I’ve been thinking about gravity. Gravity wells, specifically: pulling me toward certain products and technologies. Google, Meta, Microsoft etc. I feel the pull every day.
These companies started by launching great products. The technology was immensely useful, and that made the companies powerful. And power begets power. In the last decades, they’ve grown exponentially in their influence, to a point where they’ve become essential parts of our daily lives worldwide.
Here’s what perplexes me. I don’t want to be a customer (or product) of these companies, but I still am.
I don’t like Facebook. I don’t want to use it. I don’t want to be Meta’s customer. But my children’s school parent group is a Facebook group. I can say “let’s not use Facebook”, and they’ll say “stop being annoying, and go with the flow”. I can pick a fight with my fellow parents, or begrudgingly use Facebook.
At this point, not choosing Facebook, means opting out of a part of my local community. This product has power over me.
Am I being dramatic? “The market decides”, after all, doesn’t it? I can “vote with my feet” and just use something else. True, in a way. I can leave, but it won’t do any good if no-one will leave with me. Leaving a social network takes massive collective action. And let’s be real: I won’t be the one to organise that action.
Facebook’s gravity well is its network effect. It sucks me in, even as I pull away. Escaping it requires a massive exertion of force. And I have a million other things to care about. That makes voting with my feet (or euros) a difficult thing to do.
As the network grows, the gravity well deepens.
Google has a different gravity. I don’t like them anymore, either. Reading “Don’t Be Evil” by Claire Stapleton tipped me over the edge. Love the engineering, but not the leadership, and not really the product either.
Still, I orbit Google. 20+ years of vigorous data collection makes it hard for a competitor to catch up. I’m very happy to see we’re making progress on this in EU with the European Search Perspective, but we’re not there yet.
I understand that I’m leading up to an argument against monopoly and the consolidation of power. You’ve heard it a thousand times before. But I think that many of us still fundamentally believe in this notion that the market can correct itself. Despite many reasons to correct, big tech seems to only have become more powerful.
Power begets power.
I’m no communist, not even a socialist. Used to be big on free markets, actually. But I’m realising that competing with these companies on their terms is near impossible in the current political climate. That would take an insane amount of will, force, energy. And you’d end up in the same place as where you started, only with some other company as a center of power.
If we want things to change, I think we need to play a different game. I think we bet hard on open technology. Open research, open source, open weights, open data.
Open technology lowers the barriers to entry, to innovation and to competition. As individuals, we can build it, use it, make it better. And as communities, we can choose it.
The onset friction might be higher, but in the long run it’s worth it. Linux runs most of the world’s servers. Is Linux as user-friendly as Windows or macOS? Hell no. But that’s changing. As the incumbent operating systems become increasingly bloated, Linux is becoming increasingly stable, customisable and easy to use. I love the energy that DHH has managed to create around Omarchy.
If we avoid open alternatives because they aren’t as far along as the closed ones - they won’t catch up. We have to accept some short-term pain for long term gain. Because if we choose the power, we feed the power. We give Google, Meta, et.al. more capital, polish and influence over us.
We need people excited about making open technology accessible and awesome. And we need people willing to adopt it before it catches up to the proprietary frontier.
We need capital willing to bet on the long term future of open tech. And we need governments to create market conditions that are favourable (or at least not hostile) to open technology.
If we do that, we shift the gravity. Away from Death Star situations. Toward smaller gravity wells, distributed among people. Each person has a little more power than they used to. Local businesses and governments have a little more leverage.
That’s what a distributed, localised version of power could look like in the 21st century.
And we’re at a tipping point: cost of software is going down, open source output is going up. Let’s use this moment. Instead of putting all our eggs in Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, Amodei, and Pinchai’s baskets, let’s put some in our own.
Let’s fight for open technology. A handful of mega-conglomerates cannot dominate billions of motivated people working collectively.
This isn’t incompatible with markets at all. Markets are great at making incentives for building new things. But if we create a favorable market for open technology, we can distribute power in a way that it isn’t today.
That’s worth fighting for.