#Abolitionist #creativity. How #intellectualProperty can #hack #digitalpower. Corporations’ wealth is increasingly built on intangible intellectual property (#IP) rights rather than hard #assets. What if we could hack these #legal and #economic codes that underpin #capitalism so that they are based on #humanrights, worker s#olidarity, ecological #sustainability and community wealth building? https://www.tni.org/en/article/abolitionist-creativity

#DigitalPower #Oligopolies #GAFAM #Antitrust #Surveillance #Privacy #DataProtection: "As Tom Eastman, a software developer in New Zealand, has observed: the Web has devolved into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. A small number of extremely powerful firms, namely Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, have what the European regulators call gatekeeper power – the right to decide who can speak, who can reach one another, how it works. This is a marked departure from the early ethos that birthed these firms, which was characterised by the idea that the internet would be a new kind of network where anyone who wanted to speak to anyone could do so without any third party intervening. We now have any number of ‘chokepoints’ in which speech or similar activities like fundraising can be controlled by one of a very small number of firms.

And it's important to note that the reason those firms were allowed to grow as large as they have, the reason that state regulators turned such a blind eye, is because states view those firms as potential deputies for their own exercises of power. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the US National Security Agency (NSA) could have gotten regulatory authority or convinced us to carry beacons that broadcast our location all over the world. By allowing firms to do that, by failing to step in and demand regulation, the US government has accomplished a future in which the NSA doesn't need to wiretap us all. It can just ask Facebook or Google or Apple for information that it couldn’t otherwise reach. And so this really needs to be understood as a public–private partnership."

https://www.tni.org/en/article/seizing-the-means-of-computation