Who Owns the Future? Ways to Understand Power, Technology, and the Moral Commons

This post is part of a series of contributor perspectives and analyses called "The Coming Age of Tech Trillionaires and the Challenge to Democracy." Learn more about the call for contributions here, and read other pieces in the series as they are published here.

The ascent of tech billionaires—and, depending on the market, soon trillionaires—signals more than a shift in global economic structures; it marks a transformation in the moral and cultural conditions under which democratic life is sustained. This contribution offers a communitarian critique of Big Tech’s influence, grounded in the philosophical frameworks of Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and virtue ethicist Shannon Vallor, and further supported by public goods theory and economic insights from Paul Samuelson and Joseph Stiglitz, with Elinor Ostrom’s work emphasizing the civic importance of collective stewardship. It contends that the challenge to democracy posed by concentrated digital power is not merely institutional, economic, or ethical, but a disruption of the very conditions for democratic citizenship.

Indeed, critical frameworks from multiple disciplines are useful in understanding the current moment. For instance, Charles Taylor’s conception of the self as dialogical and morally situated exposes the fragility of democratic cultures when background moral frameworks are replaced by the atomized, choice-maximizing logic of digital capitalism. Michael Sandel’s critique of market reasoning underscores how Big Tech commodifies not only goods but goods-in-common: attention, solidarity, and public discourse. Yet it is Shannon Vallor’s articulation of technomoral virtues that most clearly illuminates a path forward.

Vallor, a philosopher, challenges the adequacy of inherited moral vocabularies in a world shaped by artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, and platform dependency. She proposes the cultivation of virtues—such as honesty, humility, empathy, and courage—adapted to our technologically mediated condition. These virtues are not individualistic habits of character, but relational capacities formed and sustained through shared practices. Against the hyper-personalization and moral outsourcing encouraged by Big Tech, Vallor's vision insists on rebuilding the moral commons: spaces and capacities for collective reflection, responsibility, and ethical growth.

Extending this line of reasoning, we argue for a communitarian reorientation of tech ethics—beyond regulation and proceduralism—to revive the democratic lifeblood of shared meaning, moral cultivation, and civic agency. Democracy does not only require rules and representation; it requires citizens capable of virtue. Reclaiming that capacity is the most urgent countermeasure to the rising empire of the tech elite.

While our argument is situated in a moral and anthropological critique, it gains transdisciplinary strength from political economy, specifically through the well-established concept of public goods. First introduced by Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson in the context of collective consumption goods, public goods are defined by their non-excludability and non-rivalrous nature. Classic examples include infrastructure, clean air, and public safety. Public goods are then contrasted with private goods—goods that do not have such properties, are excludable, and rivalrous.

In the digital age, a new class of digital public goods has emerged: search engines, platforms, and foundational AI models. Contemporary Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences Joseph Stiglitz, together with Bruce Greenwald, has emphasized how information asymmetries and externalities distort markets, but in the case of digital infrastructures, this distortion is magnified by the concentration of power among a handful of actors.

Tech trillionaires have effectively privatized these digital public goods. Platforms such as Facebook, Google’s Search engine, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT now operate at scales and with degrees of societal dependency that effectively render them infrastructural in many countries. And yet, their governance structures remain private, unaccountable to the broader citizenry that depends on them daily. The moral significance of this shift is not merely a matter of accountability or regulation: it represents a form of enclosure, where what, due to its civic significance, could have been a commons for democratic discourse and ethical development becomes a proprietary asset ruled by corporate interests.

This monopolization leads to two interlinked degradations. First, the degradation of the digital public goods themselves, and second, the moral corrosion that accompanies the process. As platforms become more extractive and less trustworthy, they erode the very capacities upon which democratic life depends: trust, dialogue, and mutual recognition. In this light, Vallor’s emphasis on technomoral virtues becomes not merely aspirational but necessary. Without shared spaces governed by ethical norms—spaces where truthfulness, empathy, and accountability are cultivated—we are entering a post-civic condition: a society where digital subjects are manipulated, rather than empowered, and where citizenship itself is degraded.

Legal developments reflect the recognition of this problem: for instance, the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) are essentially efforts to reassert public oversight over platforms. However, these frameworks remain largely procedural and technocratic. What is missing is a thought-through normative framework that reclaims not only what is regulated, but why—not simply to reduce harms, but to reestablish the moral architecture of a democratic digital public sphere.

To reframe the digital sphere as a moral commons is thus to go beyond conventional regulatory language. It requires a reimagination of ownership, participation, and responsibility in the digital age. Who should own the means of communication in a democracy? Who should decide on the norms that govern our shared epistemic environment? And how do we cultivate citizens—not just users—capable of navigating these domains with virtue?

These questions echo the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first female economist to receive the Nobel Prize, who challenged the assumption that commons inevitably deteriorate without privatization or centralized control. Her response was rooted in civic action and participatory governance—demonstrating that the commons can be sustained through collective responsibility and ethical stewardship. In today’s context, where both public goods and civic life are at risk, Ostrom’s insights remain not only relevant but urgently needed.