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Socialising Digital Infrastructure Programs for post-capitalist platforms
Aline Blankertz nov 2026 · essay · issue 02
Vonovia own 471,000 housing units in Germany. Image: Public domain.

Can we even imagine digital infrastructures that serve our needs rather than serving capital? What could they look like? How could we make their existence a reality? These are not merely hypothetical questions for academic contemplation. Campaigns like Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (DWE) — Berlin’s attempt to expropriate real estate companies — show that bringing private property under collective ownership and democratic control is, today, a real and tangible option. In this article, I argue that in order to prevent Big Tech firms from further encroaching on our societies, we should take the prospect of socialising digital infrastructure seriously.

Until recently, platforms were seen as the defining form of digital capitalism. Endless scandals marked their rise. From A for Amazon: the retail platform which identifies popular items with high margins and offers copycat products, selectively incentivises the use of its own logistics firms to further cannibalise its service providers, and employs dystopian levels of workplace surveillance. To X for Twitter: the openly fascist billionaire Elon Musk has turned the already dysfunctional microblogging service into a cesspool of misinformation and deepfakes where his psychopathic views determine the limits of “free speech”. The list spans the alphabet: travel platform Booking.com controls the visibility of hotels, and the conditions under which rooms are offered, often favouring already highly visible international chains; food delivery platforms like Lieferando take a 20–30 per cent cut from restaurants while heavily exploiting their drivers; ridesharing platforms like Uber algorithmically manipulate both prices and wages, while systematically undermining the most basic of employment protections for their drivers. Add to that a long list of miscellaneous offences, including a consistent track record of using misleading, addictive interface designs, subverting regulations when collecting vast amounts of data, and tax evasion.

More recently, the public’s focus has shifted to the material foundations underpinning platforms and other digital services. What was said to scale cheaply turned out to have physical limits.1 Local servers no longer sufficed. Today, the public is increasingly aware that “immaterial” software structures like platforms rely on material infrastructures, made up of resource-intensive chips and vast networks of cables that require massive amounts of energy and water. Without such software, this infrastructure would not be needed. Just as cars and tanks historically configured our cities’ streets and bridges, today’s software systems necessitate a highly specific, rapidly expanding, and destructive form of material infrastructure designed to concentrate knowledge and power, extracting rent for its owners in a variety of ways.

The problem is not that companies in the USA or China or even “evil” individuals like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel own this infrastructural buildout, as the currently prevalent “sovereignty” discourse would tell us. Indeed, these infrastructures work exactly as intended under globalised, financialised capitalism. Their configuration simply follows from the imperative to maximise returns on investment. The crux of the problem is, rather, that these infrastructures are private property that follows the logics of capital instead of serving people’s needs.

The DWE campaign currently stands out for turning socialisation into a hugely popular policy option, in a European context where such politics have long been shunned. A combination of tenant organising and direct action against the largest real-estate companies had been underway since at least 2017, culminating in a 2021 referendum on whether to socialise real-estate companies that own three thousand or more rental units. Turnout was huge (at 73%), and the result was very clearly in favour of the proposal (at 59%).2 However, political parties from across the spectrum, including on the left, made excuses and raised obstacles to implementing the referendum’s core demands. Since then, campaigners have worked to draft an actual law, hoping to make it directly applicable through a second referendum. In July 2026, the German federal government made it clear that it is concerned about the campaign’s effect on investor confidence and plans to outlaw any sub-national socialisation efforts. Officials claimed that the project’s mere existence threatens future gains from real-estate speculation, thereby acknowledging the central tension at the heart of the matter: landlord profits stand in direct opposition to the tenant population’s interest in affordable housing.

DWE has made it clear that — far from being a fringe position — most of Berlin’s voters want real estate socialised. Moreover, the campaign has developed detailed positions on how companies can be compensated below market rates, and how democratic governance for socialised units might work, with bottom-up organised councils representing the interests of tenants as well as those of the city’s broader population.

The socialisation of private property does and should not, however, depend solely on legalistic avenues. It may not seem obvious, but the last few years have been rich with examples of housing occupations and rent strikes and of workers asserting control over the means of production. Take, for instance, the Italian factory GKN, another example of workers refusing to bow to the factory owner’s plans. Instead of accepting mass layoffs in 2021, they have been fighting to convert the plant from manufacturing car parts to producing components for sustainable public transport.3 Other recent initiatives for collective ownership include public-common partnerships with which pharmaceutical production is embedded within local communities in France, or UK council farms designed to facilitate experimentation with new agro-ecological approaches, and to provide long-term income for municipalities.4

Real estate and digital infrastructure are very different things to socialise. Housing units serve a clear purpose, irrespective of whether they are privately or publicly owned. Many questions arise when shifting from private to collective ownership, but the purpose of housing is never itself in doubt. Aligning with the public interest involves determining, for example, what a fair rent is, how to make housing environmentally sustainable, and how to balance the interests of current tenants with those of others wanting to move in. But digital infrastructures might not be as easily reprogrammable to serve collective needs, and it is not always straightforward to determine which parts serve real needs and which are superfluous.

Let’s start with an example of a platform that intermediates access to the service just discussed: housing. Immobilienscout24 is the leading German-language platform that is used for property search, application and tenant selection.5 Its parent company recently entered the stock index of the 40 most valuable companies listed in Germany, crowding out the luxury car manufacturer Porsche. Its 2026 profit margin of 60% dwarfs that of most Big Tech firms. Both landlords and tenants tend to despise Immobilienscout24: landlords and their agents complain about rising subscription costs, while tenants see it as another layer of complication, stress, and cost in a housing market that absorbs an ever-increasing share of their income. But this burden is not evenly distributed. Immobilienscout24 uses its leading market position and vast database to help landlords adjust and raise their rental prices, while pushing prospective tenants to give direct access to their banking, credit and employment data.

Instead of merely trying to contain its harms through increased regulation, collectivising Immobilienscout24 would open up the possibility of using its functionalities for the benefit of the tenant population. In fact, the group Redscout24 is currently working on a proposal for exactly that.6 Specifically, they are working with housing activists, software engineers, and policy-makers to engineer a politically feasible path to bring Immobilienscout’s capabilities under democratic control. A collectivised rental platform would collect from tenants only the data necessary for intermediation, while providing information about landlords, such as their history of rent increases or tenant satisfaction scores. Inspiration for how to do this can also come from existing projects, such as the “Know your landlord” initiative in Australia, or the platforms that mediate public housing in Vienna and Munich, which facilitate a matching process centred on tenants’ needs.7

Bringing digital platforms under democratic control must not end with local platforms like Immobilienscout24, although, from a practical perspective, it is easier to build political momentum to collectivise regionally limited quasi-monopolists. Other domains include, for example, platforms that provide medical services, such as Doctolib, or local ride services, such as FREENOW. Ultimately, collectivising international digital conglomerates might also be possible, but would require disentangling the different services within a parent company. It is conceivable to reprogram Google Maps to prioritise public transport and sustainable routing, Google Search to provide relevant results and Google DeepMind to undertake research that improves health outcomes across large parts of the population without reselling data to commercial third parties.

At the same time, there exist digital technologies that function as intended only under capitalist logics. For such technologies, it is more reasonable to adopt a strategy of attacking, abandoning, and unwinding than to try to alter their fundamental structure. This includes the dominant forms of so-called artificial intelligence, even though several prominent voices on the left have been advocating for various forms of publicly-owned AI.8 Most of these proposals, however, simply adopt ideas pushed by AI firms, naively accepting their claims about their systems’ capacities. Consequently, they also end up disregarding the technology’s tendency to reinforce existing patterns, which, when applied in social contexts, concentrates power and increases inequality, and does not afford accountability for decision-making, due to its highly parameterised, stochastic, and black-box nature. These features render AI as it exists today incompatible with the values a democratic society would aspire to.

Which other digital technologies can be appropriated to serve the public interest is an open question. Many social media platforms, for instance, would likely require a fundamental overhaul to rid them of addictive design features, and of their tendency to stimulate virality through emotional polarisation and reinforce sexist, racist, ableist and other unhealthy social norms. Data centres could be governed more democratically, but could they exist without significant environmental destruction? Many open questions remain, but enough is clear to start subverting the capitalist status quo and reclaim the fundamental one: how do we want to live as a society?

Notes

  1. 1. In reality, “scaling cheaply” was a result of the dotcom boom having led to an overbuilding of technical infrastructure that could accommodate subsequent growth in connectivity and compute.

  2. 2. “Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen”, Wikipedia. See also: Adam Taylor, “Berlin voters asked the city to tackle rising rents. The plan is a long shot, but the message is powerful”, The Washington Post, 29 September 2021.

  3. 3. Lorenzo Feltrin, “Ex GKN Florence: The Factory Collective Relaunches their Popular Shareholding Campaign”, Notes from Below, 16 January 2026.

  4. 4. “Food Sovereignty Through Council Farms”, Abundance; “Pharmaceutical Production in Common”, Abundance. See: https://www.in-abundance.org/case-studies

  5. 5. Peta Wolifson, Sophia Maalsen, Dallas Rogers, “Discrimination in the time of digital real estate: Illustrating a rental schema in the Australian setting”, Digital Geography and Society, Volume 6, 2024.

  6. 6. For more on Redscout24, see: https://redscout24.de/. The author is a member of this group.

  7. 7. Sophie Maalsen, “Digital activism in housing struggles: Countering algorithmic violence with algorithmic care”, Human Geography, 2026.

  8. 8. Bernie Sanders, Proposal for an American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, 22 May 2026.