Privacy is constrained by technical skills in most people's model. Thats where the scarcity lies. People talk about it as a software problem, but don't underst

Privacy is constrained by technical skills in most people's model. Thats where the scarcity lies. People talk about it as a software problem, but don't understand that lots of people have not even a slight grasp of why Facebook and the other silos are bad. The web fits the analogy perfectly well: it has many actors and many near monopolies. This is not unprecedented: just as most people in the 19th century had houses and access to roads, people have computers and the internet now. Neither precludes domination by large companies or the very wealthy, but domination can be precludes by collective endeavours. Landlords were thwarted by building societies and mutuals, coercive employers thwarted by cooperatives and unions. Similarly, platform cooperatives can solve the problem of people's private information being commodified. Lots of software approaches have been tried to solve this problem but none have succeeded, even with sponsorship from large companies (think xmpp and google). As yet, nobody has tried my approach because it isn't a natural avenue for exploration among people whose sole consideration is technical implementation. It has a high initial barrier because it demands a multidisciplinary approach, but once established it would only require a small team (think WhatsApp and its dozen or so employees).