Platformocracy is one year old! Here’s what’s coming next (including song lyrics and maybe some code)

Welcome to the Platformocracy first anniversary party! This week, reflections and looking forward. Next week, I summarize my argument for democracy online, so your friends don’t have to catch up on fifty posts to get the gist. After that, new things.

A year ago, I had recently left my role as founding director of the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. I am proud of the team I put together and the work they’ve done, but as a job, it wasn’t what I (or, I suspect, the BKC leadership) had hoped it would be. 

I was enjoying extra time to walk the dog and cook dinner for my family, but I can’t go that long without a project to work on. Even the laziest lion (they sleep 15-20 hours/day) eventually needs to pick themselves up and go chase down a zebra.

Enter the classic refuge of the former tech executive — a newsletter!

Besides the people, the best thing about my brief stint in academia was being encouraged to share my own ideas. After 30 years inside the tech industry machine, I barely knew what my ideas were, because corporate America expects employees to self-censor their public comments constantly on the basis of “Is This Good for the COMPANY?”

[More on this to come in August, when my second Summer Field Trip will share a little of what I saw of big-tech corporate culture, at Google and elsewhere. I know you love these stories, because my most-shared issue was December’s Inside my battles with Google Trust & Safety.]

All I knew for sure was that the Internet I fell in love with back in 1990 was getting more dystopian every day. Cory Doctorow crystallized this when he coined enshittification at the end of 2022. In an act of staggering arrogance, I wanted to try to help fix it.

This fit with my professional career, where I tended to run toward fires, pulling off several turnarounds over the years. Writing up my thoughts every week was a way to think through the problem and look for solutions I thought would make a difference. And with luck, doing it in public might even change some minds.

Thus, Platformocracy was born on June 3, 2025, with What is the Platformocracy? followed a few days later with Bluesky trust and safety is too important to be left to Bluesky.

So, 50 posts later, how are we doing?

It’s been a good year.

I finally know what I am here to say: Internet platforms have become our unelected governments. They should be subject to the laws of the communities they serve, not the will of their owners. More on this next week.

I’ve been lucky to build this audience. Thank you all for being here, giving me feedback, sharing my work on your social media, and challenging me when I deserve it.

I’ve gotten to meet outstanding people, both online and in real life, working hard to change the Internet for the better. I plan to introduce you to them this year with more regular bonus Q&A issues like the first two (from Scott Spencer and Ganesh Shankar).

I’ve gotten to speak with smart hosts on several podcasts, and even gave a special lecture on the Platformocracy at Columbia Business School. If you are host of a podcast or event and think I’d be an interesting guest speaker, I would be happy to talk to you about it, just email [email protected].

And I’ve gotten to collaborate with some great artists on cover images - thanks to Chaos_Theory, Iulian Thomas, Sonja Hutchinson, and Puka Muriska.

So yeah, it’s been a good year.

While I deeply appreciate every one of you who read this, I would like to build a bigger audience in year two. My year one target was to get to 500 subscribers, and while I am growing steadily, I’m still just under 400. I don’t know whether that’s because I am not doing enough self-promotion, or if I’m just turning out to be a very niche taste. 

To reach more people, I’m going to try to connect more of my writing to what’s happening in tech governance now. My most popular pieces with new audiences have been hot takes on breaking news, especially every time I yell at egregiously confrontational Meta PR VP Andy Stone (November, January, May). I ran a news round-up as an experiment in April, and will keep adjusting that format to see if it can be useful as a regular feature.

I am also acutely aware that I am still barely scratching the surface of technology and political science topics that experts have spent decades on. I need to keep reading and learning, so you can expect to see more Explainers in the year to come.

It can be hard to get tech people to pay attention when you’re just writing, and not actually building anything. Probably the only thing I agree with Marc Zuckerberg on is that code wins arguments. So, as well as writing, I am going to try to build demos that show my ideas for online democracy actually work, and even try to integrate them with open source social media tools (I’m looking at you, Coop and Ozone). This is going to be rough. I haven’t written significant amounts of code in a couple of decades. Nonetheless, look out for (hopefully) some eventual launch announcements.

Thanks again to all of you who’ve signed up over the past year, whether you were here at the beginning or just started reading last week. I hope you’ll find year two worthwhile. Please let your friends and colleagues know about this newsletter, and write to me at [email protected] with what you’d like to read about in the year to come.