Why now
People have had enough.
So have regulators.
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US$17b
Meta's teen safety settlement over Instagram and Facebook, August 2026.
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3 days
How long a new Instagram AI image feature lasted before creator and talent agency backlash forced Meta to pull it.
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A$109m
Maximum penalty under Australia's proposed digital duty of care. The exposure draft, released September 2026, would bar recommender feeds and endless scroll for under-16s.
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Under 16s
Banned from social media in Australia since December 2025.
Public sentiment toward the industry is at its lowest since the financial crisis.Paraphrasing the American Economic Liberties Project
The discontent has nowhere to go.
Twenty years of memories sit on someone else's servers, on someone else's terms. What people share trains AI they never agreed to, then gets sold back to them. Leaving means losing it all, so they stay: aware, uncomfortable, trapped.
Every alternative so far has asked people to give something up.
- Privacy tools slow extraction but create no ownership.
- Web3 asked people to think like traders.
- Pay-for-data apps paid people without giving them title.
- Alternative networks fixed the feed, not who owns the content.
