Why Big Tech Must Be Socialized: And Why Decentralization Starts With Us
Explore how libertarian socialism, decentralization, and cooperative tech models can counter Big Tech power, rebuild trust, and expand human freedom.
I. Aligning Action with Politics
If you’re someone who’s lived between mundos—linguistically, culturally, economically—you learn to notice which institutions decentralize power and which hoard it. You see which require uniformity and which promote unity. And eventually, you see which structures make humans más humano, and which make us smaller, flatter, algorithmic versions of ourselves.
That’s the backdrop for why I’ve been learning more about libertarian socialism, decentralized platforms, and why I uprooted my newsletter from the algorithmic casino of a for-profit platform and replanted it in an independent network that doesn’t treat my readers like monetizable nodes en una puta sistema de vigilancia. Not because moving to Ghost is a revolution (it’s not) but because it’s one concrete step toward aligning my actions with my politics.
And that politics, if you boil it down, is this:
Humans deserve democratic control over the systems that shape their lives.
And the systems that shape our lives are increasingly digital, global, and corporate.
Which means if we’re serious about democracy in the 21st century, then we cannot avoid the question: What do we do about Big Tech? Do we regulate it? Reform it? Nationalize it? Break it up? Or—the question that scares the shit out of freedom-fry-munching market fundamentalists—do we begin socializing it?
Let’s start with us.
II. Prefigurative Politics: The Micro-Decision
The day I switched my newsletter from Substack to Ghost, several people asked me the same question: “Isn’t what matters how many people your words can reach?”
Not if you care about how systems shape behaviour. Not if you’ve spent a life crossing fronteras and noticing the subtle infrastructures that govern nuestra cultura. Not if you understand that the form of an institution determines the freedom of the people inside it.
Substack is a corporation. A well-designed one—clever, seductive, and built for growth. But within its architecture sits a familiar logic: your work is content, your readers are a resource, and you exist in an ecosystem optimized for attention extraction. Even if Substack is less toxic than Meta or X, the incentive structure is identical. You are a creator in the gladiator arena. Tu valor es tu viralidad. Your labour subsidizes the platform’s profit.
Ghost, on the other hand, is structurally incapable of exploiting you because exploitation would contradict its own bylaws. No shareholders. No external growth mandates. No VC firms with gravitational pull. It is a nonprofit, and nonprofits (properly run) can focus on their values over return.
The architecture of Ghost reflects the architecture of the world I actually want: decentralized, independent, and community-owned.
And that’s not an aesthetic choice. It’s prefigurative politics.
Prefigurative politics is practicing the values and social structures you want to see in the future society. It’s eating more vegetarian food instead of complaining about the meat industry after ordering a Big Mac. It’s biking in the pouring rain to get your groceries instead of ordering an Uber Eats as you’re busy writing about reducing waste. It’s allowing yourself to feel shame instead of hiding it behind blame. It’s using discomfort to fuel progress.
Moving to Ghost won’t dismantle technofeudalism. But it’s a micro-decision that aligns with a macro-belief: infrastructure matters. Governance matters. Ownership matters. And the longer we treat digital platforms as neutral tools, the faster we become tenants in someone else’s empire.
When you build on corporate-owned land, you inherit corporate logic. When you build on community-owned land, you inherit community logic.
III. The Structural Problem: Big Tech as Digital Oligarchy
The problem isn’t technology, but the feudal structures behind it.
Big Tech isn’t evil because it builds software. It’s dangerous because it builds digital infrastructure with feudal governance models. You can dress it up as innovation, disruption, agility, or whatever buzzword the McKinsey intern has copy-pasted into the quarterly memo. It doesn’t change the power structure:
A handful of founders
A handful of investors
A board
Senior executives
And then 150,000 workers who execute decisions they didn’t participate in making
Brian Klaas, whose work on power structures should be mandatory reading for anyone who touches an institution, boils the problem down to a simple, uncomfortable truth: Power attracts gilipollas, and once they have it, it distorts their minds, incentives, and morality.
Centralized institutions don’t just accidentally become authoritarian; they drift there because their architecture pushes them in that direction. Hierarchies calcify. Leaders become insulated. Feedback loops shrink until the top of the pyramid operates inside a hermetically sealed worldview.
And when that kind of structure controls: search, communication, mobility, identity, knowledge, public discourse, and digital infrastructure—the people at the top inevitably become unelected, unaccountable governors of the digital public sphere.
Look at the phenomena we struggle with today:
the gig economy
platform monopolies
algorithmic governance
surveillance capitalism
ecosystem lock-in
data extraction
AI model training scraping your creative work without permission
the enclosure of public infrastructure
the death of online community forums
the rise of technofeudal platforms with no accountability
These phenomena are not market failures. They are structural outputs of concentrated private power. When entire economies depend on platforms run by five unelected executives who answer only to investors, you don’t have a market, but a digital oligarchy.
Big tech, as it currently exists, is the antithesis of a democratic worldview. It is hierarchical, opaque, extractive, centralized, unaccountable, and oriented toward shareholder value over human well-being. It is, in short, a shitstorm.
IV. The Political Answer: Libertarian Socialism and Democratic Control
Libertarian socialism (sometimes called “left-libertarianism,” “anarcho-socialism,” or “libertarian municipalism,” depending on who’s speaking) has many branches, but at its core lies one consistent belief: Humans are most free when they participate in the decisions that shape their lives rather than being managed from above.
Power should be radically decentralized and democratically accountable—especially when it affects the many. Tech affects everyone, so tech must be democratized.
Libertarian socialism doesn’t try to eliminate markets, but domination. Instead of a corporate-controlled, or even state-controlled internet, it’s a user-controlled internet.
If Cold War boogeymen shaped your entire political tradition, you probably think “socializing” a company means confiscating it and giving it to the state. But libertarian socialism isn’t state socialism. It’s not central planning. It’s not a Politburo in the cloud. It’s democratic ownership. Federated governance. Decentralized power. A world built from the bottom up, not commanded from the top down.
Cooperatives, mutual aid networks, worker-owned companies, federated communes, digital commons—these aren’t utopian relics of 19th-century theory. They are functioning, real-world systems where people govern themselves, distribute resources democratically, and maintain accountability through structure rather than hierarchy. If you’ve ever participated in:
a worker co-op
a neighborhood assembly
an open-source project
a DAO with real accountability
a liberation movement organized horizontally
…you’ve already seen libertarian socialism in action.
Which is why socializing big tech should not be seen as idealistic, but as a democratic reform, akin to granting universal suffrage or abolishing slavery or ending feudal monopolies. The people doing the work, generating the data, building the products, and sustaining the infrastructure should be the ones participating in decisions about how that infrastructure is used. That’s you, by the way.
This doesn’t mean everyone votes on every UI change. However, the governance model reflects democratic principles like councils at every level, elected leadership, recall mechanisms, transparency, accountability, shared profits, and decision-making that mirrors the complexity of the organization.
The alternative is what we have now: feudal lords waving chainsaws around on stage and renting out cities for their weddings.
V. Decentralize Everything, Authorize Everyone
A decentralized system is:
more resilient
less corruptible
less fragile
less prone to catastrophic failure
less susceptible to power concentration
more adaptable to global diversity
Applied to global tech, socialization looks like the socialization of major technological infrastructures:
Workers electing leadership at local, regional, and global levels
Transparent, democratic decision-making
Non-tradable ownership (no shareholders, no speculation)
Capital rented, not owned
Revenue shared equitably
Platform power distributed instead of hoarded
Instead of a CEO-monarchy, you get a federated democratic ecosystem. Instead of an opaque algorithmic kingdom, you get transparent digital commons. Y sí, funciona. MONDRAGON scaled. The early internet scaled. Global cooperatives scale. International unions’ scale. Open-source projects like Linux and Wikipedia scaled beyond anyone’s predictions. The problem has never been feasibility. The problem is the unwillingness to give up conveniences.
VI. A Necessary Parallel: Historical Socialization of Infrastructure
People act like the idea of socializing critical infrastructure is some radical sci-fi fever dream, but historically, it’s the default. When something becomes essential—water, electricity, transportation, communications—societies eventually realize it shouldn’t be controlled by a handful of private actors.
Examples include:
Public libraries
Hospitals
Postal systems
Roads
Fire brigades
National parks
Public broadcasting
Mutual aid societies
Community land trusts
We’ve always democratized essential infrastructure when the alternative became unworkable.
The internet is by far the most essential infrastructure of the twenty-first century, and yet the platforms built on top of it remain stunningly undemocratic.
Imagine if all schools were privately owned by four companies that could edit, block, and monetize everything your children produce in their buildings. You would call that dystopia. But because the dystopia arrived digitally, and behind elegantly designed UI, we call it “innovation.”
VII. The Freedom Floor: Bregman & Varoufakis’s Contribution
Rutger Bregman’s work on UBI, poverty, and historical progress dovetails with this vision. Bregman’s thesis is simple: people make better decisions when they aren’t trapped in survival mode. Freedom requires a floor.
And a floor requires structures that do two things:
Give people autonomy.
Protect them from coercion—economic, political, or corporate.
Right now, Big Tech provides the opposite:
Precarity
Surveillance
Centralized power
Algorithmic control
Wage stagnation despite massive productivity
Gig-ified labour markets
Monopolized communication channels
When entire economies depend on platforms run by a handful of executives who answer only to investors, Putin, and their ketamine dealers, you don’t have a market—you have a digital oligarchy.
Bregman’s Universal Basic Income (UBI) model offers an essential defence by giving individuals crucial bargaining power and expanding personal freedom. Yet, UBI remains a reform, not a revolution. It is funded by the existing tax structure and, on its own, doesn’t democratize the underlying institutions. UBI expands freedom, but it fundamentally fails to expand collective power. The risk is that UBI merely serves as a personal subsidy within a still-monopolized digital economy (hence why tech lords sometimes advocate for it), leaving the central question of wealth generation and ownership unaddressed.
Therefore, moving toward Yanis Varoufakis’s idea of Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) might be a necessary structural solution. It directly tackles the concern that dividing limited corporate profits among everyone yields trivial shares by tapping into different sources entirely. UBD is funded not by taxing labour, but by distributing Economic Rents derived from the Commons—streams of wealth that rightfully belong to the collective. These sources include:
Natural Rents: Royalties from collectively owned resources (like the Alaska Permanent Fund model).
Digital Rents: Fees on the immense, currently monopolized value generated by social data and network effects.
Pollution Rents: Fees paid for using the atmospheric commons, such as a Carbon Dividend.
The total value of these economic rents is enormous, making the UBD a sustainable floor. It reclaims the Commons and makes every citizen a legal co-owner in the economy’s capital, transforming them from a mere recipient into an entitled partner.
That’s where socialized tech steps in.
If UBI liberates the individual, UBD combined with socialized tech liberates the collective. UBI gives you the freedom to say no to exploitation. UBD gives you the power to say si to co-creation and democratic ownership.
The Real Challenge: Doing This at a Multinational Scale
But then the obvious question crashes in:
Okay, but how the hell do you do this with a company that has offices in 40 countries?
For obvious reasons, you can only read the rest of this article on Ghost. Click here to read it.