Big Tech is everywhere, and those behemoths can only be disrupted by similarly sized challengers. Therein lies the problem.
Only large challengers can take out tech giants, and that’s an issue
I couldn’t tell you when it happened exactly. But some time in the past decade or so, I went from being the sort of child of the 1990s who’d watch TV to unwind to someone who’d choose YouTube instead. Cooking shows, interviews, sports highlights — whatever pops up is now how I veg out.
Every day, more than one billion users watch more than one billion hours of content on YouTube. This is how huge digital platforms work: because they are so enormous in scale, they end up becoming the thing to which many of us default.
That’s not to say they are immune to challenge, however. This week, it was revealed that the short-form video app TikTok is gaining on YouTube. In the U.S. and U.K., users are spending more time on TikTok watching lip syncing, skits and rants there than on Google’s video site, which is a remarkable shift for an app so comparatively new.
So YouTube isn’t impossible to unseat. By extension, that should mean that Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat and others are also not safe from disruption.
Yet a lingering trouble is that tech mainstays can only really be disrupted by similarly sized challengers. That is, it takes a giant to unseat a giant. And that dynamic is a problem for all of us. Tech giants are like black holes: they absorb everything and bend light around them, and the internet and our lives are worse off for their domineering scale.
Size is a problem because of what are called network effects. As more and more users pile on to a platform, the popularity itself becomes an entrenching factor. If everyone is on YouTube or TikTok or whatever, then you, too, must be there if you wish to participate in contemporary culture or make money.
That dynamic has a circular effect that both encourages further growth and discourages people from leaving. (Think, for example, of the number of people who claim to hate Facebook or Twitter but who stay there nonetheless.)
Yet with that size comes the seemingly impossible problem of moderation. It clearly seems a problem that misinformation and bigotry can spread on these platforms. But, on YouTube, a billion of hours of content is uploaded each day. It is impossible to fully filter that.
If that weren’t enough, that scale then requires software called recommendation algorithms to suggest to people what they might like to see. Such software is always imperfect, and has built-in biases. YouTube, for example, is notorious for recommending increasingly extreme or bizarre videos to people who might dabble in a clip from podcaster Joe Rogan or right-wing author Jordan Peterson.
We are thus in a strange double bind. Our experience of the internet is inevitably tied to huge companies with multibillion-person user bases because the economics and pragmatic reality simply work that way. But that same size and scale carries inherent problems that in many ways make the world worse.
TikTok is a clear example. True, there is undoubtedly an enormous quantity of creativity and expression on the app. Like all technology, it lends itself to particular things. As but one example, the small frame of the smartphone camera has appeared to encourage a particular focus on the body and commodification. While some young people are clearly using this for empowering themselves or pushing back against archaic norms, there is also a much more straightforward tendency toward objectification.
The “black hole” effect is the recognition and even potential income of the app shapes our behaviour in particular ways, and very frequently not for the better.
That seems to be a stubborn and perhaps inherent issue with all social media: something about the scale and structure of it seems to eventually overshadow the obvious benefits and upsides of free expression and a space for creativity with the lowest common denominator.
The answer to that problem, however, cannot simply be to quit social media. While it may work on an individual level for some, broad social changes are never addressed solely through individual action.
It’s worth considering a pushback, though. Last week, Facebook launched a pair of smart glasses with popular brand RayBan. The glasses look like a normal pair of shades, but contain a couple of cameras to take photographs and videos.
The appeal is clear. Who among us hasn’t wanted to quickly snap a shot of something pretty or funny without taking a phone out of one’s pocket?
But the image of a world in which millions of people walk around with cameras on their faces is a profoundly dystopian one. It also, at least for now, feels inevitable: that the convenience and appeal of a shiny new technology will encourage uptake, the popularity of which will cement it, and then we are forced to deal with the problems of privacy and voyeurism and who knows what else.
That is how digital technology works. One day you’re watching TV, then somehow years later, you’re glued to YouTube on your phone. Then later still, to images from a pair of sleek glasses. One doesn’t exactly know how it happened, but it happened all the same.
And unless there comes a point where we can offer an alternative to this late capitalist vision of the future, that same surreptitious change will keep on occurring — silently, stealthily, yet devastating all the same.