The power that slipped from the state's hands did not evaporate; it settled into servers, payment networks and app stores. Perhaps the basic political question of our age is not who governs us but whether we notice that we are being governed.
For a long time, when thinking about power, we turned our eyes to the state. Who governs, which law is passed, whose command do the police follow, where do the taxes go? These questions still matter. Yet today not all the decisions affecting large parts of our lives are taken in parliaments, ministries or municipal councils. A significant share of the systems determining what we will see, whom we will talk to, which job we can work at, how we will get somewhere and even how we will present ourselves to others lies in the hands of private companies.
This shift was sometimes narrated as liberation. Instead of the state’s ponderous bureaucracy there would be fast start-ups; instead of uniform public services, personalised options; instead of official borders, global networks. In many fields convenience and variety did indeed increase. But the power that left the state’s hands did not evaporate. It settled into servers, platforms, payment networks, app stores and data centres. Where we once waited at the door of an office, today we wait for the automatic reply to a support form. The door has changed; the one waiting is usually still us.
The new border gates
The digital world is said to be borderless, yet its crossing points are hardly few. Whether an application may appear in a store, whether a content creator may earn income, whether a small business may accept payment — a handful of large infrastructure providers can decide. These institutions are not states in the classical sense; yet they perform a function resembling a border gate. They grant entry, change the rules, suspend accounts, and usually need not offer a detailed justification.
A public decision has at least a visible legal language. A private platform’s decision may be explained with broad phrases such as “community standards,” “risk policy” or “commercial assessment.” The appeal mechanism may be automated; there may be no one before you who takes responsibility for the decision. While exercising a power resembling public authority on a global scale, the company remains legally a private party merely offering you a service. Authority grows; responsibility does not grow at the same pace.
Being governed without an election
We think that we at least choose state administrators at intervals, and that laws can be opened to public debate. In practice this supervision is often weak, unequal and inadequate. Even so, political power’s claim to legitimacy rests on the public. In the government of platforms there is not even such a claim. Users do not elect the boards, algorithm changes are not put to a vote, working conditions are not opened to collective negotiation.
Yet the decisions of platforms deeply affect public life. Whether a piece of news reaches millions, whether a social movement becomes visible, whether a small trader finds customers, or what a worker earns in a day may depend on undisclosed ranking systems. We are governed, yet our being governed is not officially acknowledged. Because we count as users, customers or “independent contractors,” the language of objection that belongs to a citizen also slips from our hands.
Are the state and the company really opposites?
Seeing states and technology companies as two rival powers also leaves the picture incomplete. Sometimes they clash; they confront one another over taxes, regulation, data access and sovereignty. But they often need each other. States can use private companies’ infrastructure, cloud services and surveillance capacity. Companies protect their property rights, contracts and market dominance through the state’s law. Rather than one being the alternative to the other, they can form a new partnership of power.
When boundaries blur in this partnership, holding anyone to account grows harder. The state can say “a company operates the technical system,” and the company can answer “we are fulfilling a legal obligation.” The citizen wanders between two doors. Power distributed in the form of a network causes responsibility to be distributed too. Everyone is a small part of the process; yet the large decision that emerges appears to have no owner.
The limit of the freedom to exit
We are told that if we are unhappy with a private service we may simply not use it. This is presented as the fundamental difference between corporate and state power: we cannot easily exit the state, but we can exit a platform. Yet when a service becomes the infrastructure of daily life, this freedom weakens. Leaving a platform that holds your friends, your customers, your business contacts and years of archive is not merely switching to another application. It is leaving behind part of your social world.
The same appears more harshly in work and payment systems. If your income is tied to a particular platform, closing the account cannot count as a free consumer preference. If the alternatives operate by the same rules, market competition offers no real escape either. “Don’t use it if you don’t like it” is rather like saying “don’t cross to the other shore” while a private company runs the city’s only bridge.
Making power visible again
If power has fled the state, we cannot look for it only at its old address. We must look at the owner of the code, at whoever runs the infrastructure, sets the ranking criteria, holds the data and makes migration to another system difficult. Yet the solution cannot be to hand the whole digital domain to a stronger state either, because as the state’s capacity for oversight grows the same instruments can be used for a more central and more coercive surveillance.
What we need may be not a change in power’s address but guarantees that limit power at every address: the right to move and delete data, contestation of algorithmic decisions, platform workers able to bargain collectively, open standards, community ownership and public oversight. These are more laborious than a romantic slogan about “taking back the internet.” But at least they start from the right place.
Power has not disappeared. It has moved behind faster, more scattered and often friendlier interfaces. To see it, looking through the window of a government office no longer suffices. We must also look at the phone in our pocket, at the screen from which we receive work, at the network through which we pay and at the list of “recommendations.” Perhaps the basic political question of our age is, before who governs us, whether we notice that we are being governed.
One obstacle to supervising these new fields of power is the difference of scale. A single user cannot make the terms of the platform on which they work, or around which they have built their whole social world, a matter of negotiation. Reading the terms of use, changing settings and looking for another service may be individually useful; but where millions depend on the same infrastructure the problem cannot be solved by personal vigilance. We must be able to face the company not only as consumers but as workers, citizens and genuine owners of shared infrastructure.
The state’s role, too, should not be merely to impose bans or demand data from companies. Mandating open standards, making it easier for people to carry their connections and content to another service, limiting monopolisation and securing workers’ collective voice can reduce the centralisation of power. But if these regulations are drafted behind closed doors and create new surveillance powers on security grounds, the problem merely changes hands. The company’s invisible government is replaced by the state’s invisible government.
Finding power’s new address therefore matters as much as building new political instruments to face it. As digital services take up more room in our lives, user councils, worker cooperatives, independent auditing and jointly governed data structures cease to be luxuries and become democratic needs. Power may have fled the state; but we are not obliged to treat it, in the name of freedom, as the private property of companies.