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Socialize the Data Centres
Morozov's 2015 New Left Review essay arguing that digital infrastructure — like railroads and electrical grids before it — should be governed as a public utility rather than owned as private property.
'Socialize the Data Centres!' (New Left Review, January-February 2015) is the essay in which Morozov first articulated the full political-economic argument for democratic governance of digital infrastructure. The essay's title was deliberately provocative, but its analytical core was precise: the data centers, cloud platforms, and computational resources on which the digital economy depends constitute infrastructure in exactly the same sense that railroads, electrical grids, and telephone networks were infrastructure — critical systems whose governance determines the distribution of value they enable.
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The essay's historical argument drew on the well-documented trajectory of previous infrastructure concentrations. Railroads, telephone networks, and electrical grids had all followed a recognizable pattern: initial private development, rapid concentration of ownership, the emergence of critical dependency relationships between infrastructure owners and the populations whose economic activity depended on the infrastructure, and eventually — after the consequences of unaccountable concentration became sufficiently visible — the imposition of democratic