The marketplace is not the town square

The platforms that now dominate our online lives did not seize power through villainy. They grew dominant by doing something genuinely useful. Google looked at the link structure of the web — the collective editorial judgement of millions of people — and turned it into search results that actually worked. That was the magic of the PageRank algorithm. Facebook read the social graph and surfaced the connections and content you cared about. In each case, the platform observed the behaviour of everyone, extracted a signal that no individual could have computed alone, and fed it back as a better service.

That was real value. We should be honest about that.

But what happened next is the problem. Having discovered that social signals were not only useful but extraordinarily profitable, the platforms made a fateful choice. They fed those signals back in the ways that maximised shareholder returns — not in the ways that maximised public value in the forms of greater understanding, more social cohesion, or healthier democratic life. The social signal, which belonged to all of us collectively, became private property. The architecture of the internet calcified around that choice.

The result is a cyberspace in which commerce is no longer one of the things that happens in human society. It has become the organising principle of human society in cyberspace. The data flows that characterise the dot-com world are now so deeply embedded that they are almost impossible to avoid. Even "free" software libraries routinely contain tracking code. Public institutions — the NHS, the BBC, local councils — publish through commercial platforms they do not control, using systems designed not for public service but for surveillance and advertising. The very infrastructure through which we conduct civic life is optimised for extraction.

This matters more than we tend to acknowledge. Commerce is an entirely legitimate domain of human activity. But it is a domain in which we are not "all in it together". In the marketplace, we are all, ultimately and potentially, apart from each other — as potential competitors, as buyers and sellers manoeuvring for advantage. That is fine. Markets work. But to make the marketplace the organising space of all social interaction leads somewhere dark: to suspicion, to paranoia, to the conspiracy thinking that now saturates online life, to the bone-deep exhaustion of living in an environment where every interaction might be a transaction and every piece of information might be an advertisement. It is a space in which there is no room for the attempt to create common understanding or build a shared world. It creates, we might say, a state of alienation.

It is perfectly fine to decide to enter the marketplace. But entering a marketplace presupposes that it exists within a larger space that is not the marketplace — a space of shared facts, trusted institutions, and relationships not mediated by profit. When that surrounding space collapses, the marketplace itself becomes ungoverned and undermining of society.

Cyberspace — and the societies within which it lives — now needs to be repaired from this damage. And for me, the solution has two parts.

The first is dotPublic — a new layer of internet infrastructure where public values are built into the architecture itself, not merely written into policy documents that no-one enforces. DotPublic will provide a top-level domain under which participating institutions must operate according to enforceable civic standards. It will not be a platform competing for attention. It will be the digital equivalent of what public service broadcasting was to radio: an architectural guarantee that some part of the information environment serves the public, not the advertiser.

The second part of the solution is data unions — civil society institutions that represent our individual and collective interests in the stewardship of our data. A good cyberspace needs mechanisms by which social signals remain social, held in individual or collective control rather than captured for private extraction. Data unions are those mechanisms. The First International Data Union (FIDU), which I founded, exists to steward members' data with an absolute duty of loyalty to them — not to shareholders, not to advertisers, not to its own growth. It aggregates the social signals that make an ecosystem intelligent and feeds them back as a commons, not as a proprietary moat.

These two pieces come together naturally. DotPublic gets the macro architecture right — the civic space within which the marketplace can exist without consuming everything around it. Data unions get the micro architecture right — ensuring that the social intelligence generated by our collective behaviour serves us, under our control, according to our values. One builds the town square. The other makes sure the town square's intelligence belongs to the town.

That is why, as the founder of FIDU, I am enormously pleased to also support dotPublic. Together, they represent something the internet has needed for thirty years: the infrastructure of a public life that does not depend on the grace of companies whose interests are structurally opposed to our own.

The marketplace is not the town square. It is time we built the town square and used it for its proper purpose — to create a shared reality.