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Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker writes about the implications that technology monopolies have for culture by asking "Who owns the Internet?". Three decades ago, few used the Internet for much of anything and the web wasn't even around. Today, nearly everybody uses the web, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Internet for just about everything. However, despite massive growth, the Web has narrowed very much: "Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales."
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What Big Tech's Monopoly Powers Mean for Our Culture
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squatcho, n.:
The button at the top of a baseball cap.
-- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
(Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:11AM
"Star Wars: The Death Star Cantina | WDR" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yl_reBjVqU [youtube.com]
Though if you look around, you can see infrastructure projects along the lines you suggest -- like Matrix.org, Mattermost, and more... One can hope they continue to gain traction...
Ultimately we likely need a mix of approaches though:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm [t0.or.at]
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Also, healthy economies are a good mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned transactions. So emphasizing creating better exchanged-focused organizations, even if narrowly scoped ones with more idealism, still does not address a need for balance across all four types of transactions.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.