Every Despot Needs A Chokepoint

from the get-rid-of-the-chokepoints-and… dept

In January 2011, a man in Tahrir Square held up a handwritten sign that read “Facebook: against every unjust.” Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Same exact platform. Radically different relationship to power.

That contrast is the starting point for a piece I’ve spent the last month working on, published yesterday at Liberalism.org, exploring the intersection of decentralization and democracy: Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet. It tries to explain how the internet technology we were told would liberate us is now being used as part of an authoritarian crackdown on rights and freedoms — and, more importantly, why that outcome was arguably built into the architecture from the start.

The key argument builds on Cory Doctorow’s encapsulation of how centralized systems get enshittified — big companies take control of chokepoints to extract ever-greater value from users — but extends it to show how those same chokepoints become targets for political manipulation as well. It also makes the case that infrastructure choices are far from neutral — they shape the incentives that determine who ends up with power:

What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful.

By 2025, everyone had figured it out.

This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentrate power or that distribute it. It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes. And once you’ve built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing.

That’s the Doctorow half of the argument — enshittification, the corporate extraction playbook. But the piece extends it into territory Doctorow didn’t name: despotification, the political analog, where the same chokepoints that enable corporate extraction also enable authoritarian control:

The problem of centralized systems is that they create an irresistible temptation to control and exploit. Users who found value early on feel stuck: they can leave, but doing so means abandoning their community. That lack of easy exit creates lock-in, and lock-in enables enshittification.

And the same chokepoints that let companies extract value also let governments extract power. Those seeking control hunt up and down the network stack for leverage, and centralized providers concentrate it.

Call this despotification: the political analog of enshittification, where the same chokepoints get exploited to extract compliance from platforms—and ultimately to gain control over what people can say and hear.

The temptation of those in power to twist the knobs to their liking became irresistible. This took many forms: X downranking posts with links to external sites, Amazon choosing which products to show you as the promoted results, Instagram choosing which content deserves to be sent to you as a reminder notification, Substack choosing which newsletters to suggest to you. Each of these choices can be tweaked in ways that enable greater usage, engagement, and revenue, and not necessarily in the interests of the users.

But the piece doesn’t just diagnose the problem — it argues that none of this is inevitable. The same way democracy requires active defense, so does a genuinely decentralized internet:

Decentralization, like democracy itself, is something we have to fight for. Absent deliberate effort, the default trajectory runs toward centralization, because centralization is convenient, and convenience wins in the short term.

Which means the decentralized alternatives have to be genuinely better, not just philosophically purer. The centralized platforms won the last round because they removed friction. They didn’t ask users to manage config files or understand network topology—they said “click here and it works,” and most people took that deal. Any decentralized successor that requires users to become their own sysadmins will lose the same way the last generation of open protocols lost.

What’s different now is that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to having decentralized systems that are actually more convenient and more empowering, where the user experience is competitive with the centralized incumbents, and the democratic benefits come built in rather than bolted on. The goal is to build systems where those two things point in the same direction.

There’s a lot more in the full piece, including a section on how this same chokepoint logic is already being embedded into the infrastructure of whatever comes next — and why the architectural decisions being made right now will matter as much as anything that happened with social media.

Filed Under: centralization, chokepoints, decentralization, democracy, despotification, enshittification