Introduction

Has it ever occurred to you that around the turn of the century, the language we use to talk about technology shifted? In the 90s and early 2000s, we used to lower the volume on the radio when we got a phone call about a new television show. If you weren’t out to the shop, you might have browsed a website about an event you were interested in joining. This is no longer the case. Now, you tune in to Spotify as your friend tells you on WhatsApp or Instagram about their favourite Netflix show. After your purchase on Amazon, you update your Facebook app from the App Store to check out the page for that event you wanted to go to.

Notice the difference? All “modern” technology is capitalised and all “old” technology is in lower case. Each “modern” product is the One and Only, and each “old” product is only one of many. The current zeitgeist expects technology to come to us by brand names rather than generic descriptors. And when brand names take the place of generic categories, they may even adopt their orthography and grammatical function. We no longer go to the App Store, but to the app store. No more WhatsApp groups, only whatsapp groups. No more searching the web, only googling.

What has happened?

Why have generic category names disappeared? In other words, how did a handful of companies manage to gobble so much of the market that, within their respective niches, only they are the last ones standing? If you ask me, it has everything to do with how much easier it is to spread software than physical devices, especially on the internet. A purely digital product is not bound by conventional laws of logistics. If you are the first one to write a piece of software, you can ship it to a worldwide customer base at a fraction of the cost that the manufacturer of a physical product needs.

The second factor that has made a huge impact is the shops that sell the software. The primary way people interact with software in today’s society is the mobile app, and the only two mobile operating systems people actually use revolve around getting those apps from one centralised store. The most trending apps rise to the top of the charts nationwide, giving them even more visibility. This rapid exposure is one of the major characteristics of centralised app stores: they tend to prop up to giants and stifle the smaller alternatives.

Both of those factors combined, i.e., the digital nature of modern technology as well as its centralised place for purchase, have one combined effect: once you get big, you dominate the market. With software, it seems like every player is either globally huge or totally insignificant. Everyone is acutely aware of when they are only using the second most popular product on the market and will switch to the most popular one in the blink of an eye.

One of those trendwatchers is named Mark Zuckerberg. When he saw that WhatsApp was trending and threatening Facebook Messenger’s position of dominance, he bought the company for a whopping 19 billion USD. The reason? Purely to remain the biggest player in the game, no other justification required. Simply eliminating a competitor was worth the money. Since its purchase, Facebook (the company that now goes by “Meta”) has not made significant attempts to monetise WhatsApp in a way that compensates for the 19 billion USD purchase. In other words: to Facebook’s board of directors, market dominance requires no further justification in terms of calculable profits.

“But everyone uses it”

The result of this rise in concentration of the software market is a rise in defaultism on the customers’ side. People no longer ask each other whether they use WhatsApp, or Spotify for that matter. It is simply assumed that being a citizen of the modern world involves being a customer of a set list of companies for a set list of products. Now say that one out loud. If you ever get your hands on a time machine, I dare you to travel back to the early 2000s and watch the looks on people’s faces when you say this.

The typical justification for participating in this monopolistic system is “But everyone uses it”. Indeed, most modern technologies, in particular those revolving around communication, get their value from having everyone on board with them. This trope is as old as time, and it also applies to the old-fashioned 20th century technology that I appear to glorify: phones, e-mail, and radio all rely on reaching a broad audience and, recognisably, that “everyone uses it”. If this adage is nothing new, shouldn’t I just accept that it applies to the current technology all the same? By now, you can anticipate my rebuttal: we have redefined what “it” means. Now, “it” refers to a specific product whereas it used to be a generic category of products. To return to my provocative tone: in the current zeitgeist, “everyone uses it” is an open endorsement of monopoly.

What is particularly nefarious about communication technology that “everyone” uses is that it is almost impossible to use it by exception. As soon as you have an account on WhatsApp, people will use that as their default communication channel with you. All doubt is removed if you send them one WhatsApp message by exception: they will now mentally register it as the way you communicate. I have tried to do this by exception. Twice. It did not work as intended. There is simply never a moment when it is socially desirable for you to respond to their birthday party invitation by going on a political tirade about how - whilst you would love to come and bring the perfect birthday present - the casual use of the technology with which the invitation was sent is an implicit endorsement of the monopolistic tendencies of a multinational corporation by capitalising on human interaction in a way that totally went under society’s radar (breathe). Perhaps you might write an essay about it.

Going forward

Now, is this essay just a long advertisement for an alternative app that only nerds use? Not quite. The go-to messaging app for filthy autistic communist tech nerds (such as myself, apparently) is called Signal, and it seems to be liked by people from all walks of life, or at least the strict subset of us who choose to use smartphones. It is lauded by experts for its security and by users for its sleek user interface. It is free of charge and logs minimal information about you. I use it myself, and I would recommend it to everyone.

So where is the catch? It is still a centralised product that is not interchangeable with any alternatives. Signal is made by one entity called the Signal Foundation. Granted, unlike the developer of that other messaging app, this non-profit organisation is completely uninterested in the details in the metadata of your chats, your contact list, your location, or the link with your Facebook and Instagram activity, but it partially suffers from the illness of our time. That is, it reinforces our focus on specific technology products rather than standards that specify how products from different companies can interoperate. It is for this reason that I only see Signal as a short-term solution.

Perhaps another messaging service can take us further: Matrix. This is not an app, but a network, quite like the phone or e-mail network. Applications from different vendors can connect to it and nobody owns all of it. I have not given it a shot, though, because I, too, am sensitive to that age-old trope: “no-one I know uses it”.

One mantra that I swear by is that social problems do not have technological solutions. Sure, technology can help us out, but it cannot address the root of the problem, which is usually a pattern of human behaviour. In this case, that pattern is the expectation of technology to come as products rather than standards. As a society, we need to recognise the value of interoperability and denounce market concentration. How about a label for that frame of thought? I call it technological pluralism. We cannot all become technological pluralists simply by downloading this or that alternative app. We need to have conversations about these values and what prevents us from enacting them. As for which messaging service you use for those conversations, I have no preference.