Welcoming the digital as a new agora

Picture the current situation: a table full of delicacies, linen as white as snow, beautiful cutlery; you’ve invited your friends to dinner. Everyone is happy and deep in conversation. All realise, however, that nothing on that table is yours. You only (still) own the house in which you throw the party. GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, and BAT: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, play on that table and they get richer every minute from our very own feedback. They build new services on top of that.
You realise that at some point soon they will take over your house. They already offer to pay the rent of the patio, and do you really need the attic? You are in an uphill battle. You have no tools to fight off the invaders as you are only now, when it is too late, beginning to realise these friends you have invited are taking reality itself, what is “normal” to another level. And as the peasants learned how to tumble the knights from their horses, the world was never the same again.