Last June, the International Criminal Court experienced operational disruptions after Microsoft blocked the official email account of its chief prosecutor following US sanctions.
The action revealed the return of an old pattern. Systems once imagined as open, neutral channels of communication harden into privately controlled switches, capable of halting entire institutions for a single policy change or alleged misstep. But this was not an outlier.
Across the globe, millions of workers and entire branches of government now find their most basic functions throttled by choke points they neither control nor understand. The real consequence of AI-driven consolidation isn’t just automation or efficiency; it is dependency. Democratic institutions are increasingly at the mercy of technical systems they do not own and cannot audit.
Meanwhile, much of the Left has retreated into academic papers and panels, even as unions, co-ops, and local political collectives capable of acting continue to thin out. The familiar call to “reclaim the state” repeats earlier cycles in which exhausted public agencies — defunded and increasingly dependent on private contractors — were expected to deliver transformations they no longer have the capacity to implement.
Even if we could find wise progressive leaders able to wrest formal authority back from today’s Trumps, they would still confront private digital empires that control the playing field itself. Today roughly two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure is owned by just three US corporations, giving them a scale and structural power that democratic institutions cannot realistically match.
At the same time, cooperativism is trapped in a myopic politics, clinging to the 2025 UN Year of Cooperatives slogan “Cooperatives Build a Better World” as if co-ops alone prefigured such a future, while sidestepping wider coalitions. That omission matters. Governments around the world bend digital policy to a United States that is…
Auteur: Stefano Tortorici
