WORK
Socialize the Data Centres
Morozov's 2015 <em>New Left Review</em> essay arguing that digital infrastructure — like railroads and electrical grids before it — should be governed as a <em>public utility</em> 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.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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 governance through regulation, public utility