Lou Huang is an user interface engineer and front end developer, building open source tools for the civic tech ecosystem. He is the project lead of Streetmix, a collaborative platform for urban planners, and a founding member of Bad Idea Factory, a collective of technologists and civic thinkers.
What can be done?
We can’t talk about internet health without talking about wealth inequality. Rather than make the rich richer, we should look to other models of online organization. There’s a lot to be said for the co-op model: no one has ever required that technology be owned or operated by one “visionary” individual. If we truly value lofty concepts like decentralization, shouldn’t all our technology also be co-owned by the workers that make it and the users who adopt it?