Ecdpm

Chloe Teevan and Gautam Kamath interview Robin Berjon, French-Australian technologist, Deputy Director of the IPFS Foundation, and a major thinker on technology sovereignty and the tech stack.Robin Berjon explains that power in technology stems from operating infrastructures and that the current governance model for these infrastructural systems is largely autocratic, controlled by monopolies or duopolies. This autocratic power, which sets rules for users, can seep into society, potentially making society itself autocratic. The rules set by these digital monopolies can even become more important to businesses, like publishers, than state laws, leading to a loss of self-governance for collectives.He argues that the problem isn't a lack of innovation; it's the capture of architectural control points (e.g., how revenue flows, system defaults) by a tiny number of actors, leading to high power concentration. Breaking these monopolies requires intervention at the infrastructural level to liberate these co