We're not sure that any entity, public or private, should have the centralized power over public life that social media platforms and app stores do.

If the conclusion winds up being that that power should exist it, there needs to be a great deal of thought about the proper way to govern it.

However, while it does exist, it should be used for good. Banning the asshole-in-chief was long overdue.

We've spent literally years chewing on this question, because it's important. That's not enough, though. Tech people - including ourselves - can't simply decide in a vacuum what's good for a world. The public is a stakeholder.

That means there needs to be a public conversation about the centralized power of the tech industry, and what's to become of it.

We're one step closer, today, to everyone understanding the stakes well enough to have an informed opinion.

Just making sure this important point is linked on the thread. https://twitter.com/shauna_gm/status/1347693133614764034

See, the thing is, when centralized power exists, that basically invites absolutely everybody to fight over who controls it.

We've met people who, coming from a small-government perspective, are ideologically attached to the idea that private corporations are the proper entities to wield this kind of power. In our youth, we even believed that ourselves!

We want to take a moment to address that, because, although it should be obvious that we and much of our audience are leftists, we think a broader consensus is possible on this topic and we'd like to try for it.

The reality is that if a private corporation has a power, the government also, immediately has that same power. Look at how often data stored on cloud-computing systems is subpoenaed, or vacuumed up in bulk by intelligence agencies.

Anyone who believes that governments should not have high-tech surveillance and censorship powers, must also accept the reality that private corporations can't have those powers either.

We're left with the conclusion that power of this kind SHOULD NOT BE CENTRALIZED. Technical capabilities such as social media should be built in ways that are decentralized, and designed such that they can STAY decentralized.

The only way to not have constant fights over who controls it, is if nobody can ever control it.

We don't want to get deep into practical questions about what that means. We believe that reasonable answers exist, but right now we just wanted to make the high level point.

For a few years, we wanted the answer to be something along the lines of the Facebook Oversight Board - a non-profit entity with a governance structure that places it outside both capitalism and the surveillance state. That was a naive idea.

We'd been exposed to that idea through private talks, before it was publicly announced. The reality did not live up to our conception of it. It is neither sufficiently independent, nor does it have sufficient authority.

Through our work at Tech Inquiry we've come to understand more about the mechanisms by which billionaires keep control of supposedly-independent organizations, and we're pessimistic that anything like the Oversight Board could *ever* be enough.

Decentralization is the answer. That's our conclusion.

Through discussion, we realized we should be explicit that we do NOT consider the Oversight Board approach to be an example of decentralization.

It's centralization, just with a pseudo-democratic structure rather than the purely top-down structure that most for-profit corporations have.