It isn’t news that there are serious problems with the digital spaces that many of us engage with daily as we work, play, interact, and generally try to stay alive. But it might be less evident that we’re living through an important juncture in digitized capitalism — one where the future of many of these platforms is currently being contested and rewritten.

The discourse around major international technology companies seems to have shifted hugely in the past five or six years. The growth of app-based, locally tied services for grocery delivery, transportation, care work, and other forms of labor has been accompanied by growing levels of worker militancy in many cities. This has led to new transnational coalitions in the effort to improve the wages, benefits, and general working conditions of platform workers.

The decisions made by corporately controlled social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram — or, more accurately, the sprawling, invisible bureaucracies that they have developed in an effort to placate advertisers and combat illegal behavior online — are increasingly met with protest by their users. They are also perceived as unsatisfying and problematic on both the Left and Right (albeit for different reasons). The situation has apparently become so dire that even Elon Musk has seen it fit to descend from his unholy perch in an effort to save the day.