Alternative timelines: escaping Big Tech

In recent years, the dominance of major digital platforms has begun to show deep cracks: business models in crisis, growing user distrust, high-profile failures such as the Metaverse, and at the same time, a frantic race toward artificial intelligence as the next promise of growth. Within this shifting landscape, alternatives are emerging that challenge centralization: the Fediverse, with platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, offers new forms of sociability and digital governance. This panel examines the decline of the Big Tech model and the social and technological laboratories now taking shape, asking what impact these changes have on digital cultures, the internet economy, citizens’ rights, and forms of political participation. It is an opportunity to reflect on what possible futures may open up beyond the platforms that defined the past decade of the internet.

In collaboration with QUANTS