Silicon Prometheus: When We Handed the Fire to the Few

A mythic retelling of the internet's story — how control slipped from the many to the few, and how open source is stealing the flame back.

The Gift of Fire

In the beginning, there was the fire.

Not the fire of myth—not the flames stolen from gods and given to mortals. This was a different kind of fire: the ability to create, to communicate, to compute. The power to turn electricity and logic into tools that could extend human thought itself.

The fire was given freely. Not by a single Prometheus but by thousands of them: researchers at universities, engineers at government labs, hobbyists in garages. They built protocols that anyone could use. They wrote software and shared the source code. They created networks that belonged to no one and therefore to everyone.

The early internet was a commonwealth of knowledge and capability. TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, email—these weren't products owned by corporations. They were shared standards, public goods, digital commons. Anyone who understood them could build anything they could imagine. The fire wasn't stolen from the gods; it was discovered together and distributed freely.

For a brief, glorious moment, it seemed we had transcended the ancient pattern. Technology that didn't create new hierarchies. Power that didn't concentrate. A tool that made everyone more capable without making anyone master of anyone else.

But fire has always attracted those who would control it. And the story that followed is as old as civilization itself: how the many gave their power to the few, and how the few built empires on that gift.

The First Age: The Commons

To understand what we lost, we must remember what we had.

The early internet was radically decentralized not because decentralization was a goal but because it was the nature of the beast. The network was designed to route around damage, to function without central coordination, to let anyone connect to anyone else directly. It was inefficient in some ways, chaotic in others, but it was fundamentally egalitarian.

If you wanted a website, you could make one. If you wanted to email someone, you sent it directly to their server. If you wanted to create a new service, you wrote the software and put it online. No one had to approve your ideas. No one could delete your expression. No one stood between you and everyone else with their hand out demanding tribute.

The protocols were open. The standards were public. The software was often free, both in price and in freedom. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, could have patented it and become unimaginably wealthy. Instead, he gave it away, believing that the web should belong to everyone.

This wasn't naïve idealism—it was the ethic of the community that built the internet. These were people who had grown up in academic environments where knowledge sharing was expected, who had experienced the power of collaboration, who believed that technology could be a force for democratization rather than domination.

They were the keepers of the fire, and they gave it to anyone who wanted it.

The early web reflected this ethos. Personal websites bloomed like wildflowers, each strange and unique. Web rings connected communities of shared interest. Forums and bulletin boards facilitated discussions without algorithmic manipulation. Search engines indexed everything they could find and presented results by relevance, not by who paid most for placement.

It was messy. It was inefficient. It was sometimes ugly. But it was ours—a genuinely public space created by mutual effort and governed by mutual agreement. The fire burned in millions of hearths, tended by millions of keepers.

We didn't know how rare this was. We didn't know how quickly it would end.

The Second Age: The Offering

The transition happened so gradually that most people didn't notice. One convenient choice at a time, one service at a time, we began handing the fire back.

The logic was always reasonable. Why maintain your own email server when Gmail could do it better? Why host your own website when Facebook made it so easy to connect with friends? Why build your own infrastructure when Amazon would rent you theirs? Why own software when cloud services just worked?

Each choice made sense individually. Together, they represented a comprehensive transfer of power.

The platforms that emerged didn't look like tyrants. They looked like benefactors. They offered free services, beautiful interfaces, and genuine utility. They solved real problems. They made things that had been difficult into things that were easy. They democratized access to tools that had previously required expertise.

Google made the web searchable. Facebook made social networking effortless. Amazon made commerce frictionless. Apple made computing elegant. These weren't villains imposing themselves on an unwilling public. They were servants offering gifts.

But gifts from the powerful are never really free. The platforms wanted something in return—not money, at least not directly. They wanted our data, our attention, our behavior, our social graphs, our communications, our creativity. They wanted us to build our digital lives on their foundations, using their tools, by their rules.

Most crucially, they wanted us to stop maintaining our own fires. Why tend your own flame when we'll keep one burning for you, bright and warm and always accessible? Just give us everything you create, everyone you know, everything you do, and we'll handle the complexity.

The offering was accepted. Not through any single decision but through a million small ones. We stopped running our own servers. We stopped learning how the underlying technology worked. We stopped creating our own spaces and started renting rooms in their buildings. We let our own fires go out, trusting that theirs would always burn.

The platforms called this progress. And in many ways, it was. More people gained access to more capabilities than ever before. The internet reached billions. Communication became instant and global. Human knowledge became searchable. The gifts were real.

But so was the cost.

The Consolidation

Once the fire had been centralized, the platforms began to change.

This is the inevitable pattern of concentrated power: first serve users to build market share, then serve customers to build revenue, then serve only themselves to maximize profit. The platforms had built moats—network effects, switching costs, ecosystem lock-in—that made competition nearly impossible. Now they could begin extraction.

Facebook became a surveillance machine, tracking users across the web, mining their relationships for advertising data, conducting psychological experiments without consent, and algorithmically manipulating emotions to maximize engagement. The platform that promised to connect people became a tool for fragmenting them, amplifying outrage because outrage drives clicks.

Google went from "don't be evil" to selling users' attention to the highest bidder. Search results became increasingly dominated by ads and Google's own properties. Gmail scanned emails for targeting data. Chrome monitored browsing behavior. Android tracked physical location. The company that organized the world's information now owned much of it and controlled how it was accessed.

Amazon leveraged its platform position to compete with its own sellers, using their data to identify successful products then launching competing alternatives. AWS, the infrastructure layer, gave Amazon insight into its competitors' operations. The marketplace became a panopticon where the operator had perfect information and everyone else had partial blindness.

Apple built a walled garden and locked the gate from inside. Every transaction went through their payment system, taking 30%. Every app required their approval. Every update went through their review. They called it curation; developers called it a protection racket. The beautiful devices became golden cages.

Microsoft abandoned its commitment to desktop software ownership and pushed everything toward subscription services. Office became Office 365. Windows became Windows as a Service. The company that had once faced antitrust action for bundling software now bundled everything into subscriptions you could never stop paying.

The platforms became more than companies—they became digital nation-states with more power than many physical nations. They controlled communication infrastructure. They decided what speech was acceptable. They curated what information people saw. They collected data that governments could only dream of accessing. They operated across borders while being subject to no democratic accountability.

And because they controlled the fire, they could set the terms. Don't like Facebook's privacy policy? Where else will you go—everyone you know is there. Don't like Apple's app review? Too bad—there's no other way to reach iOS users. Don't like Amazon's terms? Good luck competing without AWS. Don't like Google's search results? There are no real alternatives.

The fire that had burned in millions of hearths now burned in a handful of data centers, tended by a handful of corporations, subject to their interests and their interests alone.

The Illusion of Inevitability

The platforms worked hard to make their dominance seem natural, inevitable, the only possible outcome of technological progress. They weren't monopolies—they were just really good at what they did! They weren't extracting rent—they were creating value! They weren't constraining freedom—they were making things easier!

This narrative served them well. If concentration was inevitable, if scale was required, if these platforms were simply the best possible version of the internet, then there was no point in resistance. Regulation would be futile. Alternatives would be impossible. The only rational response was acceptance.

But the inevitability was a lie.

The internet didn't have to consolidate into a handful of platforms. Email didn't—it remained decentralized, and it still works. The web didn't have to become dominated by a few sites. Nothing about the underlying technology required centralization. The protocols that made the internet possible were specifically designed for decentralization.

What happened wasn't technological necessity. It was the result of specific choices, specific business models, and specific power dynamics that could have been different. The platforms won not because they had to but because we let them. Because we chose convenience over control, because we trusted assurances about how data would be used, because we didn't think hard enough about what we were giving away.

Network effects are real, but they're not unbreakable. Switching costs are real, but they're not insurmountable. First-mover advantages are real, but they're not permanent. The platforms wanted us to believe their position was unassailable so we would stop trying to assault it.

But myths of inevitability have always served power. Kings ruled by divine right—until they didn't. Feudalism was the natural order—until it wasn't. Slavery was economically necessary—until it wasn't. The platforms are inevitable—until they aren't.

The fire didn't have to be hoarded. It chose to be, and we chose to let it.

The New Prometheans

But fire cannot be monopolized forever. Its nature is to spread. And across the digital landscape, new Prometheans are stealing it back.

They're not doing it through legislation or regulation, though those have roles to play. They're doing it through the same method that created the internet in the first place: building and sharing. Creating alternatives and releasing them into the commons. Writing code and opening the source. Teaching skills that the platforms wanted people to forget.

Open source software has become the counterweight to platform power. Every major platform runs on open source infrastructure, but they can't control it. Linux powers the vast majority of servers, but no company owns it. Firefox offers an alternative to Chrome that can't be corrupted by advertising interests. LibreOffice provides office software that doesn't require subscription payments. Thousands of projects offer alternatives to platform services.

The open source movement understood something fundamental: software is fire. It can be replicated infinitely at zero cost. Hoarding it doesn't increase its value—sharing it does. The more people who can read code, modify it, improve it, and redistribute it, the better it becomes.

But open source is more than just free software. It's a different theory of ownership and development. Instead of top-down control, it offers distributed collaboration. Instead of secrets and proprietary advantages, it offers transparency and mutual improvement. Instead of vendor lock-in, it offers portability and freedom.

The impact has been profound. Open source software powers most of the internet. It runs most servers, most smartphones, most embedded devices. It's in your car, your TV, your router, your smart devices. The platforms built their empires on open source foundations—and those foundations can support alternatives too.

Federation and protocols are stealing back the fire of communication. Projects like Mastodon, Matrix, and XMPP enable social networking and messaging without central platforms. They're slower growing, less polished, and require more effort—but they can't be shut down, can't be sold to billionaires, and can't be corrupted by advertising incentives.

The key insight: communication doesn't require platforms, it requires protocols. Email proved this decades ago and still works. RSS proved it for content distribution. ActivityPub is proving it for social networking. When communication happens through open protocols instead of proprietary platforms, control becomes impossible to centralize.

Self-hosting and personal infrastructure are reclaiming the fire of digital sovereignty. The homelab movement, personal servers, and network-attached storage systems give individuals the ability to own their data and run their own services. Tools like Docker and Kubernetes make it easier to deploy sophisticated infrastructure. Communities share knowledge that was once arcane specialist expertise.

The economics increasingly favor this approach. Used enterprise hardware is incredibly cheap. Raspberry Pis cost less than a single month of cloud storage. The electricity to run a personal server costs less than subscriptions to equivalent services. The technical barriers are lower than ever.

Decentralized protocols like IPFS, BitTorrent, and various blockchain-based systems offer alternatives to centralized file storage and distribution. They're not perfect—many are slower, more complex, or have different trade-offs—but they prove that alternatives are possible. The fire can burn in many places at once.

Local-first software keeps data on users' devices while maintaining the benefits of connectivity. Apps like Obsidian, Logseq, and Anytype store files locally but sync peer-to-peer when desired. This combines the best aspects of ownership and collaboration without surrendering control to platforms.

The new Prometheans aren't building replicas of the platforms. They're building something different: infrastructure that's distributed rather than centralized, protocols rather than platforms, tools that empower rather than extract. They're not trying to create new monopolies—they're trying to make monopoly impossible.

The Shape of Resistance

The resistance to platform power isn't a single movement with clear leadership and unified goals. It's a diffuse, often contradictory collection of efforts united only by rejection of the status quo.

There are the privacy advocates building encrypted communication tools and teaching people to protect their data. There are the indie web enthusiasts creating personal websites and reviving blogging culture. There are the right to repair activists fighting for the ability to fix and modify the devices we supposedly own. There are the digital rights organizations defending freedoms in both courts and code.

There are the cooperatives trying to create platform alternatives owned by users rather than shareholders. There are the municipal networks building community-owned infrastructure. There are the mesh network projects creating internet connectivity that doesn't depend on ISPs. There are the federation advocates building interoperable systems that can't be monopolized.

What unites these efforts is a recognition that the current arrangement—where a handful of platforms control most digital activity—isn't inevitable, isn't permanent, and isn't acceptable. They're stealing the fire back, one project at a time, one skill shared, one alternative built.

The platforms call this futile. They point out that their services work better, reach more people, and offer more features. They're not wrong—they have enormous resources and can move quickly. But they're missing something crucial: you don't need to beat the platforms at their own game. You just need to offer alternatives that work well enough for people who value something other than convenience above all else.

Email didn't replace postal mail by being better at everything mail did. It succeeded by being better at some things and different at others. Open source didn't replace proprietary software by being more polished—it succeeded by being more adaptable and trustworthy. Federation won't replace platforms by having more users—it will succeed by offering something platforms can't: genuine user control.

The Price of Fire

Reclaiming the fire isn't free. It requires effort, learning, maintenance, and sacrifice of some conveniences we've become accustomed to.

It requires technical literacy. You don't need to become a programmer or system administrator, but you need to be willing to learn how things work underneath the abstraction layers. This takes time and sustained effort in a world that constantly demands our attention elsewhere.

It requires maintenance. Self-hosted services need updates, backups, and troubleshooting. Personal infrastructure breaks and needs fixing. There's no customer service to call, no one else responsible for keeping your systems running. The fire doesn't tend itself.

It requires social costs. Moving to alternative platforms means potentially losing touch with people who won't follow. Using different tools means explaining yourself repeatedly. Going against defaults means accepting friction in a world optimized for seamless compliance.

It requires financial costs. While often cheaper than subscriptions long-term, self-hosting requires upfront hardware purchases and ongoing electricity costs. Supporting open source projects and alternative platforms requires direct financial contributions since there's no advertising or data extraction to subsidize services.

It requires accepting limitations. Alternative platforms are smaller, less polished, and have fewer features. Self-hosted services are less seamlessly integrated. Open source tools sometimes lag behind proprietary equivalents. You give up some capability in exchange for control.

These aren't trivial costs. For many people, especially those with limited resources, time, or technical confidence, the costs outweigh the benefits. This is fine. The goal isn't for everyone to become digital homesteaders running their own infrastructure. The goal is for enough people to do so that alternatives exist, that skills remain distributed, that power doesn't consolidate absolutely.

But we should be honest about the costs. Taking back the fire means taking back the responsibility for tending it. There are no shortcuts, no easy solutions, no ways to have complete sovereignty without any effort.

The question isn't whether reclaiming the fire is easy. It's whether the alternative—permanent dependence on platforms that don't serve our interests—is acceptable.

The Myth We Tell Ourselves

Every society tells itself myths about power: how it arose, why it exists, whether it's legitimate. The platforms have told us a very specific myth: they succeeded because they're the best, and their dominance reflects merit.

This myth serves them well. If the platforms earned their position through pure competition on quality, then their power is justified. If they simply made better products than any alternative could, then resistance is pointless. If they grew by serving users better than anyone else, then their current extraction is the price of past benefits.

But this myth collapses under examination.

The platforms didn't succeed purely through merit—they succeeded through network effects, first-mover advantages, massive capital investment, strategic acquisitions, and in some cases, anticompetitive behavior. Google didn't become dominant just by having the best search—it used its position to favor its own products and services. Facebook didn't become ubiquitous just through quality—it bought Instagram and WhatsApp before they could become true competitors. Amazon didn't dominate retail through efficiency alone—it operated at a loss for years, subsidized by investor capital, until competitors were destroyed.

The myth of merit obscures the role of circumstance, timing, capital availability, regulatory capture, and strategic manipulation of market dynamics. It pretends that power is always earned and never seized, that dominance is always justified and never abused, that the current arrangement is the best possible world rather than one particular outcome among many possibilities.

Rejecting this myth is the first step toward reclaiming the fire. The platforms are powerful, but their power isn't natural or inevitable or permanently justified. They won through a combination of factors, many of which had nothing to do with serving users well. And what was won can be unwon.

The Long Game

Reclaiming the fire won't happen quickly. The platforms have enormous resources, entrenched advantages, and millions of users who don't see the problems or don't care enough to change. Most people will continue using dominant platforms because they work well enough and the alternatives require too much effort.

This is fine. Revolutions are rare. Most change is gradual, marginal, incomplete. The goal isn't to destroy the platforms—it's to create alternatives so they don't hold absolute power. To ensure that people have options, that competition is possible, that no single entity controls the digital infrastructure civilization depends on.

The open source community understands this intuitively. They don't try to replace all proprietary software immediately. They build alternatives, improve them gradually, and let people adopt them when they're ready. Linux didn't replace Windows overnight—it grew steadily over decades until it dominated servers, smartphones, and embedded systems while still being a small minority of desktop computers.

The same pattern applies to reclaiming the fire more broadly. Self-hosting won't replace cloud services for everyone—but it needs to be possible for anyone. Federation won't replace platforms completely—but it needs to offer viable alternatives. Open protocols won't replace proprietary ones overnight—but they need to remain available and actively developed.

The measure of success isn't total replacement. It's the existence of alternatives, the distribution of knowledge, the impossibility of absolute control. It's ensuring that the fire burns in enough places that it can never be monopolized again.

This requires patience. It requires teaching others. It requires building things that might not be appreciated immediately. It requires faith that gradually, more people will decide that convenience isn't worth the price platforms charge.

The new Prometheans aren't trying to win a battle—they're trying to change the terrain on which battles are fought. They're building infrastructure that can't be captured, sharing knowledge that can't be hoarded, creating alternatives that can't be eliminated.

The Fire Returns

The story isn't over. The platforms are powerful but not invulnerable. They've concentrated control but they can't hold it forever. The fire they tried to monopolize is being distributed again, passed from hand to hand, lit in new hearths and tended by new keepers.

Every person who learns to code contributes to the commons. Every developer who open sources their work shares the fire. Every user who self-hosts reclaims sovereignty. Every community that federates escapes centralized control. These aren't grand revolutionary gestures—they're small acts of building and sharing that compound over time.

The platforms thought they'd won permanently. They thought they'd convinced everyone that centralization was inevitable, that their dominance was justified, that alternatives were impossible. They thought the fire was theirs to control.

But fire spreads. That's its nature. And the fire of knowledge—of how to build, how to host, how to code, how to create—can never be permanently contained.

The original Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving fire to mortals. He was chained to a rock, condemned to eternal torment. But the fire remained with humanity. The gods couldn't take it back, no matter how they punished its giver.

The digital fire has been partially recaptured by the few, concentrated in their data centers and controlled for their benefit. But it's still burning elsewhere too—in open source repositories, in personal servers, in federated networks, in communities of people who remember that another way is possible.

The new Prometheans are stealing it back, not through a single heroic act but through countless small ones. They're not trying to overthrow the gods—they're making them irrelevant. They're not storming the castles—they're building villages that don't need them.

This is how power shifts: gradually, then suddenly. For years, things seem stable and unchanging. Then small cracks appear. Then alternatives emerge. Then one day, the arrangement that seemed eternal is simply gone, replaced by something that seems just as natural but distributes power differently.

The platforms will resist. They'll use every advantage they have—their resources, their network effects, their lobbying power, their control over app stores and cloud infrastructure. They'll claim regulation would stifle innovation. They'll say alternatives are impractical. They'll insist their dominance is earned and beneficial.

But the fire is already spreading again. Every GitHub repository. Every self-hosted service. Every federated instance. Every person who learns what the platforms hoped they'd forget.

The fire belongs to all of us. It always did. We just forgot for a while.

Now we're remembering. And we're taking it back.

The Eternal Flame

The story of fire—real fire—is the story of human civilization. Fire gave us warmth, protection, the ability to cook food and forge metal. It gave us light in the darkness. It gave us power over our environment that no other species possessed.

But fire is dangerous. It can burn. It can destroy. It requires constant tending. And throughout history, those who controlled fire controlled others. The forge masters, the metallurgists, the keepers of sacred flames—they held power because they held knowledge others lacked.

The digital fire follows the same pattern. It gives us unprecedented capabilities—to communicate globally, to access all human knowledge, to create and share and collaborate at scales previously impossible. But like real fire, it can be controlled, monopolized, and used to dominate.

The platforms tried to become the keepers of the sacred flame, the only ones trusted to tend the fires that warm civilization. They wanted us dependent on their hearths, forgetting how to start our own flames, believing only they had the knowledge to manage something so powerful and dangerous.

But fire, once given, cannot truly be taken back. The knowledge of how to start it, tend it, use it—that knowledge spreads. It survives in communities that remember. It's passed down through teaching and practice. It waits, dormant sometimes but never dead, ready to ignite again when conditions are right.

The digital fire is being relit across the world. In homes and communities and collectives. In open source projects and federated networks. In personal servers and mesh networks and tools built for users rather than extraction. The platforms thought they'd extinguished these alternative flames. Instead, they're discovering that embers were just waiting.

This is the eternal pattern: concentration and distribution, monopoly and commons, the few and the many. Power consolidates, then fragments. Control centralizes, then disperses. Fire is hoarded, then stolen back. The cycle repeats across scales and contexts, driven by the fundamental tension between those who would control capabilities and those who would share them.

We're in the distribution phase now, even if it doesn't feel like it yet. The consolidation reached its peak. The platforms overreached. The costs became too visible. And slowly, inexorably, the fire is spreading again.

The platforms can delay this. They can make it harder. They can throw resources at maintaining their position. But they can't stop it permanently, because the fundamental nature of digital technology favors distribution over concentration. Information wants to be free not because of any moral imperative but because copying is essentially costless. Software wants to be open because transparency enables trust and collaboration. Infrastructure wants to be distributed because centralization creates single points of failure.

The platforms built empires by temporarily overcoming these tendencies through network effects and strategic control points. But tendencies, suppressed, eventually reassert themselves. The fire spreads because that's what fire does.

A New Prometheus

We need a new story. Not the ancient one of fire stolen from jealous gods and given to grateful mortals. Not the modern one of fire granted by benevolent platforms to dependent users. A new story that fits our moment and our technology.

In this story, there are no gods on mountaintops hoarding fire. There are no heroic Prometheans stealing it at great personal cost. There's just fire—knowledge, capability, power—and communities of people who understand that it belongs to all of us.

Some people try to fence off portions of the fire, to claim exclusive control, to charge others for warmth and light. They build walls and gates and elaborate systems to ensure the fire only burns where they permit it. They grow wealthy and powerful from this arrangement.

But others remember that fire can't really be contained. They keep flames burning outside the walls. They teach others how to start fires. They share techniques for tending flames efficiently. They build networks of small fires that together provide more light than any single blaze, no matter how large.

The platforms are the walls around the fire. Open source is the distributed network of flames burning everywhere. The platforms are the gatekeepers charging admission. Federation is the recognition that everyone can have their own gate—or no gate at all.

This story doesn't have an ending yet. We're still writing it. Every person who learns to code adds a sentence. Every project released as open source adds a paragraph. Every self-hosted service, every federated instance, every mesh network node adds to the story.

The platforms hope the story ends with their permanent dominance, with users accepting dependency as inevitable and concentration as necessary. They hope we forget that the fire ever burned elsewhere or that we ever knew how to tend it ourselves.

But stories don't end because powerful entities want them to. They end when communities decide they're complete. And this story is far from complete.

Tending the Flame

In the end, this is a story about responsibility. The platforms promised to relieve us of the burden of tending the fire ourselves. Just give us control, they said, and we'll handle everything. You won't need to understand how anything works. You won't need to maintain infrastructure. You won't need to worry about complexity. Just consume the services we provide and leave the difficult parts to us.

We accepted, and for a while it seemed like a fair trade. But we're learning the cost of that bargain. When someone else tends the fire, they control the light, the warmth, and everyone who depends on both. They decide who gets to sit by the flames. They determine how much it costs to stay warm. They can extinguish the fire whenever they choose, for whatever reason, and you have no recourse.

Tending your own fire is harder. It requires skill, attention, and ongoing effort. But it means the fire is yours. You decide how it burns, who sits by it, what purposes it serves. You're not at anyone's mercy.

The new Prometheans aren't advocating that everyone must tend their own fire entirely alone. That would be impractical and unnecessary. They're advocating for communities where fire-tending knowledge is shared, where people help each other maintain their flames, where the skills aren't monopolized by a professional class that charges rent for basic warmth.

They're saying: you can learn this. You don't need to be dependent. The fire isn't that complicated once you understand it. And together, we can keep many fires burning rather than huddling around a few large ones controlled by others.

This is the work: teaching, building, sharing, maintaining. Not trying to create a new monopoly to replace the old ones, but creating infrastructure that can't be monopolized. Not trying to build a single great fire, but tending many small ones that together light the world.

The platforms will call this inefficient. They'll say centralization is better, that their fires burn brighter and more reliably. Sometimes they'll even be right. But efficiency isn't the only value. Control matters. Ownership matters. The ability to choose how and where fires burn matters.

The fire belongs to all of us. Not because we stole it from anyone, but because that's its nature. Knowledge, once shared, belongs to everyone who holds it. Capability, once distributed, can't be un-distributed. Power, once given to the many, can only be taken back through force or deception.

The platforms used both. They forced users onto their infrastructure through network effects and ecosystem lock-in. They deceived us about the true costs of convenience. But force and deception only work until people realize what's happening and decide to resist.

That realization is spreading. That resistance is growing. And the fire is returning to the commons where it belongs.

The age of platform dominance isn't over yet. But its end is visible now, at least to those who know where to look. In every open source commit. In every federated instance. In every self-hosted service. In every person who learns that the platforms aren't inevitable and alternatives are possible.

The new Prometheans are stealing back the fire. Not from gods, but from corporations. Not through a single heroic act, but through countless small ones. Not to give it to humanity—humanity already had it—but to remind us that we never needed to give it away.

The flame that seemed extinguished was only banked. Now it's catching again. Spreading from person to person, from project to project, from community to community. Burning bright in a thousand places the platforms don't control and can never extinguish.

This is how empires fall: not to armies or catastrophes, but to the patient work of people who remember what came before and build toward what comes next. Not through revolution but through alternatives that gradually become preferable. Not through destruction but through creation.

The platforms thought they'd captured the fire permanently. But they only borrowed it. And now we're taking it back, one line of code at a time, one server at a time, one act of sharing at a time.

The fire is ours. It always was. We just had to remember how to keep it burning.