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FOSS Contra Big Tech Contestation beyond critique
FT may 2026 · essay
Konstantin Yuon, "New Planet". The State Tretyakov Gallery.

Taking on Big Tech is a phrase we hear ad nauseam in politics nowadays, but rarely with specificity. To “take on” is deliberately vague verbiage: it gestures to the existence of a conflict between the interests of “tech oligarchs” and “everyday people”. Anything beyond that is left open to interpretation.

Those on the right take it to mean that content moderators are wrapped up in a larger cultural conspiracy to subvert society away from their preferred moral values. Liberals employ a paternalistic reading, framing digital activity as something that needs to be tightly regulated and tracked to safeguard the social order. Some on the left, meanwhile, philosophise about the dehumanising effects of technology and the ways in which it breaks down organic social communities.

All these responses offer moral narratives, but none of them provides an adequate anatomy of an actual conflict. When we speak of wars, strikes, or any other clash of real import, we do so with an extreme level of concreteness. Historians are able to make sense of these in the language of actors, strategies, resources, timelines and outcomes. To be in conflict means to take seriously the real, constant possibilities of winning and losing at every step. This cannot be captured purely within the language of discourses, solidarities, and tactics. Taken on its own terms, conflict is a fundamentally strategic exercise.

As labour historian John Womack puts it, a strategic perspective requires calculating “the most probable powers and fields of the forces in conflict for the period you intend to fight […] what you can win or lose […] what you most want to win […] what you have to win, and what you cannot risk losing”.1 In other words, conflict requires its actors to take a live situation, break down its terrain, and gamble on a response. The language is concerned less with “good” versus “bad”, and more with strengths versus weaknesses, “cans” versus “cannots”. Scenarios may lack clear precedent, and analysing them incorrectly carries real stakes. The answers one comes to could cease to be relevant ten years from now as the situation evolves. Conflict does not stop at criticism — an actor has to apply their analysis.

It isn’t hard to find critiques of the tech industry nowadays. Headlines are full of thinkpieces, ideological profiles, and industry horse-race coverage — zooming in on the ideologies of billionaires, and on what happens at companies behind the curtain.2 But this kind of analysis tends to be focused more on sensationalism than on anything informative or applicable.

But even more sophisticated tech-critics, who are skilled at identifying and delineating problems, fail to provide solutions that extend beyond the liberal state. Cory Doctorow can devote multiple chapters of his book to chronicling how the emergence of the modern tech industry dovetailed with the suppression of organised labour, but when pressed on how to fight back, he falls back on calls for regulation.3 His weapons of choice to “keep the market fair” are antitrust legislation and the goodwill of bureaucrats.4 Lawrence Lessig can recognise how intellectual property is designed to promote rent-seeking and stifle creativity, but his response is to funnel grassroots energy into “getting money out of politics” so we can pass legislation.

The conflict these critics describe is not one between lawmakers and the market. They explicitly lay out how it is a conflict between the agents of capital and working people. The role of the state — which depends on economic growth for both legitimacy and tax revenue — is to mediate the struggle, rather than aid it. The same European Commission that passed the GDPR is now actively pushing to gut it in the name of tapping into AI-driven growth.5 Even where the state recognises industry as a threat, it pushes policies that protect its own objectives of basic law enforcement — age verification, chat control, domain-blocking — over the interests of users.6

The kinds of reforms that progressive-minded activists propose are often some of the hardest to push through legislatively, because they tend to run up against deep-seated realities of the modern economy. Lessig, for instance, wants to significantly slash copyright terms, but modern economies are extremely dependent on IP revenue.7 Doctorow’s emphasis on union power hinges on an incredibly rosy picture of the current state of organised labour and overlooks genuine grassroots advances, such as worker-to-worker organising models, in favour of overstating the role of “non-corrupt judges” and “good union leaders”.8

Any serious response to the current moment needs to reflect a systemic awareness of the conflict over technology. It must emerge from the actions of those with the most skin in the game and not bet its entire house on external circumstances spontaneously changing. If we wish to hone in on the internet as a specific front (as Lessig and Doctorow do), then we need to start our analysis from those who directly interface with software: developers, users, and digital-native communities.

To this end, it is worth reflecting on the free and open-source software movement (FOSS) to find seeds of a radical break. At its core, FOSS is a culture of commons-based peer production which has, in a very practical manner, challenged long-held notions around property and production.9 The people involved in forming the culture did not start it as a socialist experiment, but accidentally discovered it through their work. They saw for themselves how collaborative, non-exploitative work structures were built and constructed their ideological frameworks out of that experience.

Working in this way opened up genuinely new horizons that were not anchored in abstract political principles. While this allowed a certain degree of creative freedom, difficulties arose as these communities evolved into a movement lacking clear political grounding. FOSS activists tended to take for granted an implicit consensus on values and political orientation among community members. But in reality, this was far from the case. Richard Stallman, for example, believed that solving software was just a matter of appealing to civic virtue, whereas Eric S. Raymond was more inclined to put his hopes in the “invisible hand of the free market”.10 Explicitly socialist currents did exist within the community at the time, but they were either mostly concentrated among certain pockets of the rank-and-file or folded into more broadly anarchist political projects.11

Despite the real grassroots enthusiasm behind them, these movements were gradually subsumed over the course of the 2010s. They had underestimated the radicality of what they were proposing and were ill-prepared for both a market and a state that declared war against them. To meaningfully fight back, they needed a better understanding of how the industry functions and what it was up to.

Silicon Valley’s mode of production is capitalism, not “techno-feudalism”, as a subset of tech critics today would have it.12 The tech sector, as we know it today, emerged as the load-bearing pillar to an economy reeling from the aftermath of the Great Recession.13 Where the housing crisis had dried up much of Wall Street’s growth, the relatively insulated tech sector swooped in to pick up the pieces. Tech provided a safe offramp for all the talent, capital, and political goodwill that had been burned in the ‘08 crisis.14

Historically, when faced with moments of stagnation, capitalism would often recover its growth by tapping into the periphery — underdeveloped areas which provide access to new markets, resources, and cheaper labour.15 As Kohei Saito points out, there are strong parallels between this process and the commercialisation of digital space.16

As a result, the FOSS communities that inhabited the internet came to have a rather ambivalent relationship to the market. The rapid growth of tech startups depended on the wealth of free resources and labour that these communities provided. Yet, business held a genuine contempt for the culture of free and open sharing within them, actively and aggressively employing enclosure and flattening tactics, such as embrace-extend-extinguish and open-washing,17 to subsume FOSS and swiftly neuter any opposition.18 Given time, this process was refined into a formula.

Capitalism depends on continuous growth; an industry cannot sustain itself on one-time miracles. There needs to be a constant flow of new iPhones, Uber services, and new Amazon products to keep consumer demand rising. Tech executives and investors thus need strategies to keep reliably churning out The Next Big Thing. This is where venture capital comes in. Investors pool their money into a fund managed by industry “experts” who employ aggressive investment strategies optimised for high-risk, high-reward bets. They achieve this by exploiting power laws within the market — a disproportionate share of growth across a market empirically tends to be concentrated within a small handful of firms.19

Knowing this fact tells you a lot about where to place your bets. Focus on sectors with the highest potential growth ceilings, such as startups developing cutting-edge tech. Double or triple down on startups that show promise of becoming a “golden goose”; cull the rest. Break up funding into “rounds” so you can set expectations for founders to match an exponential growth curve throughout the entire cycle. Prioritise a firm’s potential for monopoly: properly competitive markets are, after all, a race to the bottom, with competition thinning your margins. But companies that are eventually capable of “escaping competition” can indefinitely squeeze their customers for all they are worth.

To this end, it is encouraged to run a startup “fat” — operating in the red for years in service of capturing market share down the line.20 Uber famously did this, burning through $25 billion in investment and selling taxi services at a rate impossible for the rest of the market to compete with; eventually locking in customers, cutting costs, hiking up prices to pull themselves back in the black.21 For platforms, there is a double lock-in at play, since they connect buyers to sellers.22 They are not just monopolies but also monopsonies, controlling the flow of an entire market. That is the reality of how these businesses work. The VC narrative stresses how “innovative” and “one-of-a-kind” their products or services are. The fact is, however, that the desired lock-in effect cannot occur in a truly free market. As Peter Thiel is happy to admit, two factors essential to a successful business are proprietary technology and network effects, which depend heavily on intellectual property and anti-circumvention legislation.

Thiel’s airport book advances the thesis that capitalism and competition are intrinsically opposed. But the sleight of hand lies in the implicit assumption that eliminating competition is equivalent to building organic value. Yet one look at the tech sector demonstrates that monopoly-building — through acquisitions, loss-leading, or outright illegal collusion — speaks far more to a firm’s ability to freely deploy capital than to anything related to the value of what they make or sell.23 This is also why it is not helpful to spend too much time picking apart the ideological theories that emerge from this space, which repackage the same Silicon Valley tropes on how an optimal society is one that is run by venture capitalists continuing to do the things they already do.24 This is why this Investing 101 textbook keeps getting dredged up over and over again when VCs propose solutions to a range of social issues, from prediction markets to science funding. Venture capital is self-referential: it reflects not just the strategy for accumulating short-term power but also the end goal. The rent-seeking slaughterhouse comes to define the contours of the internet, which, in turn, is expected to serve as a model for society writ large.

But do the basic assumptions behind the venture capital model actually hold up to reality? Even on its own terms, this model of economic success has only proven itself within narrowly artificial constraints. Being one of the “greats” of the early/mid-2010s meant benefiting from low interest rates, a frothy investment market, and a wealth of technological commons ready to be exploited.25 TV-over-internet, taxis-over-internet, pawnshops-over-internet, books-over-internet: none of these ever represented a true “zero to one” in the bigger picture.26 There may have been a good deal of ingenuity behind some of the designs; they may have “revolutionised” a product category, but they mostly involved taking newly commercialisable infrastructure and figuring out how to apply it to a pre-existing industry. This is engineering, not black magic, and it is a far cry from wielding the ability to regularly conjure generational leaps out of thin air. Yet, that is exactly the myth upon which the industry’s growth curves hinge.

VC does best in bull markets, when investors have the surplus to take on higher risk in pursuit of higher rewards. But the internet can only be tapped for so long. When growth inevitably begins to slow, the sector is forced to start gambling on increasingly dubious bets — the metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now GenAI — with higher and higher stakes and hazier and hazier practical applications.27 There is a constant deferral of risk in favour of short-term gains, as an increasing share of the money flowing through investment markets is based on speculative rather than tangible value. Those involved in these markets have a vested interest in ensuring the speculative value of their assets remains pumped up.28 Therefore, the social and intellectual networks VCs rely on become viral incubators for runaway speculation. In addition to burning credibility, these hype-cycles surrounding the “newest big thing” create a fundamentally delusional culture, one where there are strong disincentives to rain on the parade.

Silicon Valley runs on ahistoricity. It has a terrible habit of ascribing eternal significance to phenomena derived from about twenty years of business history. This is exacerbated by the highly isolated intellectual and mentorship networks — such as MIRI or YCombinator — that feed into its professional networks. Within these spaces, effective governance becomes analogised to business management, and public opinion to crowd effects. Democratic institutions become a competitive market for political influence, while the terms that refer to today’s entrepreneurs — like “founder” — are retroactively applied to any noteworthy historical figure.

This inability of those in the industry to objectively reflect on their own situation is a real weakness, especially when things stop working. The obstacles that the Silicon Valley playbook accounts for are political and financial. Material obstacles, such as a technology’s supply chain and the ability to sustain it, remain an afterthought. The dominant business model of locking in and squeezing customers produces cyclical and recurrent crises, as platforms begin to undermine their own stability. The market tries to correct for this by creating new platforms and product categories to serve the same degraded function (see: ChatGPT replacing Google). In the process, it opens itself up to newer, harder-to-manage risks, as technological complexity balloons out of control. Monopolised networks often add fuel to the fire, since they provide less redundancy in times of failure. For example, Amazon’s push towards AI-driven development has led to multiple widespread outages for many AWS customers, forcing full-on rollbacks.29

This breakdown of network effects is amplified in the case of social media platforms. The very same engagement-driven design baked into these apps to maximise advertising revenue also serves as a highly optimised carrier of propaganda. The small share of users who post an overwhelming majority of content is also the most attuned to platform-level changes. When enshittification begins, these same users are the most likely to hijack the network’s own channels to voice opposition. This is a pattern we have seen with the Reddit API blackouts, and the various user revolts since Twitter’s acquisition.30 But ultimately, the passivity instilled by tech platforms in their users creates a sense of learned helplessness, leading to moral panics whenever the industry’s breakdowns ripple outwards. The opacity these companies cultivated around technology bleeds into political discourse, as the state finds itself under increasing pressure to pass sweeping, haphazard legislation. The industry is incapable of providing satisfactory answers to the public because it does not understand the nature of the crisis. Rather than admit the intractable causes of its slowed growth, its agents scapegoat those they see as the representatives of the regulatory state — “decels”, “village”, “luddites”, the list of epithets goes on. What was originally a set of issues confined to a narrow industry becomes a fundamental political deadlock.

One of the main findings of the Marxist tradition was how capitalism produces recurrent, destabilising crises that ripple out in a highly indirect fashion.31 These crises are a real, intractable weakness that socialist movements throughout history have seized upon to bring about change. Crisis itself does not guarantee collapse, however, nor can it bring about change on its own. Capitalist systems have a remarkable capacity to limp along and prop themselves back up, relying on the efforts of regular members of society whose survival is threatened.32 But what crises do offer are moments of reflection, where we are forced to recognise, on both a political and practical level, that the systems we have do not work. What we see going on in the tech sector is no exception to this rule. The recurrent crises plaguing the industry are a direct consequence of its core assumptions regarding property and value.

To meaningfully take advantage of capitalist crisis, a movement must be able to challenge the present system on both political and material levels. On the discursive level, too, the root of the crisis has to be demystified and vocally disseminated, and further expansionism by big tech opposed. But by itself, this is not sufficient. To prove the genuine possibility of an alternative requires real experimentation and practice in the present. Thus, in moments of acute danger like today, the goal should not be to simply force a change in policy or government. Neither should it be to simply stir animosity against the “oligarchs” or to promote a broadly oppositional stance towards the corporate world. Instead, we must use the turmoil as a springboard to begin concretely transforming the economic and social structures we are caught up in. Thus, if the crises facing tech are caused by top-heavy strategies that prioritise rapid short-term growth, then the counter is to develop systems geared towards the long term: bottom-up, stable, and low-overhead. If the industry’s inability to manage crises stems from alienation from the material underpinnings of a technology, then taking advantage of that starts with recentering those very underpinnings.

The real subversive potential of FOSS communities against big tech lies not in critique, but in their ability to directly challenge the industry’s model on economic and material grounds. This starts with a recognition of the artificiality of the digital space’s boundaries, treating intellectual property law and Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes as arbitrary red lines around what is otherwise just ones and zeroes, and thus avoiding the trap of essentialising what is imposed from outside as a property of the technology itself.

Indeed, hacker culture is built on poking holes in precisely these structural barriers. DRM can be cracked, blocks can be circumvented, devices can be homebrewed, and where software is developed, it need not meet the intended design. There is a rejection of the producer-consumer dichotomy that underpins the commodity market into which capital tries to assimilate technology. Users are encouraged to fork and contribute to projects, to learn as they set up and fix their own systems, and to strengthen their networks through self-hosting. A new definition of ownership becomes pervasive: one centred on what we use and depend on, rather than on abstract legal or financial status.

Remix culture can produce innovation without having to rent-seek for intellectual property. Commons-based peer-production models have led to the rapid development of complex systems such as Linux without requiring large up-front capital infusions or full-time wage labour.33 Old systems and solutions do not need to be constantly rendered obsolete or “revamped”. Indeed, classic UNIX principles stressed simplicity, reusability, focusedness, and longevity of the designs it produced.34 And all of this comes together to create a culture in which the primary purpose of technology is direct use rather than marketability, and where there is a broad understanding of everything that goes into a product, from the codebase to the production and maintenance processes.

Having this perspective is vital because it helps us make sense of the under-the-hood nuances of technology that fall squarely within Silicon Valley’s blind spot. By considering each input and step of the production process on its own terms, rather than flattening them into dollar valuations, we can delineate strategic categories more precisely.35 Thinking outside the purely financialised logics of Silicon Valley allows us to reframe many of the “lessons” often taken as conventional wisdom, and to creatively appropriate some of the industry’s strategies for ourselves. It demonstrates that power laws apply beyond startup growth trajectories. Indeed, a small percentage of servers frequently handle the majority of online traffic, and a handful of developers often contribute the majority of code to a project. Network effects apply to the GNU General Public License, too — using it for several key pieces of early software virally bolstered its popularity. Even non-commercial projects greatly benefit from building up strong, formalised professional networks and talent pipelines.

However, open-source theorists often overstate the extent to which the organic advantages of hacker culture can bring about change on their own. The big difference between the early days of Linux and now is that there is no longer a singular “holy grail” of free software. Back then, a fully free operating system was a clearly defined goal that many from across the space could coalesce around. Now that so much of our computing is done on mobile devices and web apps, the landscape is severely fragmented. Perhaps, back then, the problem was that FOSS communities lacked the political consciousness necessary to recognise their strategic position and to connect it to a broader context and a theory of economic warfare. Nowadays, we deal with the reverse problem — growing political awareness with little strategic application.

The FOSS space today is littered with a litany of local groups, projects, and teams, all working towards roughly common goals with relatively little coordination or overlap. This has real consequences: it is incredibly difficult for projects, conferences, and community groups to find support without courting corporate sponsors. Whether the average community-driven project lives or dies often depends entirely upon the passion of a handful of isolated individuals. Even the best-supported projects, such as Wikipedia, face a shrinking pool of contributors as people become less and less tech-literate.36 Effective education and coordination, therefore, remain the primary issues facing FOSS communities right now. Maintaining the overall health of the space will depend on organisations capable of consciously filling in the gaps — directing limited resources in a targeted fashion according to a long-term strategic plan.

One would expect established advocacy groups such as the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative to carry out such a task, but in reality, they are ill-equipped and internally resistant to change. Structured as advocacy nonprofits, they often burn resources on advertising and direct-conversion efforts and incur substantial financial overhead to carry out basic administrative functions. It is thus necessary to break from the nonprofit model in favour of new models of organising. Here, financial and material constraints must be part of our basic calculus; we must find ways to design structures that are capable of running lean. This can put pressure on the FOSS community to evolve in ways that favour long-term resilience rather than trying to match corporate spending blitzes.

Power laws can be applied in reverse. Targeting a handful of enthusiasts, activists, and developers can have outsized effects at a fraction of the cost. Software adoption cycles occur in a concentric fashion — the recommendations of a small core of enthusiasts funnel outwards through a series of adjacent audiences.37 The best advertisements often do not come from billboards or endorsements, but from the regularity with which the competition blunders and alienates its users. This is most evident when you look at the perpetual waves of exodus to Linux and the Fediverse: factors beyond their control produced name recognition that money could not have.

The real hurdle to adoption comes when people try the suggested FOSS offerings for themselves.38 If a project is unprepared for a new wave of interest, it can quickly get overwhelmed and waste a valuable opportunity. This is why, instead of trying to reach audiences directly, it is a better use of resources to build structures that improve these projects, such as hosting infrastructure, targeted code contributions, content networks, and onboarding processes to ease the transition for new users.39 These are all relatively low-cost tasks that an ad hoc, small-scale volunteer network could solve with some creativity.

Taken alone, these are individual tactics, but the greatest impact comes from performing them collectively. You don’t need a fully funded nonprofit for this, but you do need a group able to link theory and practice, such as a tightly-knit network of local, in-person chapters that can provide a pipeline for a small group of passionate enthusiasts to “get involved” in supporting the community at large.40 Through this pipeline, you can begin to instil a set of collective ethos and habits, encouraging members to recognise and adapt to constraints. You can start with education, explaining the anatomy and dynamics underpinning both the tech industry and FOSS communities, then move into application, shining a spotlight on various niches within the FOSS space and their potential, and finally get these groups involved in taking action to support FOSS infrastructure.

In the end, it all comes back to building strong collective habits, because those habits trickle down to the rest of the community in the long term. It was not that long ago that kids reading Wikipedia fell down the rabbit holes of editing it. The game jams hosted by projects such as Godot have resulted in a flourishing of its community and ecosystem — and a culture of respect for free software among game developers. The same industry that has drilled the concepts of non-fungible tokens and large language models into public consciousness will try to tell you that people are too technically illiterate to accept an internet of open protocols. Don’t accept their terms — that is the only way to win.

Notes

  1. John Womack, Working Power over Production, 2006. [^]

  2. For example, see: Jay Stephens, “Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Worldview”, Programmable Mutter, 11 September 2025. [^]

  3. Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, 2025. [^]

  4. Cory Doctorow, Enshittification, 2025. [^]

  5. Christoph Schmon and Karen Gullo, “EU’s New Digital Package Proposal Promises Red Tape Cuts, Guts GDPR Privacy Rights”, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 4 December 2025. [^]

  6. Often, these state functions are outsourced to private contractors. Palantir’s main customer is the government — both parties benefit immensely from rampant data collection. [^]

  7. Lawrence Lessig and Russell Roberts, “An Interview with Lawrence Lessig on Copyrights”, Library of Economics and Liberty, 7 April 2003. IP-heavy industries accounted for 41% of U.S. economic activity in 2019; see: USPTO, “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Third Edition”, March 2022. [^]

  8. Doctorow’s historiography of the American labour movement is extremely reductive. He chalks up union decline entirely to right-wing governments and bad leaders, neglecting the real intractable factors of deindustrialisation and a changing global economy. He points to rising public support for labour and the election of Shawn Fain as proof of resurgence, even though union density still has not meaningfully increased. A sympathetic NLRB can, in reality, only do so much. Doctorow lambasts union leadership for waiting on external circumstances to change rather than recognising their own agency and developing new strategies to meet the changing labour landscape. This is ironic, since it is not unlike how his strategy requires the entire political landscape to realign around progressive values first. Additionally — while labour is an important component of a larger political movement — unions, socialist organisations, and mutual-aid networks often have blindspots around tech. The DSA, despite calling on their members to “wash their hands of data harvesting”, failed for the longest time to take seriously the threat of storing member records in plaintext on Google Drive. See: Cory Doctorow, Enshittification; Hamilton Nolan, “Labor Movement, Attack!”, How Things Work, 18 February 2026; Democratic Socialists of America, “Washing Our Hands of Data Harvesting”; DSA Tech, “Google Drive & Google Groups for Chapters”. [^]

  9. P2P Foundation Wiki, “Commons-Based Peer Production”. [^]

  10. Richard Stallman, “Avoiding Ruinous Compromises”, GNU Project, 2008; Eric S. Raymond, “The Magic Cauldron”, USENIX ALS, 1999. [^]

  11. Over the past decade, the far-left bloc has substantially increased its influence, but this has yet to materialise into serious or large-scale FOSS institution-building that is meaningfully informed by socialist analysis. [^]

  12. Cédric Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy, 2025; Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2024. [^]

  13. This means, for instance, that the sector directly or indirectly now employs around 28 percent of the American workforce. See: Mark Muro and Siddharth Kulkarni, “America’s Advanced Industries: New Trends”, Brookings Institution, 4 August 2016. [^]

  14. Brian Roberts and Michael Wolf, “High-Tech Industries: An Analysis of Employment, Wages, and Output”, Beyond the Numbers, Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2018; Nathaniel Meyersohn, “After the Crisis, Silicon Valley Overtook Wall Street as the Place to Be”, CNN Business, 7 June 2018. [^]

  15. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, 2020. [^]

  16. Kohei Saito, Slow Down, 2024. [^]

  17. The phrase “embrace, extend, extinguish” originates from the 2001 anti-trust case against Microsoft, in which internal memos coined this prhase for their strategy of undermining open competitors. They would embrace an open standard when trying to break into a market, slowly begin appending proprietary features to drive a wedge, and once their market share grew large enough completely drop support for said open standard. See: Larry Salibra, “The Death of Jabber”, 9 August 2019; Jeff Eaton, “The Openwashing of Everything”, 2013. [^]

  18. Early web entrepreneur Andrew Keen compared the advent of free-culture to communism in an infamous 2006 essay. See: Andrew Keen, “Web 2.0: The Second Generation of the Internet Has Arrived. It’s Worse Than You Think”, The Weekly Standard, 15 February 2006. [^]

  19. Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, 2014, p. 77. [^]

  20. Ben Horowitz, “The Case for the Fat Startup”, Andreessen Horowitz, 17 March 2010. [^]

  21. Andrew J. Hawkins, “Uber ends the year in the black for the first time ever”, The Verge, 8 February 2024. [^]

  22. Cory Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok: Or How, Exactly, Platforms Die”, Wired, 23 January 2023. [^]

  23. Richard Waters and Kiran Stacey, “Google Accused of Colluding with Facebook in Online Ad Market”, Financial Times, 16 December 2020; “Instagram Cofounder on Mark Zuckerberg”, Internal Tech Emails, 25 June 2023. [^]

  24. The Thiel Network literally structures two of its longest-running political projects (Rockbridge Network and 1789 Capital) as venture capital firms which primarily fund media outlets. Thiel’s other investments (NatCon, PirateWires, Quillette, Rumble, Inference) also focus on monopolising small niches of media and intellectual figures. Andreessen-Horowitz’s lobbying campaign started by leveraging cryptocurrency as a wedge to wider tech deregulation. Wendy Siegelman, “Chart and Overview of Key Links for J.D. Vance with Mentor Peter Thiel, the Little-Known Rockbridge Network and 2016 Kingmaker Rebekah Mercer”, NewsTRACS, 29 July 2024; Alexandra Ulmer and Joseph Tanfani, “Trump-Linked Venture Fund 1789 Capital Tops $1 Billion in Assets”, Reuters, 8 September 2025; Charlie Tyson, “The Talented Mr. Thiel”, The Baffler, 20 September 2021; Adam Becker, “Junk Science or the Real Thing? ‘Inference’ Publishes Both”, Undark, 28 January 2019. [^]

  25. Ed Zitron, “The Rot-Com Bubble”, Where’s Your Ed At, 3 June 2024. [^]

  26. Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One, 2014. [^]

  27. Ed Zitron, “The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble”, Where’s Your Ed At, 21 July 2025. [^]

  28. Ed Zitron, “How Venture Capital Tries and Fails to Rewrite Reality”, Where’s Your Ed At, 6 December 2021. [^]

  29. Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, “Entirely Foreseeable AWS Outages”, Songs on the Security of Networks, 22 February 2026. [^]

  30. Morgan Sung, “Thousands of Subreddits Go Dark to Protest Reddit’s API Pricing”, TechCrunch, 12 June 2023; “Twitter Backtracks on Block Feature After Users Revolt”, CBS News, 13 December 2013. [^]

  31. Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, 2012 [^]

  32. Chuang, Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China, 2021, [^]

  33. Eric S. Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Knowledge, Technology & Policy, no. 3, 1999. [^]

  34. Eric S. Raymond, “Basics of the Unix Philosophy”. In The Art of Unix Programming, 2003. [^]

  35. For example, there’s an important difference between infrastructural and application-level software (i.e. Apache vs. Mastodon). The dynamics behind their production, use, and position in the stack create different conditions for both, determining how effective they are as chokepoints and which development models can support them. The industry struggles to even coherently define infrastructure. See: Ed Zitron, “How to Argue with an AI Booster”, Where’s Your Ed At, 25 August 2025. [^]

  36. Aaron Halfaker, R. Stuart Geiger, Jonathan T. Morgan, and John Riedl, “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its Decline”, American Behavioral Scientist, no. 5, 2013. [^]

  37. Audiences are not a monolith but can be sorted into niches based on adjacency and size. For example, the pool of PC gamers is larger than that of Linux users, but the culture and practices surrounding the hobby tend to make them good early targets for recruitment — big enough to expand the current base, but sympathetic enough to be won over with relative ease. [^]

  38. Relatively frictionless products such as Blender, OBS, or Krita often face much smoother adoption curves. [^]

  39. “Software Guilds: A Model for FOSS Mobilization”, Not the Solution, 26 May 2023. [^]

  40. Efforts in this space have been made by, for example, the B40 Caucus. [^]