Saving the Internet requires addressing the threats to its utopian potential – its low barriers to entry, the freedom to participate and its openness.

Just as our physical universe contains different types of powers such as solar power, nuclear power, wind power and more – all of which derive from different sources and produce diverse impacts on the world – our social-historical world also contains many different forms of socially created power. This includes, but is not limited to, economic, political, cultural, sexual and military power.

Grey Power: As power to impact and influence the Internet, external threats to the system such as states, corporations, individuals and bad actors manipulate the platform and distort its original intended purpose.

This is what Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute, describes as the new “grey power.”

Grey power is not ordinary socio-political power or military power, Floridi explains. It is not the power to directly influence others, but rather the power to influence those who influence power.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the industrialists in grey suits were the ones who held grey power. Today, it is those controlling the social networks, the search engines and the industries around digital technology who hold grey power.

The Google Transparency Project, for instance, has identified 258 instances of “revolving door” activity between Google and the US Federal Government, Congress and national political campaigns during President Obama’s eight-year term in office.

These revolving doors move between White House officials, former national security, intelligence and Pentagon officials who left the administration to work for top positions in Google, and Google executives who joined top echelons of power in the White House and the Department of Defense.

Expository Power: In his book Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, founding director for the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Bernard E. Harcourt proposes a new theory of mass surveillance which he calls “expository power”.

Expository power, he argues, is based on our need for new digital technologies that make it possible for us to believe we can achieve total awareness.

We surrender ourselves in acts of total transparency to online platforms such as Facebook and Google, enabled and exploited by their algorithms:

“It is about every little desire, every preference, every want, and all the complexity of the self, social relations, political beliefs and ambitious, psychological well-being. It extends to every crevice and every dimension of everyday living…”

We carelessly allow ourselves to be exploited and through this process create whole expository societies.

Surveillance Capitalism: The process through which technology responds to individuals and groups to surveil and modify human behavior in scalable and profitable ways has been described by Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, as a new sub-species of capitalism known as “surveillance capitalism.”

Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as “a new logic of accumulation.” It is “a novel economic mutation bred from the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies.”

The incredible evolution of computer processing power, complex algorithms and leaps in data storage capabilities combine to make surveillance capitalism possible.

It is the process of accumulation by dispossession of the data that people produce. It occurs in both profound and seemingly benign ways.

So long as these powers have a hold over the Internet this system will act as a platform amplifying power and privilege.