Elon Musk, who has been innovating the world of space travel and electric vehicles for 30 years (and clearly not innovating the world of tunnel building), says his next step is to build “X, an app for everything.” I decided that there was. The platform, formerly known as Twitter, is ostensibly a one-stop shop for everything people do on their phones: banking, watching videos, messaging, calling, gaming, and of course posting shit. You will be able to do this.
Mr. Musk may be unique, but his ambitions are not. There are also many platforms trying to do the same thing. It’s about building a digital ecosystem that you can live in for the rest of your life. In fact, in the summer of 2022, he even said that the inspiration for X was his WeChat, a Chinese anything-goes app run by Tencent.
But his ambition to create an inclusive platform for the masses may be misguided at best and downright evil at worst. “To think that he can build something like WeChat for a Western audience is a fundamental misunderstanding of what WeChat is,” said Graham Webster, editor of his DigiChina project at Stanford University. ,” he told The Daily Beast.
However, there are many apps in the US that ostensibly aim to do the same thing. With your Apple ID or Google Account, you can sign up and make payments almost anywhere on the Internet, and increasingly, anywhere in the real world. Both companies offer a range of products that allow you to do more of your work and play with friendly supervision.
When you watch YouTube on Android using Chrome, you are wrapped in three layers of Google products, just as the money you pay your cousin with ApplePay via iMessage on your iPhone passes through three slices of Apple. . Meta continues to be active, but the success rate can be said to be low. In Zuck’s ideal world, he’d strap on an Oculus Rift, pay for it using his Meta cryptocurrency, Libra, and have ticketed Metaverse meet-ups with his favorite Instagram stars. . Failed in 2020.
Whether you succeed or fail, the core goal remains the same. It’s a highly competitive “every app race.”
Such an app would be very useful. After all, who wouldn’t prefer one login over countless subscriptions, platforms, web stores, and software? But the reality is that anything-apps can also undermine democracy. That’s because tech giants don’t build them for the same reason they build products and businesses, they build them because people build governments.
These apps aim to shape the way people experience reality, thereby making it easier to pursue the platform’s vision of how the world should work. Whether that means colonizing Mars, defending human rights, or never having to follow someone else’s orders, never again.
There is a growing trend among many researchers to view large tech companies as institutions attempting (or stumbling) to meet governance challenges.Shoshana Zuboff, author era of surveillance capitalismsees “governance of governance” as a logical outcome of a technology platform’s business strategy. That means more and more life will happen on the platform, and more influence over what people know and who they know. “Concentrations of economic power produce concomitant concentrations of governance and social power,” Zuboff writes.
European Commission and FTC Chair Lina Khan has already stated that in the United States and Europe, platforms such as Apple, Amazon, and Google “essentially act as regulators” in the areas of the economy they control (such as the App Store). It concludes that . Similarly, Instagram and TikTok regulate the actions of influencers who rely on their platforms to create, distribute, and promote content. Meanwhile, Google reportedly regulates web publishers through SEO rules that prioritize “expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.”
According to European officials quoted in Zuboff’s latest article, “These companies now have the power to constrain the choices of democratically elected sovereign states. They are the gatekeepers of society. is.”
Western WeChat
Of course, the governance power of technology platforms is not just a Western phenomenon. His WeChat in China is his one big app, which includes a series of mini-apps created by other companies. WeChat’s approximately 1.3 billion users log on to pay bills, buy gifts for their kids, romance, doom scroll, collaborate remotely with colleagues, order food, and see other people’s vacation photos. doing.
As a business idea, a Western WeChat clone is attractive. Centralized management (and data collection) of all these activities has the potential to generate significant revenue. But according to Webster, WeChat was a “coincidence” and succeeded in China’s unique cultural and economic conditions, which were “isolated from international competition” by the government, which X enjoys. It’s a privilege not to have.
No one created the idea for WeChat in a high-level meeting of the Communist Party. But governments have been using the platform from the beginning. This app is integrated into the way the Chinese Communist Party runs the country. In addition to helping governments enforce censorship, WeChat is also reportedly used to intimidate dissidents and track citizens living abroad.
The app bends power in a more subtle way, reminiscent of the power that Facebook and other social media platforms have. The app formats discourse, enforces it with algorithms, incorporates censorship, and touches every aspect of life, from the most public to the most private. Perhaps Chinese technology blogger Lawrence Li said it best in a conversation with: Sixth Tone: “It shapes our minds and our cultural lives.”
Webster said a massive government crackdown that began in 2020 left WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, at a disadvantage. The reason is that “they have become so powerful that their influence has reached an intolerable level.” Tencent, like American tech giants such as Amazon, has become so large that it has become central to cultural life and can dictate terms to the small and medium-sized businesses that need to use its platform.
But more broadly, Tencent had become too ubiquitous and too influential to roam freely. China’s entire app and digital ecosystem was unplanned, but the Chinese Communist Party was willing to take advantage of it. “When governments see a problem or an opportunity, they act within the framework that has been established,” Webster explained.
Building that framework is where the power of WeChat, or any app, really shines. As in China, US surveillance platforms are increasingly creating “frameworks” within which governments, businesses, and individuals operate. As it grows to encompass more aspects of life, it assumes more governance functions.
In other words, the bigger these apps get, the more they become like governments than tech companies.
Everything, Anywhere, All at Once
According to biographer Walter Isaacson, every business decision Elon Musk makes is about saving humanity. The threats he believes are saving humanity include (but are not limited to) the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and the “wakemind virus.”
Building spaceships and electric cars are just part of his solution to saving the world. Also, friendly facilities must be provided. Colonizing Mars cannot be tied down to bureaucratic red tape.
Back on Earth, the efforts of Apple, Google, and Meta are similarly profound and world-changing, but their politics are more akin to the neoliberal West they come from than Musk’s beloved science fiction novels. It may be in line with the ideological ecosystem.
Understanding every app as a political project does not mean that it is not a capitalist venture. It also doesn’t mean the people building it know what they’re doing. But no matter how you slice it, many of the most important decisions in our society are made by the platforms we use every day, and by the people who build them.