Collective ownership to mature our sense of progress

“Ownership determines whose interests prevail.” — Marjorie Kelly

In July 2024, The Consilience Project published one of the clearest, most consequential accounts of the progress narrative shaping this late-stage capitalist era. They question the belief that technological innovation, economic growth, markets, and our institutions together produce a steady improvement in human life, as well as the incentives sustaining this story and the risks created by its narrow definition. When progress is measured primarily through economic and military growth, it downplays the scale of its side effects and treats social and ecological costs as collateral, weakening the very conditions on which life and wellbeing depend. Their conclusion that our current idea of progress is immature and developmentally incomplete offers fertile ground for the deep, long-term thinking this moment demands of all changemaking efforts.

Looking through this lens at why social platforms, many of them built to solve genuine problems or serve relational needs, have become sources of widespread harm, ownership appears closest to the heart of the problem. It is where the incentives shaping behaviour inside the organisation, and the behaviours the platform itself goes on to reward, normalise, and scale, are set. Ownership determines who has the power to define pace and progress, whose interests are represented when tradeoffs arise, who receives the economic benefits, and who is left to carry the costs. It shapes what an organisation is ultimately structured to stay true to.

In the corporate ownership model that dominates the technology ecosystem, ownership, and therefore steering power, is concentrated among a narrow group of founders and funders. Their priorities have formal standing inside the organisation, while the people whose participation, and relationships make the platform valuable have little structural influence over its trajectory. When the interests of these groups conflict, the structure gives the financial interests of shareholders priority over the wellbeing and rights of all other stakeholders. The companies change, but the logic remains the same. Internalise profit and externalise the costs onto society and the living world.

We have seen this play out enough for a term to be coined for it. The marvellous, quick-witted digital rights activist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification. With it, he names the process by which platforms first create value for users and lock them in, then create value for business customers and lock them in, before progressively extracting from both. The point is not simply that platforms deteriorate, but that they are deliberately made worse without meaningful accountability. The most consequential truth to confront here is that they do it because they can. Internally, they are answerable to an ownership model that makes growth and financial return binding, while treating nearly everything else as a means to those ends. Externally, the institutions meant to hold this power to account are increasingly entangled with it.

A different ownership architecture offers a response at the source. Collective ownership changes who has standing when decisions are made, bringing the people who create and sustain a platform's value into the structures that define progress, establish priorities, and decide which tradeoffs can be accepted. Steward ownership adds another safeguard by separating control from capital. Steering power remains with people connected to the organisation and its purpose, while profit becomes a means of sustaining that purpose rather than an end to be extracted by owners. The consequences of a decision become harder to push outward when the people carrying them have a place in making it, and when the structure itself limits how much value and power can be privately accumulated.

At Dyad, we are putting this commitment into practice by building governance alongside the product and preparing for a transition to steward ownership from the outset. Active community members will gain a role in shaping its rules, priorities, and direction. This means giving up the conventional promise of an eventual sale for private gain, because we believe value created collectively should not be captured by a few. None of this guarantees wiser decisions, but it changes the baseline by giving those affected real standing and making accountability part of the organisation rather than a matter of goodwill.

We offer this not as a finished answer, but as an invitation for the innovative thinking that has transformed products and interfaces over the past three decades to reach the level of ownership itself. To mature our sense of progress, we need to move away from individualistic structures organised around private accumulation and unilateral control, and toward communal forms of ownership and governance that recognise our interdependence, distribute power, and allow those affected to help determine the direction. Progress cannot remain something defined by a few, imposed on many, and judged by how much value can be privately captured. It must become something we shape, govern, and hold in common.