I send your essay around my department and a colleague had an interesting reply that brought up some open source projects that also enter into this kind of debate. I thought I’d relay that portion here:

I would only add that while its useful to critique dominance by corporate or federal forces, that leaves one with the impression that they are the only players out there. As an alternative, one might consider Ushahidi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi). Created by Kenyans (both white and black) during their 2007 election crisis (Ushahidi is Swahili for “testimony”), it is open source (unlike Facebook and Google’s people locators) and has been deployed as both democratic resistance (election fraud, violence) and crisis communications system in an astonishingly wide range of sites: for example in the US it was used by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (which STS folks have contributed to) for their mapping during the BP spill; to aid pro-democracy demonstrators in Libya; earthquake victims in Hati, etc.