Imlisanen Jamir
A government orders the mobile network switched off within a few kilometres of a protest site, and within the hour an entire district has gone dark, unable to call ambulances, send money, or tell relatives elsewhere that they are safe. The order works because the network was built to allow it, a small number of chokepoints through which all traffic passes and which a single administrative signature can close. Nobody designed the modern internet to give states this kind of switch. It happened because the internet was built around centralized points of control, and a government turned out to be one more actor capable of reaching them.
This is worth separating from the more common argument that technology companies or the states regulating them are authoritarian by temperament. That argument invites an easy rebuttal, since most platform executives would insist, probably sincerely, that they believe in open information, and most elected governments would insist the same about themselves. The more durable claim is structural. Centralized servers, opaque recommendation algorithms, and data flowing one way toward whoever owns the platform were built for commercial reasons, to sell advertising more precisely and keep users engaged, and the resulting architecture happens to suit authoritarian capture well, by states, by platforms, or by both moving together.
Surveillance capitalism describes the business model that made this profitable, converting attention and behavior into data that can be sold. Algorithmic curation describes the mechanism that makes the model effective, deciding what a person sees and, by extension, what they come to treat as normal. Neither term requires a villain. A recommendation system optimized to maximize engagement will reliably amplify outrage over deliberation, not because anyone at the company wants a less thoughtful public, but because outrage performs better against the metric the system was told to maximize. The outcome resembles what an authoritarian state would want from its media environment, a public more reactive than reflective, though no authoritarian state had to ask for it.
The same default explains why a shutdown order and a platform's content moderation decision sit closer together than they first appear. Both rest on a handful of decision points that a very large number of people depend on and have no formal say over. A state exercises this power through the network's chokepoints. A platform exercises something close to the same power through its terms of service and its recommendation system, deciding without appeal what counts as misinformation or who keeps an audience. One is state power exploiting a commercial default. The other is commercial power exercising something close to state authority, and they meet in the same architecture.
None of this requires believing digital technology could not have been built differently, or that some future version will not be. It requires only noticing that the version now in wide use was built around convenience for the builder rather than accountability to the used, and that this default has made democratic erosion easier to execute than it would otherwise have been. A public square built for advertising turns out to make a functional instrument of control, and it will keep doing so for as long as the architecture stays the same, regardless of who stands at the switch.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
