Imagine what the internet would look like if legislators prevented that particular monetization strategy (targeted advertising). For example, classifying it as behavior influencing technology—we could start to analyze a lot (social media algorithms, advertising, news feeds, …) for its potential to become propaganda and influence our fellow citizens. Free speech is protected, sure, but you can’t shout “bomb” in an airport anymore than you should be able to harvest heroine data and use it to lure addicts to your marketplace.

Imagine if we saw things like Amazon and said, “woah woah woah. We as a society left feudalism behind. You can’t own the land (the “platform”) that everyone sells on, monetize the exchange of products on your land (taxes, or “platform fees”), and have control over which exchanges should occur in the first place (the “algorithm”). That’s just too much power and doesn’t follow the same free market principles that got us here in the first place.”

Imagine if the government saw things like web3.0, blockchain, federation, and said: “you know, it was public funding that built the internet. Maybe now, public funding should secure the democratic process of the internet. Let’s research the potential for using the internet as a platform for building and supporting a digital space that helps propel society into its next stages of human development.”

Instead, we got something where technology was allowed to develop into an alternative form of control. We regulated the land, so they made new land in unregulated territory while moving all the goods over there. Capitalism allowed feudalism to sprout from within if. We are the peasants who “work the land.” That’s why these platforms are free to us, because (just like in feudalism) they need us there for any of this to work. We work the land, comment and like posts, only to teach their algorithms how to better influence us. It’s not what I was hoping for back in the early 2000s.