If you haven’t yet read Part 1, I suggest starting there before continuing.

The real value people experience on platforms like Instagram — targeted reach, visual discovery, and community building — is genuine. Small businesses especially rely on it to find customers and tell their stories.

Yet Meta’s current model pairs that value with invasive surveillance and centralized data harvesting. For decades, the story that this is just the cost of doing business online has been enormously profitable. That story is now reaching its limits.

The deeper question is: what would a coherent, sovereign advertising and marketing system actually look like in practice?

Read the rest of this essay on Lynn Marie's Digital Garden.