lot better if they are managed on the local level, because local governments and cities are going to have a lot of impact on how they work and the people who use them, whereas there's other platforms that might make sense to exist on a more national level or regional level, even if they still have those kind of impacts and there can be that kind of like discourse between the different levels and whatnot. I want to come back to the point on the role of kind of municipal governments and what this can look like on the municipal level, because where you did end by talking about the state there, I did also want to get to the question of regulation and what the approach should be, because obviously there's this larger conversation that's happening now around antitrust, around competition policy, around

breaking up big tech. And I wonder what you think is the best approach in approaching these platforms through that lens and whether it is simply, you know, to break up these big companies and just have a bunch of smaller ones competing against one another, or whether we should look at the regulatory approaches to tech platforms in a different kind of way. So I think the question of regulation is really important and it's really become the kind of dominant framework, at least at a governmental level, of how we imagine our criticisms of big tech companies. And so both here in the UK and in the US, the government response is really centered around trying to combat these anti-competitive practices of big tech. So Elizabeth Warren's phrase of breaking up big tech, this idea of tightening their role as these gatekeepers of digital markets,

both in the EU and also in the US, there has been this kind of focus on regulations and on anti-competitive practices. Now, I think we should look at this, at least those of us on the left, with some hope and some scepticism. Basically, I think there's an essential point of truth here. You know, the companies clearly do need more regulation. We need to prevent them from abusing their power as gatekeepers, from stifling competition, from just buying up, you know, competitors. All of this is kind of pointing in the right direction. But at the same time, I think we need to realize that getting a more perfectly functioning market economy is not the end goal of people on the left, right? It's like there's a kind of elective affinity there. There's a way in which we can form alliances with liberals

on these questions. But I think at the end of the day, we need to think of public and commons-based forms of providing digital services that don't necessarily reduce everything to forms of market logic. And I think ultimately that is one of my emerging criticisms of some of the Web3 discourse, that at the basis of some of these Web3 solutions is this idea that you just start inserting digital tokens into online communities, Bitcoin, other forms of currency, and that eventually, you know, it will generate the right incentives within the system for a more broadly defined group of users to profit from what's going on. But I think this really, you know, as you yourself, right, have pointed out in one of your articles, this really

risks just extending these processes of commodification further into our digital lives, right? I think the best traditions that we can draw on are all those, you know, groups and movements that promoted the free and open use of software, that didn't have these kinds of market economies at their basis, that they weren't for-profit businesses. They were people that were trying to develop tools for humanity, that they wanted people to be able to have free access to this, that the information and the kind of services that are available should be there for anyone to use. And so I think this antitrust agenda should have our support to a degree, but we also need to know that it's not about creating more property or more personal property

rights around data. It should be about finding non-commodified ways of opening up these services and these tools to the public. Obviously, I completely agree with that. I just quoted your article at you, so you can't disagree. You're like, well, you contradict yourself. And, you know, you also have a recent article about Web3 and Jacobin. And so I will link that in the show notes so people can go check it out. Good luck, my man. You're welcome. You're welcome. But I think. Good luck, my man. Yeah, you're welcome.

You're welcome. But I think it's a really good point. And, you know, sometimes I worry that the antitrust discourse being too focused on competition and the competitive lens is distracting from these kind of more commons based or public solutions to the problem by framing everything through the lens of competition, instead of recognizing that, you know, as you were talking about with how maybe things need to look differently on different levels. And kind of if we're thinking about things through a platform socialist lens, that different platforms are going to need different forms of organization that again, like the universal solution to problems that we have with platforms today is not just to make them all more competitive, but it will require a whole range of different solutions. And one of the ones that you

propose as well is public utility regulation. And I wonder why you think that is probably an approach that needs to be looked at. The framework of public utilities gives you one important way to think about how platforms could be organized. The story I tell in the book is thinking about how private companies can essentially be taken over and converted into public platforms. For me, the real level at which it's best to think about this is on the level of the municipality. People often look to kind of like much older models, so, you know, like Cybus in Chile. But I think when you start to turn to more recent models, the most to kind of like much older models. So, you know, like Cybus in Chile. But I think when you start to turn to more recent models, the most exciting kind of prototypes

that have been developed, the most exciting experiments that we have are things like the Decode project, you know, in Barcelona and Amsterdam that was run partly by Francesca Bria. So Decode stands for Decentralized Citizen-Owned citizen-owned data ecosystems. It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's essentially about finding ways in which you can create new forms of data commons, right? Finding ways in which you can use a city's sensor network to kind of serve the public good. And so I think this is really where you start to think about public services that are using the same technology that some of

these private companies are doing, but that are doing so in different ways and that align with citizens' interests, that are privacy protecting. And you can see how a different use of this technology could begin to emerge, right? Because I think one of the tricks of the tech companies is to create the tools in a certain way and to deploy them in a certain way where it looks like all of the negative externalities of them running as a capitalist enterprise are somehow natural byproducts of the tech itself. But technology is a tool, right? It doesn't necessarily have to run in a particular way. And I think some of these municipal alternatives are really good because they start to show you that you can create public benefit from their tech. And when you're thinking

about the politics of some of these projects, you can start to look at the new municipalism movement that has kind of built up around the Fearless Cities Network that was first held in Barcelona in 2017. And I think what's important about this is that it's not just about devolving power. It's not just about decentralizing power. It's also trying to intervene in how this power operates. And to think about the question of democracy, because things happening on a local level is not necessarily an end in itself. It's not necessarily going to lead to more just outcomes. It's really thinking about how democracy can operate better at this local level. And I think the politics is

really important. So when you think about the decode pilots that happened, they happened on the back of a socialist being elected to the municipal government and a socialist platform that started using this tech through platforms like Decidim to ask the government and a socialist platform that started using this tech through platforms like Decidim to ask the people and to create a more participatory environment, to ask people, what do you want us to do on this municipal level? And the tech both enabled those new forms of democratic participation, but then was also deployed to think about how new forms of data commons could be created. I'm really happy that you brought up the new municipalist example that you gave in the book, because I think it does provide a good way

to look at these issues and to think about how tech can be used in a different way. And I'll also note that there was a really good interview with Francesca Bria in the Crypto Syllabus recently that I'll link in the show notes for listeners as well. I have two more questions for you that I want to explore before we end our conversation. The first is around search engines. I don't even know how to put it like Google just has so much power over everything that we do. And that really comes from its control over search, like one of these kind of fundamental tools of the internet itself. And that has allowed it to expand into so many different areas and to get a ton of control over the internet, even including infrastructural aspects of it. In the book, you suggest that we should

look at having a public search engine that would be oriented in a different way instead of to serve, you know, the interest that Google has, its profit, its continued control over the internet itself, but to instead encourage and show and demonstrate different values in how it is put together and managed. And so I wonder, you know, this is kind of a two part question, what do you think a public search engine would look like? And why do you think that is important? And secondly, do you think it is better to look at that as something that we need to build from scratch, or where we kind of take over Google and reorient Google toward a public purpose. An internet search engine and a social media platform,

I think, are two of the platforms that I look at in the book that you just can't see them running as workers' cooperatives. And indeed, I think it wouldn't be good for them to run as workers' cooperatives. And I'll get to the Google. I'm just going to have this long lead up to it. But one of the critiques of workers' cooperatives, at least within the socialist tradition, is that it's very hard using that structure to allow the broader community's voices and their interests to be taken into account, right? So let's say we get Google and we hand it over to its whatever 100,000 employees that's great for them as individuals but it's not necessarily going to create the democratic structures for the community and indeed with Google right it's the international community to be able to have

control over how it operates and so I think you need to start looking at examples of services that are operated at the international level. And I think it should be a shock to all of us that we can't access the world's information through a public not-for-profit foundation, right? I think that's just insane that we have something like Wikipedia and we can see how good it is and how necessary and important that kind of a platform is. And then we can just say, oh, but it's fine that there's this company that's just harvesting all our data and organizing all our access to the world's knowledge. So I think when you're looking at a public search engine, the overriding principle

is that it should be free, accessible for all to use, and it shouldn't be trying to turn a quick buck from us. So I think something like a foundation, I think is probably the best option that you have for this. And I freely admit at the international level, how do you democratize anything becomes an incredibly difficult question, right? So I don't think there's any like knockdown answers that fully rule out other possibilities,

but I think something like a foundation is one way in which something like Google could be organized. Now, in the case of Google, I think just looking at their dominant market share and how much control they have over the search market, I suggest in the book that you should transform Google itself into a not-for-profit foundation. And that might be a bit controversial. Well, I mean, it is, it's kind of a mad idea at its basis. But I think really, if you try to create a complete alternative, history has shown there'll be really hard to get user adoption, right? There are heaps of alternatives, some of

them good, some of them not so good. But look at the struggle of DuckDuckGo and you can see how difficult it is for people to kind of get up in that space. Now, I think if you converted it into a not-for-profit foundation, you would change certain aspects of how the service operated. Essentially, you would completely eliminate their advertising function, right? You wouldn't need to run ads because you wouldn't be running it as a for-profit service. That raises the question of how it'd be funded. I kind of talk about a few options in the book about, you know, global digital wealth fund, similar to like Norway or Australia. I talk about maybe having a levy on some of the big tech companies to kind of start it off. I float the possibility that might be somehow attached

as an independent agency of the UN, similar to like the ILO or something like that. So there are a few different options. I think a lot of them could potentially work, but essentially such a public search engine, I think, is if you turn Google into a foundation, you eliminate the advertising arm, what you end up seeing is something that I think would look quite similar to Wikipedia, at least in terms of its purpose of providing a service to people in terms of allowing them access to the world's knowledge. The idea of a public search engine is fantastic. And I want to ask a quick follow up, I guess, to that response. One of the things that I worry about when we talk about taking like a Facebook

or a Google into public ownership and reorienting it is that over a couple decades now, these companies have basically built up a certain infrastructure and, you know, a certain way of developing their, their platforms. And I wonder if you worry, it would be difficult to fully reorient them toward a public purpose after having different incentives kind of baked into their construction and their code over the course of such a long period. Yeah, it's a huge concern, right? And this kind of concern is what has worried leftists about taking over any kind of power in society, right? Like that's the problem of the civil service or the bureaucracy. That's

the problem of the army. That's the problem of the state. Anytime you talk about trying to claim power, trying to retake public institutions, trying to reorient them towards a different purpose, it becomes a very tricky question of what elements of that can be retrained or recoded or redesigned and which elements would serve as a fundamental barrier to any kind of change. And we talked about that during the Corbyn era when it looked like labor might be, you know, close to an electoral victory. You know, many leftist groups have talked about that. I don't think I'm the right person to know conclusively, you know, whether the case of Google, you know, how it would go. But I think you framed the problem correctly in

that, well, it's a very valid argument to say, burn it all down. And like, we need a new public search engine. I think the one maybe redeeming point is that at least in the case of a search engine, you can so clearly distinguish the socially beneficial element of it from the parasitic element. Like they didn't actually develop the parasitic element until after they created a useful product. They didn't know how to make money, you know, as was classically narrated by Shoshana Zuboff. They kind of had to develop that after the fact. So I think with a public search engine, at least maybe I'm not the one to talk about how the structure of Google works and who would have to be fired and which developers might stay on in some kind of like utopian public Google and what even Google would be renamed. But it's so clear that it does

something really, really well and in a useful way. And I do talk about some of the technical aspects of how that might be changed, thinking about, you know, search engine optimization and the politics essentially around search. But I think that's essentially a conversation we need to have. We need to have a public discourse about how our knowledge is organized, and we need to have some degree of accountability over the algorithms that we use to organize that knowledge? Should individuals get different results based on their search history? Should they be able to turn that function on and off? All those things are basically the politics of knowledge and the politics of knowledge in a digital age. But we don't have that discussion. We don't have that debate because it's a function

of a private company. And so all of that is just information we don't need to know, right? How the algorithm works. So we're not even at the starting point of what it would look like to have that kind of discussion. And we desperately need it. I appreciate that answer. And I completely agree that I think it's a discussion that needs to be had. And I think that you can see pros and cons of either approach, you know, starting from scratch or taking over Google and trying to reform it into something that is serving the public instead of the profit motives of this major company. But in your earlier response, you mentioned that one of the possible approaches is

to have some sort of UN organization that is helping to spread, I guess, platform socialism or these more positive implementations. A couple of years ago now, I guess early on in the pandemic, I wrote about the need to nationalize Amazon and to have the various countries that it has a footprint in to take over what it does in those countries, and then to potentially have something like the Universal Postal Union, which itself is a UN organization, do coordination between them, because in my estimation, the Amazon would be merged with public postal services in that idea of the future. And so I wonder how you would imagine a kind of UN organization or UN body helping to forward this vision that you have, especially after talking about how important it

is to be focused on the local level and to have things as local as possible. So I think imagining democratic digital platforms on a global scale is both super necessary, but also incredibly difficult to do, right? Because we don't even have democracy itself on the international level. We don't even have a way of talking about that. But when you're talking about things like global supply chains, the international scope of social networks and logistic services, they're not bounded by a single nation state. And indeed, I think one of the things that we don't talk about enough is the forms of digital colonialism that underpin the tech sector, right? I think this is just a completely absent discussion that's been missing from a lot of the talk about tech.

Because, yeah, let's say we nationalize a service in the US, it's still going to require, you know, lithium mining. It's still going to require all these, you know, product assemblage, all of these things that take place. And we couldn't expect that to remain the same if we wanted a kind of just outcome for that. So it's definitely an international question. It's definitely one that has that kind of scope. Now, we don't even have the language for talking

about this, right? So we can talk about nationalizing Amazon, but in your article on it, you confronted these issues. Well, it's not going to be a national question. It doesn't make sense for US companies to be nationalized in this way when they're delivering services that affect so many people in other nations around the world. So in the book, I propose the creation of what I call a global digital services organization. I suggest that it could be like a specialized agency of the UN, like the International Telecommunications Union or the ILO. And, you know, it could first be set up by a levy on the profits of tech companies. This is the kind of organization that we might turn to for providing some kind of funding and coordination and support for developers and for communities to build these

alternative platforms, right? So you can imagine an organization like this, particularly if it had a kind of digital wealth fund behind it. So it had some capital to start with. Investing in these services, because some of the prototypes that we have, some of the small examples of non-commodified digital services, we could turn to things like Mastodon as like, you know, a social media alternative. These small projects have been developed, I usually buy literally like one or a handful of volunteers with no money. You know,

imagine what we could achieve with better funded public services with, you know, enormous amounts of money behind it. The decode project that I alluded to earlier in the Francesca Bria interview, she said that, look, that had 5 million euros and they created this like citywide, you know, data commons, really changed the conversation. So it's crazy how much money the big tech companies have and how much of it gets poured into their products versus, you know, non-commodified public commons-based alternatives. And so I think that, look, it's not out of the realm of possibility that, you know, non-commodified public commons-based alternatives. And so I think that, look, it's not out of the realm of possibility that, you know, we could move towards something like this.

But I think that international level is really important. I think it's when you start thinking about social media, public search engines, and a few other digital services, maybe a global digital services organization could provide the funding and coordination needed to get some of those projects off the ground. Yeah, I love that, you know, and there are so many examples of digital services and software and things like that, that would have this kind of universal application that such an organization could help with. James, I have really enjoyed the conversation today in digging into platform socialism and understanding

the ideas that are behind it. Thanks so much. Thank you very much, Paris. Good to be here. James Muldoon is the author of Platform Socialism, How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech. And you can find a link to learn more in the show notes. He's also a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and the head of digital research at the Autonomy Think Tank.

You can follow James on Twitter at James underscore Muldoon underscore. You can follow me at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.