I. The Liminal Perspective: Aligning Action with Politics

If you’re someone who’s lived between worlds—linguistically, culturally, economically—you eventually develop what I call liminal intelligence. 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 more human, and which make us smaller, flatter, algorithmic versions of ourselves. And once you see that, you can't unsee it.

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 in a surveillance graph. 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 the basics.

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 borders and noticing the subtle infrastructures that govern culture. 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. Your value is your virality. 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.

What attracted me wasn’t purity. It was alignment. 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.

And the difference is everything.

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 the wrong people, 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. This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s civics.

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—you have 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; it tries to eliminate domination. It doesn’t want a state-controlled internet; it wants a user-controlled internet.

If your entire political tradition was shaped by Cold War boogeymen, 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. It means the governance model reflects democratic principles: 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

Decentralization isn’t a slogan; it’s an architectural principle. 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. And yes, it scales. 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 imagination.

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:

1. Give people autonomy.
2. 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:

1. Natural Rents: Royalties from collectively owned resources (like the Alaska Permanent Fund model).
2. Digital Rents: Fees on the immense, currently monopolized value generated by social data and network effects.
3. 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 yes to co-creation and democratic ownership.

The Real Challenge: Doing This at 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?

This is the part where most critics throw their hands up and claim it’s impossible. The labour laws don’t match. The time zones don’t line up. Compensation structures vary wildly. And corporate work today isn’t a neat, single-factory, one-country operation—it’s a scattered galaxy of asynchronous teams distributed across continents.

And they’re right about one thing:
You can’t run a multinational as one giant cooperative in the traditional sense.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it at all.
It means you need to think in federations.

The Most Realistic Model: A Federated Global Cooperative

The closest real-world analogues aren’t startups or nonprofits—they’re the governance systems designed to coordinate diverse communities across borders:
the EU, international labour unions, Mondragon’s global network, and large open-source ecosystems.

The structure looks something like this:

1. Local Workplace Councils

Every office elects its own council to handle things like work processes, schedules, internal policies, and health/safety issues.

2. Regional Councils

Offices across a geographic region elect representatives who coordinate hiring standards, mid-term strategy, budgets, compliance, and product decisions that span countries.

3. A Global Assembly

The democratic heart of the company. Delegates meet (digitally) to vote on budgets, strategic direction, executive leadership, ethical guidelines, major investments, and long-term plans.
This isn’t a shareholder meeting.
This replaces the shareholder meeting.

What you get is not chaos, but a three-tier democratic architecture—local autonomy, regional coordination, and global strategy.
It’s not abstract theory; it’s a structure that already exists in multiple global cooperatives and open-source movements.

VIII. The Economic Case: Why Democratic Ownership Makes Sense

We need to make the economics plain, because good rhetoric buys nothing if the incentives still point the wrong way.

Network effects and winner-take-most dynamics create natural monopolies. The value of these platforms rises with scale, data, and user attention, and once entrenched, they can extract rents simply by their centrality. This creates an economic rationale for democratic ownership in certain sectors: when a service is infrastructural, the social value of broad, equitable access outweighs the private return of extracting monopoly rents.

Principal–agent problems plague shareholder capitalism. Managers answer to shareholders; shareholders want returns. That short horizon warps product decisions, hiring, moderation, and even research priorities. Democratically owned platforms align the interests of governance with those who actually make the system—workers and users—reducing agency costs and improving long-term stewardship.

Externalities like misinformation, mental health impacts, and surveillance are real social costs that tech firms do not internalize. In a democratic model, these social costs can be accounted for by bodies that represent communities, not absentee investors.

Capital structure matters. Varoufakis’s proposal to rent capital rather than sell control offers an alternative financing model: firms borrow at fixed rates rather than issuing tradable equity that confers governance rights. That keeps necessary investment flowing while preventing financial markets from determining strategic, civic choices.

Resilience and diversity are economic goods. Decentralized ecosystems reduce systemic risk. A single catastrophic failure at one vendor no longer threatens the whole public sphere. As political scientist Brian Klaas argues, our centralized economic and social models operate on a naïve assumption of convergence—that the system is so robust it will always arrive at a predictable outcome. But the reality is that the modern, hyper-interconnected world is ruled by contingency, where a single, random fluctuation (a hack, a pandemic, a key executive's poor decision) can cause total system failure. Decentralized ecosystems reduce systemic risk because a single catastrophic failure at one vendor no longer threatens the whole public sphere.

These are not utopian promises. They are reasoned responses to market failures and incentive problems endemic to platform capitalism.

IX. Objections — and Why They Don’t Hold Up

Every time you talk about decentralization or socializing tech, the same objections appear like clockwork.

Objection 1: “It’ll create too much bureaucracy.”

Not necessarily. Bureaucracy comes from unaccountable management layers, not democratic ones.

Worker-run cooperatives tend to have fewer management layers because:

• people understand their own work
• incentives align
• feedback loops are immediate
• leadership is elected rather than imposed

Horizontal doesn’t mean chaotic, but responsive.

Objection 2: “It won’t scale globally.”

Many complicated organizations humans built were scaled through federation:

• the European Union
• international unions
• global standards bodies
• multinational cooperatives
• open-source ecosystems

The idea that workers can’t govern globally is a myth created by…
people who don’t want workers to govern globally.

Objection 3: “Investors will never allow it.”

Correct.
And irrelevant.

Socializing tech is not about persuading investors. It’s about designing alternative institutions that gradually make investor-run platforms obsolete.

A cooperative ecosystem can outcompete hierarchies the same way open-source outcompeted closed-source software.

Objection 4: “Users don’t care about decentralization.”

Users don’t care until power is abused. Then everyone cares.

Think of privacy:
Nobody cared until Cambridge Analytica.

Think of labour rights:
Nobody cared until gig-workers sued Uber globally.

Decentralization becomes relevant the moment centralization becomes harmful.
And Big Tech is already past that threshold.

Objection 5: “Workers can’t run complex companies.”

They already do.

They run hospitals.
Schools.
Municipalities.
Factories.
Universities.
Emergency services.
Global scientific collaborations.
Every open-source project on your laptop.

The idea that only CEOs understand complexity is one of the saddest collective delusions of late capitalism. That, and Bad Bunny.

X. What a Socialized, Decentralized Tech World Looks Like

This isn’t fantasy. It’s a plausible architecture.

1. Federated worker councils—local, regional, and global assemblies with real decision power.
2. Transparent algorithms—auditability by elected bodies, public summaries, and redress.
3. Profit shared equitably—surplus returned to workers and creators, not extracted as rent.
4. Capital rented, not owned—loans, cooperative bonds, and public finance instead of equity that buys control.
5. Sovereignty over digital identity—data portability, interoperability, and user control.
6. Platforms as digital commons—open standards, federation, and portability that reduce lock-in.
7. A cultural shift where platforms are understood as infrastructure, not merely entertainment.

Economically, this sacrifices short-term extraction for long-term sustainability: more resilient infrastructure, lower social costs, reduced volatility, and higher trust—all quantifiable economic goods. Social capital rises, transaction costs fall, and communities capture more of the value they create.

XI. One Step at a Time

My move to Ghost wasn’t a manifesto; it was a micro-adjustment. A recalibration toward coherence.

We don’t get the world we want through one giant transformation. We get it by aligning our micro-decisions with our macro-values.

Using nonprofit, decentralized, carbon-neutral infrastructure isn’t revolutionary. Think of it as some necessary foreplay before we go the whole nine yards. It helps us stop outsourcing our agency to platforms that treat us as inventory. It reminds us that alternatives exist. It helps us get into the motion we need to simultaneously reach a climactic shift.

Because the big shift is this: stop thinking of democracy as something that happens in parliaments. Start thinking of it as something that must happen everywhere power touches human life—especially online.

Ghost won’t topple Amazon. But it will help us reclaim a little part of the internet. And if enough people reclaim enough corners, the architecture begins to shift. Power begins to decentralize. Governance begins to democratize.

The socialization of Big Tech isn’t an ideological preference. It’s an evolutionary necessity for a world that is borderless, multilingual, and globally interdependent. We don’t need billionaires governing digital life. We need democratic institutions governed by us.

The future we inherit depends on the platforms we choose today. And every choice (even the small ones) is a vote for the world we want to build.

We’re overdue. The borderless humans—the liminal ones, the cultural navigators, the multilingual misfits—are already prototypes for that future. We’ve lived in the cracks. We’ve learned the patterns. We know what centralized systems do to human beings.

And because we’ve lived there, we know how to build a world that is federated, accountable, and free—just like us.

All my work is published on Ghost, a decentralized, non-profit, and carbon-neutral platform—free from VC funding and the grip of technofeudal lords.
I don’t use algorithms to hijack your attention.
My work can only exist if you share and support it.

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