Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosystems.

The internet was supposed to liberate us. Instead, it’s left us feeling helpless, waiting for billionaires, governments, and tech giants to save us.

The most insidious thing about Big Tech’s takeover of the internet isn’t the concentration of power—it’s how it’s trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords.

Every week brings a new chorus of voices demanding that [insert tech giant] must “do better” or that [insert government agency] needs to “crack down” or that [insert billionaire] should swoop in to save us. We’ve become digital peasants, petitioning various lords and kings to please, please fix the internet for us.

This learned helplessness isn’t just pathetic—it’s exactly what the tech giants want. The more we believe we need them to solve our problems, the more power they accumulate.

For a generation now, too many people have grown accustomed to the idea that the internet is just four big companies and a few others on the periphery, rather than its original promise of something that empowered users to control their own experiences.

And while I’ve been largely critical of the larger “techlash” narrative, it’s mainly because most of the “solutions” people were presenting were taking us further and further away from the world that the original internet promised us.

Almost every proposed solution I’ve seen to the “techlash” has been to effectively give the very same tech companies more power, but along with a demand that they somehow wave a magic wand and “fix” the big problems (which often represent larger societal issues).

This mindset has left us with what many believe to be only three possible saviors: the government with its regulatory power, the companies themselves under public pressure, or some “benevolent” billionaire riding in to take control. As Renee DiResta aptly described in a recent article, this reduces all attempts at change to “working the refs”—hoping that if we yell loud enough at these powers-that-be, they’ll grant us the changes we want.

But that seems like a horrible way to handle governance issues, and one that really isn’t just unsustainable, but deeply disempowering to users. We need a world in which users themselves are empowered to create and enable the actual changes they want to see.

Want to see this learned helplessness in action? When Elon Musk (whose supporters celebrated his Twitter takeover as their billionaire savior) started attacking Wikipedia, the response from some was predictable: “We need a friendly billionaire to protect Wikipedia!”

The irony here is staggering. Wikipedia—perhaps the internet’s greatest example of user empowerment and collaborative creation—supposedly needs a billionaire guardian angel? This is exactly the kind of learned helplessness that’s poisoning our relationship with the internet. Instead of recognizing that Wikipedia’s strength comes from its community and distributed governance model, people instinctively reach for another top-down savior.

Think about just how fucked up that is.

The whole promise of the internet (and, arguably the promise of democracy) was that it was supposed to be about devolving power to the people at the ends of the network, rather than centralized authoritarian control.

We should be able to “save us” rather than demanding that some authority do it for us.

This is why I originally wrote my “Protocols Not Platforms” paper, as an attempt to remind people that the whole point of the internet was to put the power back in the hands of users over the large entities.

Because I feared that this opportunity was rapidly slipping away. If we grant the premise that the only way to deal with harms or problems online is to give more power and more control to large centralized entities, and policy changes are driven by who can “work the refs” the best, we end up locking ourselves in to that world that deprives individuals of their own agency, and greatly empowers authoritarian control.

And even if that authoritarian control may be benevolent now, that can change in a heartbeat. That’s true of companies and billionaires (often effectively the same thing) but also is true of passing all this off on government regulations (which, these days, is increasingly also looking like a representative of company and billionaire interests anyway).

Let’s be clear: smart regulation has its place. We desperately need CFAA reform, actual privacy protections, and an overhaul of our broken patent system. We need reforms that allow companies to focus more on just investors’ short-term goals for growth. But there’s a crucial distinction between regulations that empower users and those that simply deputize Big Tech as government-approved gatekeepers.

Look at how most “tech regulation” plays out in reality: complex compliance requirements that only the biggest players can afford to implement. Mandatory filtering systems that only the giants have the resources to build. Content moderation rules that entrench existing platforms while blocking new entrants. Theatrical but ineffective privacy laws that simply require large companies to collect more data, and are impossible for smaller players to follow. The end result? A cozy government-corporate partnership that leaves users more powerless than ever.

We all saw the tech oligarchs lined up behind Donald Trump at the inauguration. Any plan that involves having any of them “saving” or “fixing” the internet is not going to lead to good results. It’s just going to lead to more power for the powerful, and less for the rest of us.

Instead, we need to look for more ways for users to empower themselves and to get out of this state of learned helplessness and demanding some more powerful entity “fix” everything that goes wrong.

I’m obviously biased, but this is where I think that projects like Bluesky and the ATprotocol are so important. It (in part) came out of my paper which was all about empowering the user, but I’ve been seeing an unfortunate set of demands from users again focusing on the same learned helplessness. They don’t like a particular company decision, which is an understandable position to take, but rather than making use of the affordances of the system to help deal with that problem, they demand that some centralized authority must come in and fix it for them.

There are certain categories of harms for which there needs to be some element of top-down enforcement, but people have become so accustomed to relying on such top-down enforcement for everything that they sometimes seem unwilling to consider that maybe they can take care of some of these problems themselves.

That includes embracing and using these kinds of decentralized tools that give more power to the end-users (and which are technologically resistant to takeovers from evil billionaires). But we need to do more to surface those affordances and powers to end users.

It’s no surprise that the “working the refs” approach to seeking change is so prevalent. For most people, that was really the only option for seeking change from these internet giants who really had a form of extreme power and control over the systems and their users.

But it’s important for users to recognize that it doesn’t need to be this way, and that a new generation of tools and services can be (and are being) built that allows them to have much more control and say over their own data, their own experience, and their own environment.

Here’s where projects like Bluesky come in. Yes, at first glance, it looks like just another Twitter clone. But that’s just there to make users comfortable using it. Beneath that familiar surface lies something revolutionary: actual user control. Want strict moderation of health misinformation but a lighter touch on political speech? Done. Prefer to delegate content filtering to specific communities or experts you trust? That’s built in. The interface feels familiar, but the power dynamics are completely different.

And that’s just the beginning. As the platform matures, users can take even more control by self-hosting their own Personal Data Servers (PDS) or connecting through independent relays (not yet there but coming soon). This isn’t just tweaking settings within a corporate walled garden—it’s genuine digital sovereignty.

Will every user want this level of control? Of course not. But the point is that it’s possible, it’s built into the system’s DNA, and it creates an escape hatch from corporate control that simply doesn’t exist on traditional platforms.

These are all things that are coming and will be possible, but it’s going to be important for these options to be not just available but easy to understand and use. User empowerment is a different kind of muscle for users, that many will need to learn about (or relearn about), and help will be needed along the way.

But it’s also another reason why embracing platforms like Bluesky and the underlying ATprotocol are so important (and yes, this also applies to things like ActivityPub, and other decentralized alternatives like nostr or Farcaster). It’s setting ourselves up for greater empowerment and control over our own digital lives, rather than having to rely on “working the refs” in government, in companies, or among a small group of billionaire oligarchs. We can’t expect any of those three to “save us” from poor decisions.

We need to stop waiting for saviors and start saving the internet ourselves.