Surveillance capitalism needs a centralized social graph. Bluesky built it. Bluesky is Facebook wrapped in the language of revolution. It is the product of think tanks, an anti-privacy technocrat, and *the* techno-libertarian manifesto of the new social web. But Bluesky doesn't gain 30 million users without the very much anti-libertarian crowd known as the late-stage Twitter liberal. We can be sure the story Bluesky Inc. tells their users is not the same story they tell the venture capitalists pouring millions into their business. They know exactly how they'll make their fortune if and when we adopt their technology. The fact that CEO Jay Graber is pretending not to have a business model, should raise eyebrows. It's the oldest trick in the book, to pretend that they're not here for the money; to play the part of our liberators— the warriors fighting the platform oligarchy. Technocrats are obsessed with the Hero's Journey. Mark Zuckerberg positioned Facebook as the private option compared to News Corp-owned MySpace, even as he was scrapping MySpace user data to poach users. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI tells us his pitch to investors is to not expect a return on their money; that OpenAI is for the betterment of humanity, even while ChatGPT gobbles up our deepest secrets, and turns AI into another digital mall. And Jay Graber, CEO of the "Public Good Corporation" Bluesky, says she is here to save the Internet. Which, if history is any indication, almost centrally means the opposite. But we're not in those venture capitalists meetings. We don't know Bluesky's profit motives. But if we glance at the short history of the web, we discover there's just one thing left to loot. A centralized social graph—what we buy on one website, what we share on another, our friends on platform A, our enemies on platform B, our steps on our Apple Watches, our blood results from the doctors office—remains elusive without a standardized protocol to bring it all together. It turns out, you can't get there by becoming the largest social media platform on the planet. Facebook's Open Graph proves you can get close, hodgepodging data points with permissionless APIs, but it's far from an elegant solution. No one ever *needed* Facebook Login for their apps to work. After Cambridge Analytica, when we learned Facebook's true intentions with its suite of open APIs, those like buttons and login features all but disappeared. To centralized the social graph, you need more than adoption, you need a widespread dependency epidemic. The open social web is not a revolution, because decentralized social media is not a dissemination of power and influence. Instead, what next-gen social media networks like BlueSky offer is a redistribution of accountability while maintaining the centralized power structures of the platform era. You can't get in trouble for leaking private data if privacy no longer exists. Decentralized social media, as interpreted by Bluesky Inc. is a dissemination of accountability away from the corporation and towards the user. It is also, paradoxically, the *centralization* of the most valuable speck of gold left in surveillance capitalism, the last piece of the ad tech puzzle— the social graph. What Bluesky hopes to achieve will eliminate any hope that we, Internet citizens will ever gain control over our data. The fact that tech influencers are claiming the opposite leads me to believe that they are aware of the implications of a unified social graph. Congressional hearings over moderation—either too much or not enough— becomes less salacious when users are responsible for their own moderation. Jack Dorsey, who has been sued multiple times over poor privacy practices, and has attended several congressional hearings, saw Bluesky as a way to have his cake and eat it too. Bluesky owner and CEO Jay Graber deviated efrom Dorsey's vision, implementing *some* central moderation, and *some* privacy, enough that Dorsey left the project. But the core philosophy remains— redistributed accountability over personal data and the moderation of its users, minus what we actually need— self determination over the manner in which our data is collected, sold, and ultimately leveraged against us by corporate and political powers. Claiming decentralization when you're striving for centralization, proclaiming control over data when we in fact lose control, is an old Steve Jobs sales trick. You lean into the weakest aspect of your product by simply claiming the opposite. The very first thing Steve Jobs said about the first iPad was it was a dream to type on. It wasn't of course. In the years after Cambridge Analytica, techno-libertarians have worked hard to reframe the social media problem toward a matter of free speech and away from user privacy rights. No one piece of propaganda has made such an impact as Mike Masnick's Protocols Not Platforms. It's *the* techno-libertarian manifesto of the twenty first century. The irony is that no one has fallen for this propaganda harder than late-stage Twitter liberals—a group who can only see the world in a good vs. evil dichotomy. If Twitter are the bad guys then Bluesky *must* be the good guys. It's Disney-brain. So they all migrated to Bluesky in the hopes of dodging billionaire funded social media. A Can you imagine the outcry if, right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, a social media network launched with an open firehouse of our social graph? All of our comments, likes, shares, friends, and foes (blocks) available in an open firehose API for anyone with a bucket to scoop? The same aggregated user data that Steve Bannon used to create psychological profiles on users to feed them disinformation. Eight years ago, we'd be marching in the streets against that social media company. Today, not a single news outlet, pundit, or tech influencer seems to remember how close Facebook got to toppling our democracy. Bluesky's firehouse is just Facebook's Social Graph wrapped in the language of revolution. The term decentralization, as mentioned in tech-savvy circles, carries a historical connotation of building something new from the ash. It hints at a redistribution of power and equity without ever having to deal in actual revolution. Real revolution means breaking free from the power structures that oppress us. And that's what we need—real revolution; not a marketing gimmick. It was *after* the French Revolution, that French libertarians went to work decentralizing the power structures held by the monarchy. In the 1820s, the term "décentralisation" was popularized in both Frech and American lexicons as a result of these efforts. Concepts of federation and democratization also have strong ties to the era. So when techno-libertarians offer *decentralized social media* as the atonement for the sins of Web 2.0, we reasonably assume a redistribution of power away from the platform oligarchs, and towards the people has, or will soon occur. Decentralizing anything before that occurs does us no good. But, of course, no digital revolution has occurred. We have yet to topple a single power structure. It would be like if Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake,” and then the French Libertarians went straight to work on a plan to redistribute all the baguettes. Those efforts don't make sense without someone’s metaphorical head on a platter first. The act of decentralizing systems while our kings still wear their crowns can only mean the monarchy will adapt and, if necessary, offer small concessions. They will still maintain their power over us. Put another way, how can we have this brave new social web with all the same old people? To be sure, the decentralized social media concept, popularized by thinktanks and open web evangelists, is a response to our general and growing distain for corporations like Meta, that prove profits come before even the baseline wellbeing of its users. Popular federated platforms like Mastodon has not shied away from contrasting itself from Meta. But the decentralized concepts described in manifestos like Protocols, Not Platforms by Mike Masnick, or the expression of those concepts by corporations like BlueSky, won’t liberate us from the oligarchs of 2.0. Like all solutions embraced by those who wield power, the open social web is concession disguised as revolution. Centralization vs Decentralization is a false dichotomy. It’s a way to frame our problems towards a solution that maintains the same ol’ power structures of social media. It's wholesale propaganda shoveled into the web by the same people who told us Web 2.0 would change the world for the better. So before we rush into the implementation of the solution, perhaps we should examine whether the problem was correctly identified. And we should scrutinize those who decided for us which problems are worth solving and which they can leave on the cutting room floor. --- After the Cambridge Analytica scandal we learned that our behavioral data accumulated on social media are the building blocks for creating exposing psychological profiles. And those profiles can, and have been, weaponized against us. If past dealings are the best predictor of future behavior, then our digital footprints are more than fossils. In the aggregate, they are oracles. Our history of likes, shares, and posts The lie they've sold us is that behavioral data is for discovering our likes and dislikes, so that they may provide relevancy to our social media feeds. But, Big Data doesn't identify what we like, it pushes us to change our minds about the things we don't like. But Big Data isn't in the relevancy business. Anyone can show us an ad for the umbrella we need. The real money is in nudging us to buy the raincoat we never considered, then convincing us that's what we wanted all along. So it behoves us, then, to demand not only protection, but self determination over our data. It is we who must issue the terms and conditions. The social web, and the concept of decentralized social media, not only ignores this problem, in many cases it enables the threat. By "liberating” our behavioral data from behind the walled gardens of social media behemoths, and into Personal Data Servers crawlable by anyone, it is accountability they've decentralized, not power. accountability for the safeguarding of our data is decentralized away from corporations and towards the users themselves. However, the ability to profit from that data in effectively any matter these companies choose remains unchanged. Perhaps this change could be useful if the user gained the power to dictate what these corporations can and cannot do with our data. But of course that would entail the type of government regulation that these companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars fighting against. In effect, decentralized social media is little more than a decentralization of saftey and accountability, while preserving the centralization of power and profits. It is not our obligation to blindly accept the terms and conditions of Web 3.0. It is the burden of contemporary social media corporations to demonstrate its new business models represent meaningful change. And in that respect, those companies have failed. Everyone but maybe Mark Zuckerberg starts with good intentions. Some founders have openly discussed their fear of the advertising model, only later to become the largest ad company on the planet. What it boils down to is how can we ensure that our revolutionaries of today don't become our masters of tomorrow? --- #CommunitiesMarkets