Since that guy's Nazi salute, or apparent Nazi salute, people have been getting worked up on technofascist social networks to denounce technofascism. It's good to wake up in 2025, but the evil has been growing for years. Good news: we are equipped to fight it, if we want to. But is crying wolf among the wolves the best possible defense?
A preliminary observation. The more we centralize, the more power is placed in the hands of a few, creating a powerful oligarchy. In his fourteen common features of fascism, Umberto Eco didn't list centralization, but he could have, as it appears to me consubstantial with the development of fascism, which implies disproportionate power held by a minority, accompanied by a reduction in basic freedoms, starting with freedom of thought, which often goes hand in hand with brainwashing populations to ensure their passivity. When centralization increases, the chances of fascism occurring increase while counterbalances diminish. For example, centralization facilitates the spread of populist discourse, conspiracy theories, and other evils listed by Umberto Eco.
How did we get here?
∼1960. From its birth, the internet relied on a unicast protocol. Computers communicate one-to-one (each having their unique IP address). Today, when YouTube sends a video, it's transmitted to each connected computer (in practice, caches optimize traffic — but the network still favors centralized servers, hence the immense data centers). Centralized servers don't mean information always follows the same path between a server and recipient. The network is distributed enough for information to reach its target even if part of the network fails. In summary: whoever controls the servers controls the network.
∼1990. On this network, the web was invented, an overlay that simulates total decentralization. Pages point to one another without requiring a link database (as was imagined until then). Everyone started creating content and linking it. Personal websites exploded, followed by blogs. At the web scale, no one could censor anything (the network itself is easily censored since it remains unicast).
∼1995. Multicast protocols were invented, where information flows from machine to machine, each becoming both client and server for other clients. But multicast, or multicast simulations like P2P, were mainly used for music piracy, then movies and software. No industry player had an interest in its deployment (Olivier Auber explains that in a way it was already too late). They preferred creating immense data centers rather than decentralizing computing power and risking losing control.
∼2005. Google became so powerful, so dominant, that most of us went through it to find information. While before we used to surf, we started to google. We made Google the master of the web. Gradually, Google penalized links between sites, because this practice allowed for transversal, decentralized searches that competed with Google (the fight intensified from 2007 as Facebook opened to the public). "If you link your content to others, I'll make sure you're harder to find." This was the first death sentence for the blogosphere. An entire ecosystem of manually, humanly interconnected sites began to collapse, and algorithms started deciding what we read and find - algorithms owned by oligarchs who, whether we like it or not, and even whether they want to or not, manipulate us.
∼2010. The more Google broke down the blogosphere, the more it pushed internet users toward social networks where they found material for debate and places for expression. In parallel, the more traffic went through Google, the more expensive it became to be effectively referenced there, and the better powerful sites fared, especially social networks, until they no longer even needed Google. Blogs survived, but isolated. The web, initially decentralized, was recentralized by Google and social networks, giving disproportionate power to a few players.
Their goal is no longer to inform us or make us think, but to expose us to advertisements. Their only ambition: to keep us with them, like TV channels used to do, except that we produce our own content (our own channels). Brilliant idea! Everything aims to obliterate the internet outside social networks. The technique is simple: "If you post links to the outside, you'll be less visible." The same logic of penalizing competition as deployed by Google.
∼2025. The exponential development of AI requires immense data centers and increasingly extreme centralization. The oligarchs become so powerful that they start making politicians dance to their tune.
It would take a book to detail this drift and nuance it, but this sketch shows the link between a technical structure, unicast, and our gregarious behaviors, each maintaining the other like egg and oil in mayonnaise. We resemble insects attracted to light. We all want to be where it shines and thus give power to those who transform themselves into suns, at the risk of losing our heads and all forms of wisdom and restraint. There is indeed danger.
We are all responsible
We can only blame ourselves for this history, this trajectory that gives immeasurable power to a few, without real counterbalances, except regulatory ones. We are responsible for having abandoned free and independent information sites, for having given up pluralism, left blogs, neglected decentralized social networks like Mastodon. Rather than taking risks, than exploring the corners of the web, we find ourselves in spaces supposedly offering maximum audience. To seduce us, operators boast about some success stories, this or that influencer earning millions, forgetting to specify that most often we only talk to our close ones.
We could have acted differently, which is what I called for in my texts and books of the 2000s. We were armed to resist, to build another internet, but we yielded to a few stars promising visibility, glory, recognition. Yet all is not lost, far from it.
There still exists a world outside, beyond this web limited to social networks, where most people brainwash themselves. There are still independent sites, blogs, and, outside the web, books, films, meeting places, spaces where we can build society far from algorithmic control.
I am not publishing this article on a social network. I'm publishing it at home, on my site, at my address and elsewhere (I distribute it, decentralize it, I offer it free of rights and copying). I only announce it on networks, but I continue to point to the outside world, because only there can another internet be invented, another society be built.
Should we leave centralized social networks?
Apart from messages pointing outward and some comments, I have practically stopped feeding centralized social networks for years, because equity or democracy there is just smoke and mirrors. Few people who don't know me will discover this article on social networks: their algorithms have no interest in promoting critical voices that promote the outside world (they are clever enough to sometimes bend their rules to not appear too mean).
On social networks, without playing their game, we only reach those who think like us. All this is documented. We've been living in fascism for a long time, a perverse fascism that gives us the illusion of being free. The perversion goes far. Influencers, regardless of their level of fame, behave like emissaries of ultra-centralization. They no longer respond to comments. They speak from their pedestal, sure of their certainties. Sometimes they express outrage at the rise of fascism while collaborating with all their might by attracting more people to the suns of which they are merely servile satellites. Centralized social networks are mechanically fascist because they manufacture oligarchs and their minions. All centralized platforms are fascist-leaning.
During World War II, some French people left France to join the free forces, others joined the resistance, others kept quiet, or even collaborated. We've been at the same point for over ten years on the internet.
So we can leave centralized social networks to join the decentralized free forces or stay connected to the centers and choose resistance, silence, or collaboration. I have one foot on the side of free forces, another on the side of resistance. I stay on certain social networks to make people want to look elsewhere. I only drop bombs (a link has become a bomb on a social network — if you write content that doesn't require going elsewhere, you're a collaborator, you're inviting people to stay in the fascist fold, even when you denounce fascism).
I invite you to publish elsewhere, to invent something else, even if it's more complicated, but freedom that's too simple is often just an illusion. Freedom always has a cost. It's no accident that centralized platforms sell us simplicity at any price.
I'm primarily talking about social networks because that's where politics and most cultural life now play out. Whoever controls social networks controls power. We will only defend our freedoms by decentralizing these monsters. I open their belly with links to the outside. That's my way of resisting. Publishing an external link on a social network is an act of terrorism. The question is therefore not so much whether to stay or leave, but what to publish, and of course what to read.
And it's not just reading outside that matters, it's seeking other viewpoints, other styles, other narratives there. If you censor Amazon to buy the same books elsewhere, your boycott has little use. It's better to fight against Amazon by looking for the hidden gems there. The important thing is to escape the dictatorship that forces us to think in this or that way.
Fortunately, there are still blogs, decentralized networks like Mastodon, booksellers ready to help you read something different, courageous publishers, and independent media. The location of dissent isn't crucial as long as there is dissent with full awareness of what's at stake.
I invite you to plant digital bombs on social networks (a book cover is already a link — never forget that bookstores distributed across the territory are one of our best resources to fight against centralization).