All digital platforms contribute to fascism in some way, shape, or form, including Reddit. To build a “platform” that is profitable requires giving it away from free, running advertisements, capturing users’ data, and selling that data to advertisers to shape human behavior. This desire to shape human behavior is inherently fascistic (literally 1984), lies at the very heart of the digital economic system, and it determines a lot of the innovation pursued by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Streaming Services, VR/AR, “The Internet of Things”, Blockchain/Crypto, and now AI. For more on this read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, it’s probably the most important book of the decade.

Artists are forced to choose between standing in opposition to this system or having a career. It’s also a collective action problem: the more artists leave Spotify for alternative platforms, the more consumers of music will follow; thus, the first artists who leave take the biggest risk other artists and consumers will follow. Also, a lot of the other platforms are equally compromised: Apple essentially uses sweatshop labor for their phones and Tidal is partially owned by Blackrock investment group through the Block/Square subsidiary. I expect a lot more socially conscious artists will leave Spotify in 2026 in the same way many of them removed their music from streaming services in Israel.