Cases

Software is not a tool but the infrastructure of modern life, and its control is control over people. Power concentrates through documented mechanisms—network effects, lock-in, regulatory capture, data accumulation—that operate across every domain.

The commons, when protected, produces extraordinary results when enclosed, catastrophe. This page examines how infrastructure becomes politics, and who benefits.

The philosophical ground

Technology is never neutral — and control over it is control over people.

Every tool embeds the values of whoever built it and whoever controls it. A hammer is indifferent to what it strikes. Software is not. Software decides what you can see, what you can say, what you can buy, who can read your messages, and whether your vote is counted correctly. It is not a tool you pick up and put down. It is the infrastructure of modern life — and infrastructure has always had owners.

The question that has defined every major political struggle in history is the same question that defines the digital age: who controls the infrastructure, and in whose interest does it operate? The commons — infrastructure that belongs to everyone and can be taken from no one — is not a romantic ideal. It is a proven model with a documented history. When it has been enclosed, the results have been catastrophic. When it has been protected, the results have been extraordinary.

Power concentrates through predictable mechanisms: network effects make platforms more valuable as more people use them, creating winner-take-all dynamics. Platform lock-in raises the cost of leaving beyond what most can absorb. Regulatory capture ensures legal frameworks are written by the industries they nominally regulate. Data accumulation compounds all of these — the more data a platform holds, the stronger its position becomes. These mechanisms repeat across every domain documented in this wiki.

Foundational thinkers and texts

Stallman?	Software freedom is not a technical preference — it is a political and ethical condition for human autonomy. Without the right to study, modify, and share the software you depend on, you are subject to the will of whoever controls it.
Lessig?	The code that runs your digital life functions as law — it permits and prohibits behaviour — but unlike law it has no democratic accountability. Those who write the code write the rules, without election, oversight, or appeal.
Zuboff?	A new economic logic has emerged in which your behaviour, attention, and psychological vulnerabilities are raw material harvested and sold to predict and manipulate what you do next. You are not the customer — you are the product being manufactured.
Benkler?	Commons-based production consistently outperforms proprietary models when the resource is information, yet the system is structured to prevent it. The enclosure of the digital commons is a political choice, not an economic inevitability.
More to be added

Society and democracy

How concentrated control undermines the foundations of democratic life.

Democratic institutions are the formal mechanism through which societies hold power accountable. In practice, the concentration of economic and infrastructure power documented throughout this wiki systematically undermines democratic accountability — not through dramatic coups but through the quieter mechanisms of regulatory capture, information control, and structural dependency. The mechanisms are systemic and operate regardless of which individuals or parties hold formal power at any given moment.

State actors

Capture?	The agencies created to protect you from corporate abuse are staffed by the same industry they regulate, and their officials return to that industry when their tenure ends. The regulator and the regulated are the same people — the protection is theatre.
More to be added

Corporate actors

Facebook?	The private data of 87 million people was secretly harvested and used to build psychological profiles for targeting voters with manipulative political advertising. Facebook's own infrastructure made this possible — and profitable.
More to be added

Institutional actors

Cases to be added

Economy and finance

Who controls money and markets controls the conditions of everyone's life.

Financial infrastructure is the layer beneath all other infrastructure. The ability to send and receive money, to hold savings, to access credit, to participate in commerce — these are preconditions for participation in modern economic life. They are controlled by a small number of institutions whose design serves capital accumulation rather than human welfare, enforced through legal frameworks and captured regulatory bodies that make alternatives structurally difficult. See alternatives to centralised financial infrastructure →?

State actors

Central banks?	Central bank instruments systematically inflate asset prices while pushing the cost of inflation control onto wages and small businesses. Those who own capital get richer when the system is rescued — those who work for wages pay the price.
More to be added

Corporate actors

Lock-in?	Proprietary formats, integrated workflows, and accumulated data make leaving a platform so costly that 68% of small businesses who want to leave cannot. This is not market failure — it is the product, deliberately designed. See libre office alternatives →?
AT&T?	AT&T took a thriving open commons that had produced Unix, the transistor, and information theory, locked it behind proprietary licenses, and destroyed $2 billion in value and 20,000 engineer-years of productive work. The commons was not captured — it was annihilated. See libre operating system alternatives →?
Microsoft?	Microsoft's documented strategy was to adopt open standards, extend them with proprietary additions, then use market dominance to extinguish the open alternatives. What could not be bought was buried. See libre operating system alternatives →?
Oracle?	Oracle built a database empire on licensing traps so complex and punitive that organisations pay hundreds of millions rather than risk an audit. Governments and hospitals are locked in — not because Oracle is best, but because leaving is designed to be impossible. See libre database alternatives →?
Palantir?	Palantir has built what experts describe as the most expansive civilian surveillance infrastructure in US history, linking IRS, Social Security, and immigration records into a unified system for tracking people. Its CEO calls this the defining competitive advantage of nation states. See libre database alternatives →?
Palantir?	A 2024 partnership with Oracle consolidated the technical backbone for classified government workloads — cloud, data integration, and AI analytics — in the hands of two private corporations with no democratic accountability. See libre database alternatives →?
Apple?	Apple transformed open computing into a closed ecosystem where every app, payment, and software update passes through a single corporate gatekeeper that takes 30% and can remove you without appeal. Hardware is designed to become obsolete — replacement is the business model. See libre operating system alternatives →?
More to be added

Institutional actors

Cases to be added	IMF, World Bank, BIS, and other institutional actors whose frameworks shape financial infrastructure in ways that serve concentrated interests.

Media and information

Who controls the narrative controls the possible.

The concentration of media ownership and the algorithmic control of information distribution represent a form of power over political reality that has no historical precedent in scale or intimacy. The digital age has compounded traditional media concentration: the distribution layer is now controlled by an even smaller number of platforms, and the algorithmic layer that determines what content reaches whom is opaque, unaccountable, and optimised for engagement rather than accuracy or democratic health.

Corporate actors

Cases to be added	Media ownership concentration, algorithmic manipulation of information distribution, platform censorship, advertising model incentives that structurally favour outrage over accuracy.

State actors

Cases to be added	State-directed information control, censorship infrastructure, use of platform regulation as a mechanism of narrative control.

Health

Health data is among the most intimate and exploitable data that exists.

Medical records reveal financial stress, relationship problems, sexual behaviour, mental health, and political risk. The digitisation of health infrastructure has created vast concentrations of this data in the hands of state institutions and corporations whose interests are not aligned with patient welfare. See sovereign health data alternatives →?

State actors

Cases to be added	State health data misuse, surveillance through public health infrastructure, use of health emergencies to expand data collection powers.

Corporate actors

DeepMind?	Google obtained 1.6 million NHS patient records — including HIV status, drug overdoses, and abortion histories — without patient knowledge or consent. By the time the UK regulator ruled it illegal, the data was already inside Google's systems.
More to be added

Education

The capture of learning is the capture of the next generation.

Schools and universities are not neutral ground. The platforms through which children learn, the software through which teachers assess, and the infrastructure through which institutions operate are increasingly controlled by a small number of corporations — whose interest is not education but data accumulation, habit formation, and long-term platform dependency. See libre education alternatives →?

Corporate actors

Cases to be added	Google Classroom data collection practices, Microsoft dominance of institutional computing, corporate capture of educational infrastructure.

State actors

Cases to be added	State surveillance through educational platforms, mandatory platform adoption, use of educational data for purposes beyond education.

Labour and the individual

The workplace as a site of surveillance and algorithmic control.

The digitisation of work has enabled new forms of monitoring, control, and extraction that have no precedent in the history of labour. Gig economy platforms have restructured employment to eliminate legal protections while maintaining operational control. Workplace surveillance software monitors keystrokes, screens, and movement. Algorithmic management systems make decisions about hiring, scheduling, pay, and termination without human accountability. See alternatives to surveillant work infrastructure →?

Corporate actors

Cases to be added	Gig economy platform practices, workplace surveillance software, algorithmic hiring and firing systems, corporate extraction from labour through digital infrastructure.

Institutional actors

Cases to be added	Legal and institutional frameworks used to legitimise surveillance and control of workers.

Physical infrastructure and telecoms

Whoever owns the pipes owns the flow.

Digital infrastructure depends on physical infrastructure: cables, data centres, spectrum, and the hardware through which all software runs. The concentration of ownership of this physical layer — in the hands of a small number of telecommunications corporations and, increasingly, the hyperscale cloud providers — gives those owners structural power over everything that runs on top of it. See sovereign infrastructure alternatives →?

Corporate actors

Cases to be added	ISP monopolies and duopolies, submarine cable ownership concentration, data centre market power, hardware supply chain control.

State actors

Cases to be added	State control of physical network infrastructure, spectrum allocation as political tool, use of infrastructure dependency as geopolitical leverage.