New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans

They both turned out to be more than a little right.

even unpaid peer-production models Benkler held up so hopefully have concentrated huge wealth and power in the hands of the owners of these platforms.

The content we generate creates enormous value for powerful intermediaries that gobble up our data, opaquely decide what content we get to view, and claim the lion’s share of the riches that result.

those paid models Carr anticipated that would reward our productive contributions are increasingly accused of using their scale and leverage to exploit those they pay for their efforts.

In some senses, you might say the Carr-Benkler wager has turned out to be lose-lose.

As consumers who are well trained to value the “frictionless” over almost all else, we all benefit from having easier-to-use services like Spotify

Yet the price of this is that we are all locked in to a handful of platforms that keep consolidating and making it harder for us to disentangle ourselves from them

(just think of how Facebook eats up potential competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp so it can create one big ecosystem we depend on).

have grown big and have become increasingly decoupled from the new power values their founders espoused.

They are ever more useful in our daily lives, but they also feel and act more and more like participation farms.

to turn it into a “public benefit corporation”—an emerging corporate and legal structure that binds the company to serve society, not just its shareholders

the logic of his strategy is even more compelling for entrepreneurs creating new power communities—whose

whose fate often rests on how well they cultivate and respect their crowds.

toward one that is less extractive and more socially generative: platforms that meet the

“circle test.”

“platform co-ops,”

democratically run and governed cooperatives reimagined for a world of peer-based technology platforms, not just farms and factories.

For new power platforms, he argues, it is their millions of users, not just those on the payroll, who should share in the value created, have a say in big decisions, and be represented in the governance of these platforms.

in Carr’s terms Twitter is underperforming; in Benkler’s it is thriving.

For platform co-ops and similar ideas to succeed, governments will have to make it easier to raise money to scale without relying on big investors or the traditional capital markets

To truly reimagine the platform behemoths, we also need to reimagine their algorithms.

today

their algorithms function as secret recipes that serve private interests.

Consider how a “public interest algorithm” mig...

It would need three key features.

First, the inputs into the algorithm, which shape what content we see and what gets priority, would be fully transparent to the user, including the criteria used by the platform to moderate offensive content or hate speech.

Second, every user would have a range of dials that allowed them ...

Third, the default settings of the algorithm would apply a public interest test, considering how the platform can better serve its broader “circle.”

imagine that, rather than having all your data on a third-party platform, you now take it with you.

“interoperability.”)

Another solution to the problem of placing one’s data in the hands of a powerful intermediary comes in the great—and much-hyped—hope of the Blockchain.

For non-technologists—even those who have spent hours trying to get their heads around this—the way this actually works can be hard to grasp.

But the most important things to understand are the potential human applications.

The potential of this is as huge as the hype (although, like all technologies, Blockchain remains vulnerable to co-optation and capture).

there is no reason to leave this work to regulators alone, who will tend to be more focused on blunting the power of platforms than on preserving their benefits to users.

“People were promised that the currents of change, economic, social and technological, would make them feel powerful.

Instead, they see decisions being made by political and corporate leaders ever further away from them. They feel like observers, not participants.”

We can vent our frustrations in an instant on social media and find many who will cheer us on.

But we may still feel less control over the hard realities of our lives, how we fit into society, and how we engage with our governments and institutions.

To close this gap, it will be critical to actually reduce wealth and income inequality and change the material conditions ...

But a subtler challenge is in how we create more meaningful opportunities for people to actively shape their lives and connect wi...

People need to feel more like owners of their own destinies, rather ...

If the only meaningful expression of all this pent-up agency is the occasional election or referendum, people will naturally be inclined to use t...

we need something different: a world where our participation is deep, constant, and multi-layered, not shallow and intermittent. Think of ...

When coders speak of stacks, they are referring to the diff...

software that work together to make a product hum: programming languages, applications...

This is a good analogy for the kind of world we need to create, one where people can more meaningfully participate in and feel ownership over every aspect of their lives—their

This cannot come about through one “killer app,” but requires a cultural and structural shift, with institutions of all kinds building deeper and more rewarding routes to participation.

The most important reason that people don’t trust institutions is that institutions don’t really trust people,

offering occasional, insubst...