Who Designs the Game Decides the Outcome: why network technology was never neutral (Part 3 of 5)

There is a moment, in any serious reflection on social networks, when the technological temptation reappears. It is the moment when one says: “the networks are like that, it is the nature of the thing”. Or its symmetrical reverse: “these technologies are inherently exploitative… extracting attention, data, and behavior is what they were built to do”. In either case, technology is ascribed a fixed nature that determines the social outcome.

I want to argue, in this third text of the series, that this ascription is wrong – and that it conceals the political operation that produced the current state of affairs. Social network technologies are not intrinsically anything. What we see today is the result of specific institutional choices, made by specific actors, in specific regulatory contexts. And what has been done can be undone or redone.

I have personal empirical evidence of this. In 2011, I was responsible for the creation and coordination of the social networks of the Government of the State of Ceará. I later worked for years in the Mayor’s Office of Fortaleza, with activity on projects such as the UNICEF Urban Centers Platform and the Secretariat for Conservation and Public Services. I was also responsible for the creation and coordination of FB Podcast, hosted at Colégio Farias Brito – a private secondary-school institution – which became notable as the first podcast studio in Brazil with free public access, dedicated to discussions in education, innovation, and entrepreneurship. I lived from the inside the phase in which it was possible to imagine social networks and digital infrastructure as instruments for participation, transparency, and dialogue between State, society, and citizen.

That imagination was not naïve; it was plausible and theorized. The networks could have become what they promised. They did not because specific choices were made elsewhere. It is this argument I want to develop, anchored in a literature that combines network sociology, political economy, and institutional design.

Castells: the network society as social fact, not technological destiny

It is not possible to discuss what the networks “could have been” without going through Manuel Castells. The trilogy The Information Age – The Rise of the Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1997), End of Millennium (1998) – is the most influential sociological reference of the last quarter-century on what the network has structurally changed in contemporary societies.

The central thesis is twofold. First, there is a change in the mode of development: industrial capitalism gave way to informational capitalism, in which productivity depends crucially on the capacity to generate, process, and apply information. Second, there is a change in the social form: the dominant social structure ceases to be hierarchical and becomes network-shaped – composed of nodes and flows, with an inclusion/exclusion logic that operates by being in or out of the network, no longer only by static class.

The political consequence, which Castells developed in later works – Communication Power (2009) and Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012) – is that the network is simultaneously a terrain of new forms of domination and of new forms of resistance. The movements of the Arab Spring, the Spanish 15M, Occupy, the June 2013 protests in Brazil, and more recently the 2019 Chilean uprising and the articulations of Brazilian indigenous movements are all comprehensible within Castells’s frame. The network was not destined for extraction; neither is it destined for liberation. It is contested terrain.

Castells’s argument lends sociological density to what I am saying: the current configuration of commercial social networks is not “what technology produces”. It is what a specific allocation of power produced over that technology, at a specific historical moment, with little organized contestation. And organized contests can change the outcome – as the very network-based social movements Castells documents show.

Power and Progress: technology is underdetermined

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson published in 2023 Power and Progress, a book that may be the most important recent economic contribution on the topic. The central thesis can be summarized in one sentence: the path a technology takes is not determined by the technology itself; it is determined by the allocation of power around it.

The authors make a brilliant historical reading. The same mechanical technology that could have benefited weavers in early-nineteenth-century England was used, given the prevailing relations of power, to displace them. The same electrification that could have shortened the working day was used, given the prevailing relations of power, to intensify it. The story is not “technology liberates” nor “technology enslaves”. It is: technology is malleable; organized power decides the form of the malleability.

Applied to social networks, the argument is disconcerting. The same network communication technology that enables global access to knowledge, horizontal political articulation, unprecedented cultural expression – and that produced real episodes of these, as Castells documented – was configured, given the property regime and regulatory environment of the early 2000s in the United States, as infrastructure for the extraction of behavioral surplus. In the precise sense Shoshana Zuboff gives in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019): our attention and our behavioral traces are the raw material of prediction products sold in secondary markets.

There was no inevitability in this. There was decision.

Who designs the sludge

Cass Sunstein, in the book that bears its name (Sludge, 2022), introduced a notion complementary to his famous “nudge”. If a nudge is institutional friction designed to facilitate desired behavior, sludge is friction designed to hinder it.

The important observation is that digital platforms are specialists in asymmetric sludge. It is trivially easy to post and like; it is deliberately hard to delete the account, disable notifications, opt out of the algorithmic feed, export your data. The interface is designed for low friction toward engagement and high friction toward exit. This asymmetry of frictions is not incidental. It is architecture – and architecture is choice.

If the equilibrium of mutual exhaustion I described in the previous text is sustained by this asymmetry of frictions, then redesigning the frictions is a legitimate instrument of public policy. The point is not to ban the networks; it is to invert the sludge – to require that exit be as easy as entry, that control be default, that data be portable, that opting out of personalization be one click.

This is part of what the Digital Services Act in Europe is trying to do, especially by requiring more transparency, expanding user control, and allowing users of large platforms to opt for non-personalized recommendations. Obligations of algorithmic transparency, restrictions on targeted advertising to minors, and the requirement of systemic-risk reports from very large platforms all point in that direction. It is one of the first serious attempts, on a democratic scale, to redesign the sludge of platforms.

Other experiments are underway. Australia approved in November 2024 a law that establishes a minimum age of 16 for accounts on certain social platforms, imposing on the companies the obligation to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16 accounts. Brazil has discussed for years the Fake News Bill (PL 2630/2020) in variants ranging from promising to problematic, depending on the wording. The United States debates Section 230, though with legislative paralysis that reflects the veto power of the platforms themselves. China, with its autocratic regulatory model, imposes screen-time restrictions on minors that would be inadmissible in democracies but that show, once again, that technology is malleable when regulatory power wants it to be.

The relevant academic question – and one that enters the research agenda this series sketches – is: which of these redesigns produces, empirically, a displacement of the equilibrium toward less exhausting states? Theory says it should work. Empirical evidence is being built. There is here a clear research opening in comparative policy evaluation with quantitative method.

Benkler, Schneider, and the other possible architecture

Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks (2006), had already described a possible alternative architecture: commons-based peer production. Wikipedia is the classic example: a non-market cooperative infrastructure produced in network, governed by collectively agreed rules, and in operation for more than twenty years.

More recently, Nathan Schneider in Governable Spaces (2024) and the literature on “platform cooperativism” explore models of democratic governance of platforms – digital cooperatives, collectively owned platforms, decentralized networks such as Mastodon (on the ActivityPub protocol) and Bluesky (on the AT Protocol). These are not utopian proposals; they are experiments in operation, with documentable successes and failures.

The point is not that these alternatives are fully realizable at global scale. It is that their existence proves that the current configuration is not the only possible one, and therefore the current configuration is a choice.

Back to Ceará in 2011

I rediscover here, in theorized form, what I lived as practice. In 2011, in Ceará, we were still using the networks in a “pre-engagement-optimized-by-algorithm phase”. The feed was chronological, incentives for the user were different, targeted advertising was at another stage of development, and, fundamentally, the marginal profit of the network did not yet depend so centrally on prolonged capture of attention. It was possible, in that design, to do public communication that answered questions, expanded transparency, and established reasonable dialogue with citizens. It was the environment in which the Cinturão Digital do Ceará – 3,000 km of fiber optic, 92% urban population coverage – made sense as a democratic project.

I am not nostalgic for the tools of 2011. They were more primitive in many respects. But the institutional configuration and business model of the platforms at that moment allowed a public use that became progressively more difficult. What changed was not the network technology in any fundamental sense… it was the choices of the platforms (and some squared head persons in my way) and the regulatory environment that permitted them.

This observation has particular weight for any public manager who lived through that transition: it is lived empirical proof of Acemoglu and Johnson’s argument, and direct resonance with Castells’s thesis. Technology is underdetermined. Its destiny is power allocation.

The political conclusion

There is a difficult but inescapable conclusion. If vitrinization is the result of architecture, and if architecture is choice, then vitrinization is a problem of public policy, not an individual or moral problem. To ask people to be less vain, more conscious, more resilient, is to ask them to assume individual costs to solve a systemic problem. It works as poorly as asking individuals to solve global warming by changing light bulbs.

Intervention has to be structural. And structural means institutional. It means redesigning incentives, frictions, metrics, data-ownership rules, governance models.

But there is an additional problem, which opens the topic of the next text. The very tools of analysis – including behavioral economics, game theory, and network sociology – are being transformed in real time by the emergence of generative AIs. AIs are not just one more object on the regulatory agenda. They are a new layer in the cognitive architecture we are trying to analyze – and one that changes what it means to analyze.

That is the topic of the next text.

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References

ACEMOGLU, D.; JOHNSON, S. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York: Public Affairs, 2023.

BENKLER, Y. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

CASTELLS, M. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. [The Information Age, vol. 1. First edition: 1996.]

CASTELLS, M. The Power of Identity. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. [The Information Age, vol. 2. First edition: 1997.]

CASTELLS, M. End of Millennium. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. [The Information Age, vol. 3. First edition: 1998.]

CASTELLS, M. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

CASTELLS, M. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

CASTRO, D. P. “Cinturão Digital do Ceará e as mídias digitais” [The Ceará Digital Belt and Digital Media]. Proceedings of Social Media Brasil 2011, Fecomercio, São Paulo, 2011.

SCHNEIDER, N. Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024.

SUNSTEIN, C. R. Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.

ZUBOFF, S. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.