Captocracy
The platforms that rule us
For many readers of Civic Fields, what happened last week was not even a blip on the screen, but for others of us, the screens literally went blank. On May 7, a group of hackers that goes by the name ShinyHunters broke into the most popular and profitable course-management platform in America, Canvas, shutting the system down globally and stealing the data of Canvas’s millions of student and teacher users: including names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages among users.
ShinyHunters kept Canvas in the dark and user data in its shady grip until the private equity firm partnership that own Canvas, KKR and Dragoneer Investment Group, paid a ransom. Which they did.
This happened just as finals were getting underway at most universities, including my own. For all intents and purposes, the University of Illinois, where I work, shut down. So did hundreds of other colleges and universities.
I am teaching a class of 110 undergraduates that uses Canvas. In a dictatorial mass email (there’s no other way to put it), I was told by the provost that I simply had to stop everything in my class. I was not allowed to improvise, rearrange, reconfigure, or adjust our end-of-the-semester assignments. Everything was on hold. By mandate, the university was in effect shutting down until Canvas was back online. No one knew when or if that would happen.
For me, the experience was at once frustrating and fortuitous. It was frustrating for obvious reasons—my students and I wanted to get on with things and the provost just took that option out of our hands.
But it was fortuitous because I had just been lecturing the week before in my class on how digital platforms are more than “tools,” and more even than “media”—they are mechanisms by which massive populations are governed. What we know as “Big Tech,” together with comparatively smaller platform operators like Canvas, are much, much more than “service providers.” They are governing agencies.
In a recent article in the European Journal of International Relations, a colleague of mine at Purdue University, Swati Srivastava, builds upon years of research to show how Facebook, for example, operates more like a government than a company.
Platforms as varied as eBay, Uber, and AirBnB make rules on “what is permitted and what is prohibited, who can interact with whom, what sorts of agreements are possible, and what kinds of rights and guarantees you have in practice if things go wrong.” Social platforms have direct access to their users, who make demands on how platforms are run. Facebook makes rules on how to define harmful speech, whether to flag misinformation during elections, and how to handle government requests for user data, all of which have consequences for a polity of users. Facebook’s platform rule is global as decisions made in Palo Alto govern users in 180+ countries. . . . Mark Zuckerberg also compares his platform to states: “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”
To illustrate this further, in a talk given here at the University of Illinois earlier this spring, Srivastava reminded listeners that eBay does more than provide a platform for the buying and selling of goods and services—eBay actively arbitrates over 60 million disputes a year, deciding for one party or the other (or no party, as the case may be).
To give you a sense of scale here, California, which is the largest state by population in the United States, processed 4.8 million cases in fiscal year 2023-24. California, that is, processes less than 10 percent of cases processed independently by eBay in a year.
Meanwhile, Facebook, which is still the world’s largest social media platform, has over three billion users, larger than any empire, nation, or country in human history.
In her broader work, Srivastava situates the governing power of these big tech platforms within a history of what she calls “hybrid sovereignty.” We idealize sovereignty as something belonging to nations or states. In reality, she argues, “lived sovereignty” today is a joint public-private venture, a power split between formal nation-state governments and often multi-national or trans-national corporations. Witness Donald Trump’s delegation to China this week for his major diplomatic mission. It includes not only the Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, but Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, Brian Sikes of Cargill, Jane Fraser of Citi, Jim Anderson of Coherent, Larry Culp of GE Aerospace, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jacob Thaysen of Illumina, Michael Miebach of Mastercard, Dina Powell McCormick of Meta, Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, Elon Musk of Tesla, and Ryan McInerney of Visa. (This is not just a Trump thing—Obama and Clinton both brought large delegations of CEOs with them on major diplomatic journeys.)
“Hybrid sovereignty” gets at part of the way in which the people we think are in charge are not, in fact, fully in charge. Sovereignty, as Srivastava sees it, is a joint public-private venture in the modern world.
But the recent misadventures of Canvas point to a different qualitative dynamic, the utter dependence of public institutions (and private ones too) on platforms owned and controlled by for-profit firms.
When Canvas went down, my university went down. When it went back up, my university went back up. And the time in between may have been a period in which key data about the “citizens” of the University of Illinois—students and teachers—was compromised. What is “hybrid” about this? Really, not much other than my university signing a contract that gave Canvas the rights to run our courses and gather and store student-teacher data.
This inequitable and distorted power dynamic is ubiquitous in the world of Big Tech. Official governments are surrendering sovereignty to private corporations left and right. Through Starlink, for example, Elon Musk has become an indispensable player in global power conflicts, as illustrated by the war in Ukraine. As Srivastava notes, numerous agencies have determined that Facebook was primarily responsible for the genocide in Myanmar in 2016 and 2017. More simply, as I asked my students, most of whom live away from home, could you get back home if GPS went down for a week?
I have been fishing for a name for the ways in which, through Big Tech, the governance of so many lives has become privatized—“hybrid sovereignty” does not quite get at it.
Another candidate was suggested by the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas many years ago and Jodi Dean more recently: “neo-feudalization.” But as alarming as this is, and in a certain sense accurate, “neo-feudalization” does not capture well the way individuals, organizations, and states have overwhelmingly willingly complied in surrendering their agency, power, and sovereignty to tech companies and their partners.
So, I’ve been thinking about “Captocracy.” The neologism—my own—is an adaptation of another neologism, “Captology.” The latter was coined in the early 2000s by a Stanford psychologist named B.J. Fogg. He called Captology “the study of computers as persuasive technologies.” Fogg deserves his own post here at Civic Fields (maybe next week), but “the study of computers as persuasive technologies” belies the power and influence of Fogg’s project.
As the still very relevant Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma suggests, Fogg is at the epicenter of teaching Big Tech how to build into social media (and now AI) psychological tricks that make people dependent, hooked, even addicted to platforms. “Captology” stands for “Computers As Persuasive Technology,” but Fogg knows a double-entendre when he sees one: he wanted to teach Silicon Valley how to capture people, psychologically first, economically second, and inevitably and ultimately politically. For what Fogg was after was capturing and controlling human agency.
“Captocracy” is the result of the conversion of this psychological project into a business model, and ultimately into a governing model. Unlike feudalism, which depended on structures of physical domination—a kind of medieval “biopolitics”—Captrocracy converts the psychological power of digital platforms into structures of physical, practical, and ultimately political dependency.
Under Captocracy, we are not actively “dominated” as much as we are rendered actively dependent on tools without which the world stops.
The Canvas apocalypse on thousands of college campuses last week was just a little taste of the risk of dependence on powerful, privately held governing platforms. Canvas got out of the mess by paying a large ransom. Administrators at my university are breathing a sigh of relief. But if their head is on straight, they are also realizing they are no longer the sovereigns of education on their own campus. They’ve been captured.