Digital transformation is remaking the human world, but few are satisfied with how that's been going. That's especially true in media, where the dominant model of targeted advertising derived from data surveillance and used to fund free-to-the-public services like social media and search is increasingly viewed as unsustainable and undesirable. Today, internet giants finance contact between people by charging third parties who wish to influence those who are connecting. The result is an internet -- and, indeed, a society -- built on injected manipulation instead of consensual discourse. A system optimized for influencing unwitting people has flooded the digital world with perverse incentives that lead to violations of privacy, manipulated elections, personal anxiety, and social strife. It has also made many of the largest tech companies immensely powerful. A classic example of online behemoth power, what we call a "siren server," is YouTube, owned by Google. The network effects that always accompany digital entities allow YouTube to control both the production and the consumption of digital video. They are at once a monopoly and a monopsony (a sole purchaser of data), deciding which content producers will be paid, in the manner of a communist central planner, and determining what content billions of users will consume. Tech giants have become so influential that they function like transnational governments charting the future to a greater degree than any national government. Facebook and Google, for example, have effectively become central mediators unilaterally determining the balance between free speech and election manipulation for all major developed democracies. At the same time as the widespread decline in the agency of market participants, rhetoric from the tech sector suggests a coming wave of underemployment due to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. The fear of a future in which people are increasingly treated as valueless and devoid of economic agency has elevated the ambitions of universal basic income advocates. Their rhetoric leaves room for only two outcomes: Either there will be mass poverty despite technological advances, or much wealth will have to be taken under central, national control through a social wealth fund to provide citizens a universal basic income. Yet both dramatic inequality and what we might call "fully automated luxury communism" are dystopias that hyper-concentrate power and undermine or ignore the value of data creators in a way similar to how the market value of "women's work" in the home has long been ignored and debased.