Technology

What I Would Build Today

I am asked, occasionally, what Niepokalanow would look like if I built it today. The question is hypothetical, but I find it useful because it forces me to separate the principles from the particular technologies, and the principles are what matter.

At Niepokalanow, we had a printing press, a radio station, and plans for a film studio and an airstrip. These were the most advanced communication technologies available in the 1930s, and we adopted them because they allowed us to reach the most people with the most efficiency.

Open Source and the City of the Immaculata

In 1927, I started building something outside Warsaw. We called it Niepokalanow – the City of the Immaculata. By the late 1930s, it had grown into the largest religious community in the world: over 700 friars, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000, a monthly magazine reaching a million readers, a radio station, and we were planning a film studio and an airstrip.

We built all of this with almost no money. The friars who joined us gave their labor freely. The technology we used – printing presses, radio transmitters – was the most advanced available. And every piece of content we produced was distributed as widely and as cheaply as possible.

The Digital Divide Is a Moral Divide

At Niepokalanow, we made a decision that shaped everything we built: we would price our publications at cost, or below cost, because the people who most needed the information were the people who could least afford to pay for it.

This was not philanthropy. It was a design principle. A communication system that excludes the people who most need to communicate is not a communication system. It is a privilege system with a technology layer.

The Platform Problem

In 1922, I founded Rycerz Niepokalanej — Knight of the Immaculata. We started with one printing press. By 1938, we were publishing content for 750,000 subscribers.

We did this with technology that, by today’s standards, was primitive. Hand-set type. Manual presses. Physical distribution.

But we understood something that today’s platform builders have forgotten: infrastructure should serve the community, not extract from it.

Let me show you what that means.

The Extraction Model

Today’s major platforms — the social networks, the content aggregators, the app stores — operate on what I will call the extraction model.

The Case for Community-Owned Platforms

I built a media operation that was owned by its community. The community of friars at Niepokalanow owned the printing presses, the radio station, the distribution network. No external shareholder demanded returns. No investor pressured us to maximize engagement. The people who produced the media and the people it served were the same people, and this alignment of interest was the foundation of everything we built.

I am going to make the case that this model – community ownership of communication platforms – is not a historical curiosity but the most practical solution to the fundamental misalignment at the heart of corporate social media.

The Attention Economy Is an Extraction Economy

I want to describe an economy that did not exist in my time but that I recognize immediately, because its structure is identical to other extraction economies I have studied: the attention economy.

The attention economy is a system in which human attention – your capacity to focus, to notice, to care – is treated as a raw material to be extracted, refined, and sold. The platforms that operate in this economy do not sell you a product. They sell your attention to advertisers. You are not the customer. You are the resource.