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Home > English > NEWS AND ANALYSIS > Megaphones To Platforms: 30 Years of Technology and the Information Society

Megaphones To Platforms: 30 Years of Technology and the Information Society

Tuesday 28 January 2025, by Mallory Knodel

Wigs, boom boxes, kids in trailers, dogs in backpacks– a thousand people on bicycles stretching as far as the eye could see down the streets of Westminster in London. We headed to the circle drive in front of Buckingham Palace, where the street-party celebration really began. This was Critical Mass, and my memories of those monthly protests are also filled with the noise of joyful movement building.

I was just getting into tech then, but in those years the internet played a minor role in activism. Websites were digital bulletin boards. Eventually projects like Indymedia recognized the democratizing potential of websites for collecting and sharing information for direct action, citizen journalism and other content– an idea that would eventually be commodified as “Web 2.0.” Critical mass, Indymedia, the Zapatistas and other social movements were reinventing the megaphone, building solidarity and demonstrating safety in numbers both online and offline.

This idea that we can collect and share information with one another directly spread rapidly in these intervening years. But today’s social media platforms have in some real ways actually undermined real, offline people power, rather than expanding it. Civic space hasn’t been strengthened, it’s been weakened, relegated to bursts of activity in Tehran, Hong Kong, more or less monthly.

What keeps these spaces running is how we use them in our daily lives. Users produce the actual content of the largest corporations in the world. Now those same users— journalists, activists, celebrities, public agencies— are being asked to do the work of policing that content, too. Engaging with content, curating it and promoting it across other platforms to our friends have all been “platformized”, e.g. capitalized for real-time ad bidding.

Why not pour our joy, creativity, reporting, care– all of our time and energy– into building social space that belongs to users? And can these new social spaces catalyze social movements?

Nearly 20 years after critical mass, on my visits to London it’s apparent that critical mass transformed the city for the better. A tidy and sprawling network of bike lanes can also be found in New York, DC, Montreal– all places where I’ve lived cycled and organized. In those intervening years I’ve spent multitudes more of my time and energy working in human rights organizations to transform online spaces. When it comes to the corporate online space where most of us gather, we have not made progress and have only made those corporates stronger. I am hopeful that civil society can collectively focus appropriate attention on building alternatives that directly serve end user communities for whom we have always imagined and hoped to see thrive online.

Mallory Knodel is the executive director of the Social Web Foundation

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