Protocols, Not Platforms: Building Collective Power Beyond the Scroll
The critique of platform capitalism is, by now, familiar. We know that algorithmically driven platforms monetize urgency, fragment solidarity, and flatten discourse into consumable loops of outrage and performance. What’s less developed, though, is the conversation about what comes after critique: how to build the conditions for durable, collective power without simply reproducing the very systems we’re trying to leave behind.
This is where the language of protocols, not platforms becomes useful. Platforms are walled gardens, centralized systems optimized for growth, surveillance, and monetization. Protocols, by contrast, are frameworks — sets of shared standards that allow different nodes to interoperate while preserving autonomy. Email is a protocol; the web is a protocol; even the early blogosphere, loose and federated, was protocol-driven. Protocols don’t seek to capture and monetize all activity within their bounds; they define common ground that allows distributed systems to work together without collapsing into a single point of control.
If the first step of critique is to understand how platforms discipline and contain collective energy, the next step is to start building protocols — infrastructures of coordination, trust, and resilience that make it possible to organize outside the closed systems of platform capitalism.
Lessons and Limits of Historical Precedents
The impulse toward federation is not new. Movements before us have wrestled with similar questions: how to build collective capacity without sacrificing autonomy; how to create systems flexible enough to adapt but stable enough to endure. These histories offer lessons — but also cautionary notes.
The Zapatista networks of the 1990s remain a striking example of voluntary coordination at scale. Through a combination of shared principles, rotating leadership, and intentional decentralization, they sustained a distributed network of autonomous communities that could act in concert without ceding control to a central authority. But that success was grounded in specific material conditions: tight geographic proximity, deep relational trust, and a slower media environment where coordination did not have to happen in real time. Translating that model to today’s digital landscape — where crises unfold at the speed of the scroll and surveillance is ubiquitous — is far more complex.
The early labor internationals offer another model: federations that synchronized strikes and solidarity actions without centralized hierarchies, using trusted intermediaries and agreed-upon protocols for communication and decision-making. These systems were imperfect and often slow, but they built collective leverage through patient, layered organizing that modern movements often lack.
And then there is the open-source software movement, which shows how transparent standards and modular collaboration can sustain distributed networks over decades. Open-source projects thrive because they are built on protocols — version control, contribution guidelines, licensing frameworks — that allow individuals to collaborate without surrendering ownership or autonomy. Yet even here, we see the limits: most open-source ecosystems are precariously dependent on underfunded volunteer labor, leaving them vulnerable to burnout, capture, or quiet collapse.
These examples demonstrate that federation is possible. They also make clear that federation is not magic. Every successful distributed system is grounded in shared norms, reliable coordination mechanisms, and sustainable resourcing. Those are the hard problems we have to solve in the digital present.
The Economics of Federation
Building distributed infrastructures is not just a technical challenge; it’s an economic one. Without sustainable funding, even the most elegant protocol will wither. Too often, alternative projects rely on the unpaid labor of a small core, while infrastructure costs — hosting, maintenance, moderation, security — quietly accumulate.
Several models are emerging to address this. Cooperatives and membership-supported infrastructures can align incentives with community needs, distributing both cost and governance among users. Public or municipal funding for digital commons — as seen in experiments with publicly owned broadband or community mesh networks — shows that state resources can underwrite non-extractive digital infrastructures, provided governance safeguards are in place. Hybrid models, combining modest service fees, donations, and volunteer contributions, can also create sustainability without replicating the extractive logic of advertising-driven platforms.
But economic design has to go deeper than finding money. It has to account for the labor of maintenance and moderation — the hidden work of keeping systems safe, functional, and inclusive. Distributed systems cannot outsource this work; they must recognize and compensate it, or risk repeating the exploitation that props up the platform economy.
Furthermore, these technical infrastructures don’t exist in a political vacuum. Questions of who controls specialized knowledge, how maintenance labor gets distributed, and when dependencies become acceptable rather than problematic all shape how decentralized networks actually function. Federation doesn’t eliminate power dynamics — it reconfigures them. While these operational realities deserve sustained analysis, the immediate task here is to establish why protocol-based coordination offers strategic advantages over platform dependence.
Designing Protocols for Collective Power
The promise of protocols is that they can enable interoperability without consolidation — that distributed nodes can collaborate without being absorbed. But this requires intentional design.
Protocols for collective power would start with interoperable, open standards that allow different tools and platforms to talk to one another without handing control to a single entity. Imagine decentralized messaging protocols that let organizers move seamlessly across platforms; federated CRMs that allow campaigns to coordinate without exposing sensitive data; modular verification systems that enable trust in distributed networks without requiring a central authority.
Governance matters as much as code. Open standards only work if they are coupled with transparent processes and shared cultural norms that balance autonomy with cooperation. That means designing governance structures that are lightweight enough to avoid bureaucracy but robust enough to mediate conflict and maintain alignment over time.
The Scale Problem
This leads to the hardest challenge: scale. “Federation without consolidation” is easy to say and extraordinarily hard to do. Distributed networks excel at resilience — if one node fails, the system survives — but they struggle with coordination and responsiveness, especially in moments of crisis.
Decision-making across distributed systems is slow, and slowness can be fatal when speed is the terrain of struggle. Autonomy can harden into fragmentation; consensus can become paralysis. At the same time, centralization — the instinctive solution to coordination problems — brings its own risks of hierarchy, gatekeeping, and capture.
There are no simple solutions here, only trade-offs to be navigated. Some experiments in the decentralized tech ecosystem point toward layered governance: small, autonomous groups coordinating through shared protocols that allow rapid response when needed but defer most decisions to local contexts. What’s clear is that durable federation will not emerge by accident; it will require deliberate experimentation, iteration, and the humility to accept imperfection.
Strategic Openings
Despite the constraints, experiments are already underway. Decentralized tech cooperatives are building privacy-respecting tools maintained by and for their communities. Labor organizers have used federated messaging protocols that allow cross-platform communication and self-hosted coordination tools that maintain data sovereignty. Mutual aid networks are using lightweight protocols to track needs, share resources, and distribute labor across neighborhoods and cities.
These are not finished models, but they are proofs of concept — evidence that it is possible to organize outside the narrow architectures of platform capitalism. What distinguishes these efforts is not scale for its own sake, but intentionality: tools are built to serve people, not markets; protocols evolve to support autonomy, not enclosure.
The task ahead is to study these experiments, to learn what sustains them and what limits them, and to develop principles for scaling without falling into the familiar traps of centralization and extraction.
Conclusion: Adaptive, Not Naïve
To talk about federation is to talk about a living process, not a static solution. Platform capitalism is adaptive; it absorbs, co-opts, or marginalizes alternatives with ruthless efficiency. No protocol, however elegant, will be immune to this pressure.
But adaptation cuts both ways. Distributed systems, when built with intention, can be adaptive too. They can develop redundancies, rotate leadership, shift tactics, and rebuild when capture or collapse occurs. The point is not to dream of perfect insulation but to practice continuous maintenance and collective defense — to treat federation not as an endpoint but as an ongoing, iterative strategy for collective power.
The critique of the doomscroll reminds us what happens when urgency has no exit. The work of protocols is to build those exits: to create the conditions where urgency can be metabolized into strategy, where distributed nodes can coordinate without surrendering autonomy, and where the infrastructures of collective action belong to the people who use them.
The task is not small, and the terrain is hostile. But the alternative — remaining trapped in architectures designed to monetize paralysis — is no longer tenable. Protocols will not save us. But they can help us save the possibility of collective action, if we are willing to build, defend, and adapt them together.