Now we hear the chainsaws revving as private equity’s playbook of mass firings, squeezing users, and aggressively monetizing the product starts to play out. I’ll argue that Komoot is neither a moral failure nor an outlier but the capitalist system of value extraction working exactly as intended for the platform owners. For-profit corporations squeeze and sell us out when we give them the opportunity. Corporations we depend on are swallowed all the time.
For corporations, it’s always profits over people. In financial capitalism, companies themselves become commodities. This pits owners against the people who build the platform in the pursuit of shareholder value. To capital, the corporation is a vehicle for profit; the platform is their plantation. Capitalists see our forests only for their timber value, and they wield the power to impose their limited view on us. Private equity’s business model lies in squeezing the maximum amount of profit from the company until it dies and then throwing it away.
Capital generates profits and user base growth, accumulating ever more capital on digital platforms through algorithms that harvest user data. To boost engagement and capture groups of users, capital co-opts our human instinct to connect with one another and contribute to a “community” and sells it back to us. As corporations—bureaucratic entities—cannot create value themselves, they instead lure us, social beings, with promises of “community.” In contributing to a corporate “community,” we’re providing free digital labor toward proprietary, engagement-driving features that expand the user base for the profit of the owners. In fact, we suckers even pay for the privilege. Betrayed, we see this “community” for what it is: a mirage.
Capital forcibly converts our public commons into its private property in a process called enclosure, commodifying our work. Enclosure by private interests interrupts the fundamental reciprocity of the commons, eroding its abundance over time.
The corporation is always a vehicle for generating profit and capital accumulation, always in conflict with the interests of the user base.
We begin to see that the next corporate platform courting our favor is nothing but another trap. We cannot outfox organized capital with our individual choices. Underneath the marketing veneer and despite the best intentions of employees and possibly some owners, all corporate platforms are just different profit-seeking vehicles of capital. Corporations cannot be our friends or part of our community as they indifferently co-opt, enclose, and extract from our commons until there’s nothing left.
Yet the clear-cut also contains the seeds of the next old-growth community. At this moment, a rewilding of the internet is occurring in many places. A decentralized movement toward open, cooperative platforms that support real community, rather than zero-sum corporate walled gardens. Promising projects such as the Mastodon social network, Matrix chat, and Pixelfed social photo sharing are reviving the diversity and abundance of the early, independent internet before it was enclosed by tech giants in the 2010s. More than singular platforms, the Fediverse represents a growing ecosystem of open protocols and distributed services that guarantee freedom of movement for users and data and push back against capitalist enclosure—a diverse and resilient digital commons.