Big Tech needs us more than we need them

In the early 20th century, Karl Marx argued that power flows from owning the means of production — the stuff you need to make things, like land and factories and tools. This is no longer the case. Now, in the digital age, influence and wealth flow to the people who own the means of distribution — the networks that get information to people.

Journalists do not currently own the means of distribution. Amazon does. Meta does. Google does. TikTok does. OpenAI does. This, as we have learned over the last decade, leaves us fatally vulnerable. Journalists are at the mercy of individuals, corporations, and governments that have repeatedly shown no regard for information integrity. Credible journalism must compete in the same digital sewers as fake news, disinformation, and AI slop — and is often disadvantaged by unaccountable algorithms designed to promote engagement over truth, no matter what the cost to humans or societies.

The advent of generative AI has turbocharged this situation, making it increasingly difficult — sometimes impossible — to determine what is real and what is fake.

In the very short term, this is a problem for journalists. How do we get our work heard above all this noise? But it won’t be long before it becomes a much bigger problem for big tech platforms. Their model only works because their vast audiences still believe in the illusion that what they are seeing could be real. But it is increasingly difficult to maintain that illusion when there is a little voice in the back of your head that is constantly having to ask, “Is this real or is this fake?”

And in polluting their own platforms so comprehensively, Big Tech has handed us an opportunity to regain control over the means of distribution for news.

Access to reliable information is a basic human need. More and more, audiences are going to start actively seeking out spaces where they can trust that quotes are real, that photographs are not digitally generated, and that what they are reading is not designed to manipulate them into extreme behaviors. Places they can trust. The publishers that create those spaces, and the distribution networks to support them, are going to thrive in this new information environment.

Those that continue to rely on big tech platforms to mediate between them and their audience, or that design their strategies and spend their resources in service of algorithms they don’t control or understand, are going to fail — and maybe they should.