22 ms·

An ‘everything app’ would be bad for liberal democracies and free markets

348 points by nitin-pai 4y ago

davidkuennen 4y ago
And then there will be apps within the everything app and one of these apps will want to become the everything app within the everything app. Funny.
- daveslash 4y ago
  It's apps all the way down. Jokes aside, you're absolutely right - "Facebook Apps" have been a thing for over a decade. And before Facebook, AOL was like an "Everything App" that had apps within it. Same story.... new marketing folks.
butterfi 4y ago
Our phones are already SuperApps, this is an attempt at redistricting.
- pjerem 4y ago
  This. OSes already are "SuperApps" having access to basically everything.
- eternalban 4y ago
  What do you mean by redistricting? Expand please.
  - indymike 4y ago
    Redefining who controls different parts of the ecosystem. For example, making it so apple mail is not the main controller of email on iphone, or the app store being the main controller for getting apps onto the device. It's just put everything in one app, and then have control. It's not very creative, and is really just a centralization play.
    - eternalban 4y ago
      Thanks.
- etiam 4y ago
  Agreed. Given the headline main thrust it's a shame so many are effectively forced to using one out the duopoly already. Some compulsively "modern" countries have in practice made subjugation before either Google or Apple mandatory for full functionality in society. Identification, payment, access to information about common goods, etc, have already been burdened with an abundance of friction for someone who's not constantly carrying one of these tracking and monitoring devices.
- Levitz 4y ago
  A phone is a physical purchased good though, that sets it in a whole different category, you can't prevent someone from getting a phone, generally, and he has freedom to choose how to use it. The implicit requirement to have a phone is a whole different matter that can be argued about, but that conversation is also about mail addresses or bank accounts and even further away from what the article comments on.
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  This is the real reason WeChat exists and that there's no equivalent (or market for one) in the west. The built-in apps on iOS and Android for messaging, payment, mapping, photo storage, and so forth serve the needs of a majority of users while consolidating market power for the platform operators Apple and Google. These integrated experiences had gaps in China, which were filled by Tencent, which then became a sort of virtual platform operator, essentially running its own virtual set of built-in apps on top of foreign-made operating systems. There's no market for a replacement for a built-in app suite in the west so long as the existing ones are meeting users' needs, which is why we haven't seen Facebook succeed at this. I'm not sure where Musk thinks this market for the "X app" is going to come from.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    > messaging, payment, mapping, photo storage It’s funny, out of the four things you listed, WeChat does not provide half of them. So much for “everything”.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> It’s no coincidence at all that WeChat is the only “everything app” anyone can cite, and it comes from China, an authoritarian regime. It makes sense that it would come from a more authoritarian country first. But Whatsapp, say, could add payments and similar features if they were valuable to users. This is all commentary on something Elon Musk probably said in the hope that investors would fling cash at him, of course.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The internet is the everything app; it's currently somewhat decentralized but it's becoming more and more centralized every day. And the benefits of centralization are immediate and obvious; the downsides are hidden, localized, and not clear.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    The internet isn’t an “app” but browsers are.
  - criddell 4y ago
    So if an everything app is terrible for liberal democracies and free markets and the internet is the everything app, then it follows that the internet is terrible for liberal democracies and free markets.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I would be inclined to agree, though whether that shows more the problems with liberal democracies and free markets or with the internet is still to decide.
    - butterfi 4y ago
      The internet is to apps what roads are to cars. Don’t blame the road for bad drivers.
      - bombcar 4y ago
null_object 4y ago
I think John Gruber[0] already said all that needs to be said about this latest Elon Musk fantasy: 'who looks at Twitter of all things and says “I’d like to see this expand in scope such that a lot more, if not all, of my digital life can be here”?' [0] https://daringfireball.net/2022/10/everything https://daringfireball.net/2022/10/everything
- tomcam 4y ago
  Which of these two gentlemen understands the zeitgeist better?
  - null_object 4y ago
    > Which of these two gentlemen understands the zeitgeist better? I sort of understand the downvote for citing Gruber (I'm no fan of his Apple adoration, either - although I don't see it's relevance in this context). But Twitter?? I have Twitter redirect automatically to Nitter in all my browsers, but even ignoring the technical shortcomings of the platform, it's mostly such a sewer of garbage these days, I honestly think Gruber was right in this case.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I think I understand the intent and indeed the article links Bloomberg article suggesting the same. Musk envisions it as US WeChat. I hate it, but I hate it the same way I hate Paypal. Idea though is not far fetched and is way more sustainable than effectively running a bot farm mixed with corporate PR and customer service, but there I go being a luddite.
gw99 4y ago
Isn't that the intent of it? Same as purchasing Twitter?
tomphoolery 4y ago
I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is already taken by X.com which he founded, but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook, and the reason why other social networks like Instagram and Twitter exist _at all_ is because Facebook could not keep everyone on their network. Lest we forget, Facebook was the ONLY social network people used for a good long while, at least when I was graduating HS and entering college. You had Facebook for actual social networking, band/music pages on MySpace, and everything else was essentially porn bots and pedophiles, aka "spam city". So you have to wonder, if an everything app actually is a good idea, why couldn't the one company who had the most opportunity at the perfect time with as much funding as they could possibly need...not be able to do it? Just because something works in China, doesn't mean it will work everywhere else. Actually, I would say that if something works in China, your best bet is that it _won't_ work anywhere else. TikTok being a notable exception.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  And TikTok is maybe proof that the "everything apps" don't work so well even in China; if they did then there would, by definition, be no need for TikTok.
  - jlmorton 4y ago
    Note that WeChat has a Douyin-competing product, "Channels."
    - rsynnott 4y ago
      Oh, sure; so does Facebook. Douyin/TikTok is clearly the market leader in both its incarnations, tho.
  - chrischen 4y ago
    Also Taobao/Tmall and Alipay is completely separate. WeChat certainly filled in a lot of holes in iOS such as QR code scanning (which didn’t get native support until a few years ago) so it provided a sort of OS within the phone OS to get a utility knife of features being used in China that Apple neglected. But I wouldn’t say they have complete domination of all markets. Keep in mind QR codes were a thing in China since the early 2010s, whereas the US didn’t start adopting QR codes until the later half of the decade when Apple finally made QR scanning part of the OS… because Apple was hell bent on making BLE beacons a thing. So our “everything app” was iOS and Apple literally held us back by 5-8 years regarding QR code adoption just because of some corporate agenda…
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
Good business are created by the pressure of natural selection of capitalism. Everything App assumes that some company that started with an app for something specific will magically skip the entire natural selection of capitalism in all other areas. That's never going to happen, for the same reason that communism is interior to capitalism: central planning is much more inefficient. A startup succeeds or fails on its own. A company trying to do everything will have to include a lot of failures. The real problem is that all those companies eventually get bought and eventually end up as a team of some giant corporate which then abuses it. Pre planned everything app won't happen in capitalism, by Elon musk or anyone else, but an app that bought all others can happen.
andrewla 4y ago
Can we back up a second? An "everything app" is not a well-defined thing. Projecting whatever fears you have about the threat to liberal democracy onto the blank slate of an "everything app" says much more about you as a writer than it does about the concept of an "everything app". It's being taken as a given that WeChat is an "everything app" and that Elon Musk was using "everything app" in that (not universally accepted) context for the meaning of an "everything app". The article makes some tolerably good points about concentration of power and that's totally fine, but putting it in this context just seems silly.
- nitin-pai 4y ago
  Yes, your take is reasonable going by what’s in the article alone. It does not cite Musk’s expressed desire for Twitter to emulate WeChat. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/tech/everything-app-x-musk-china-wechat-learnings-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/tech/everything-app-x-musk-ch...
mellosouls 4y ago
Most of these criticisms already apply due to the dominance of the existing tech platforms in the west; its hardly new for the threat to liberal democracy from deplatforming to be voiced - perhaps though there is added urgency for those who now see it potentially affecting themselves and their beliefs.
mradek 4y ago
I wish I could go back in time and just curb crypto from growing into the current tumor it has become. Decentralization efforts applied to app servers and services would have been such a better use of time and energy imo. If there was a protocol for cab hailing, and anyone could roll it out for someone to connect to their network (like xmpp), and anyone could offer to become a driver or play another role like customer support, they earn their local currency and are a part of their local economy. The same protocol could be used in Norway and in Taiwan. There might be a gap that’s too hard to fill, and someone else could create another protocol that works in their local economy, maybe like a matrix protocol. They’re completely different but serve to solve the same problem of real time communication. Then Elon’s super app could offer users a platform which tries to implement multiple protocols, or have a in app protocol marketplace which is the sub apps. Apps for buying shoes, or buying groceries, or hiring movers. Users could become consumers or agents, so they can both work for various protocols and spend their money on them. They would be vetted and backed by the super app. It would be fully decentralized, except for the payment part. If you have everyone on your platform you don’t need to issue tokens and other bullshit. Just build something useful and they will come.
- scyclow 4y ago
  What exactly is precluding someone from building this today, regardless of the tumor?
  - donatj 4y ago
    It exists. There have been a number of decentralized cab hailing apps. I was never able to get a single cab on any of them. The problem is decentralized apps have shit advertising budgets.
    - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
      Which is because there's no money in it. If you build a centralized platform, you get to act as a middle man and skim off profit off every transaction, which you then reinvest in advertising and feature development. On the other hand, if you build a decentralized platform, you've essentially commoditized yourself: you can't skim off profits, because if you do, a cheaper node will just pop up, leading to a race to the bottom.
unity1001 4y ago
How is that so very different from now, where everything is already tracked and controlled by a handful of megacorps who seem to be able to cut access to their app at will...
nicgrev103 4y ago
I really don't get the value proposition. Isn't it startup 101 that you should not try to boil the ocean and be the everything of everything for everyone.
- airforms 4y ago
  That's startup 101. Twitter is not a startup.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Musk's playbook has been kind of more on the ocean-boiling side of things (SpaceX, for example).
  - nicgrev103 4y ago
    True, however, even then the initail focus was very spesific: Make a reuasable rocket. An everything app does a range of very different things like ride hailing, food delivery, cash transfer, chat, etc etc.
- Levitz 4y ago
  You go to the cinema, point to its location, purchase tickets for 5 of your friends, you give them their tickets and they pay you back, all within the same app. Adding payment processing to a chat app is just really, really convenient. I'm Spanish and we have a thing called "Bizum" here, you can send and receive money from and to anyone in your contact list instantly and free of charge. It's hugely popular even with no chat implementations.
  - MisterSandman 4y ago
    I call BS on that, chat and payments haven't gone well together in the past. The friction of sending money to another person is very low, I don't think people really care whether it's on the app they're already on, or they have to switch apps. Venmo tries to push it's messaging features but nobody really cared. People use Venmo because it's free transfers, they don't need a new chatting app that mixes money with memes. Welathsimple Cash tried that here in Canada but hasn't been terribly succesful either, and so has WhatsApp in India. The reason WeChat become popular because it had first movers advantage and used it's reach to be the first payment service of it's kind. People didn't use it because it integrated with chat, they used it because it was good.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
I don't want an everything app, I want an app full of app stores. A marketplace of marketplaces.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Gross. So every shop has to make 25 versions of all their codebases and builds.
  - nileshtrivedi 4y ago
    Marketplaces are only for distribution. It absolutely does not require separate codebases or builds, the same way a .exe installer can be made available on 100s of websites.
    - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      Right; if Apple won't allow porn apps, then someone should be able to publish their iOS porn app on a marketplace for porn apps. Same amount of work, but more choice for app vendors & users.
emptyparadise 4y ago
We already have an everything app. We have at least 5, in fact: Microsoft Windows, macOS, Ubuntu Linux, iOS, Android.
- airforms 4y ago
  Those aren't everything apps, those are everything platforms. You can barely do anything (other than browsing the web) with Windows alone, with no apps installed.
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    You can't really do anything on WeChat either without connecting to other services - exactly what the web browser is bundled for.
    - slmjkdbtl 4y ago
      Lots of people use it just for messaging (maybe not now since everyone NEED it for covid related mini-apps to enter places), but I get your point
elonhype42069 4y ago
I'm sorry, but maybe we should just stop giving all of Elon Musk half-assed thoughts so much airtime? Just ignore the guy for a minute and the world will be a better place, "liberal democracies" included By parroting his tweets to drive clicks to your own blog you're contributing to the problem, just like journalists putting him (and, formerly, Trump) on "breaking news" articles 24/7/365
- loceng 4y ago
  Just because he's only shared a short tweet about something, you're automatically assuming he's only half-ass thought about it?
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    I think it's pretty clear from the majority of his tweets that most are the result of a half-assed thought process.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - MisterSandman 4y ago
    Considering how his "full-ass" attempts at creating a self driving car or Hyperloop are going, yes?
- code_duck 4y ago
  This article has some decent points but I can’t imagine why someone would think that a one line tweet from Elon Musk merits an entire article. Just 2 weeks ago Musk informed us we would be able to use Tesla’s forthcoming truck to cross “seas that aren’t too choppy” because it will be “waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat”.
rospaya 4y ago
Within a span of one week Elon tweeted about two democracies conceding territory to autocratic regimes. An everything app that he would control is just an extension of the same mindset.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- loceng 4y ago
  Why are you assuming it would be a walled garden and where users don't have full data and network mobility - ideally required through laws that don't yet exist in most places?
  - rospaya 4y ago
    We don't have any idea how that would work, since the only "everything app" that exists is in China. OP's blog is saying the same thing - it's a move towards monopoly and it might not work otherwise.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gjsman-1000 4y ago
At what point do we realize that anybody can be a critic, anything can be worth criticism, and being a critic is very easy while doing anything of practical value is very difficult? The moment we realize this, I think that we should stop giving critics so much influence and acting like their criticisms are automatically valid for being criticisms. (Maybe it's just me, but I have increasingly low respect for critics because it is actually such a lazy, easy job that drags down everybody even trying to do something.)
- dEnigma 4y ago
  The healthy response to that situation is to just look at whatever good points critics raise, work on them, and ignore the rest. But best to check with someone else if "the rest" really doesn't contain anything valid that you should pay attention to as well.
chatterhead 4y ago
Elon's best move is to launch a Twitter-wide cryptocurrency that can be earned through watching advertisements, disabling adblockers, sharing data, and direct dollar swaps. He should create a third-party ecosystem for journalists, vendors and government validated "citizen IDs". All voluntary, but with incentives and benefits. If people thought the "checkmark" was a big deal just wait. There will be all sorts of tiers of validated personhood which will grant access to things others don't get by being anonymous. It's going to become a private company; and the currency doesn't need to be an open-trustless system; but rather a deanonymized one that won't trade on exchanges and won't be subject to the SEC rules the same way Dave & Busters isn't. Then, he should open Twitter up to share conversions from coins and sell Twitter back to the people as a people-owned and managed social media giant. He could double his money in less than 24 months. The first step of course is putting me in charge of the whole damn thing. - La Flama Blanca
dandare 4y ago
1st sentence: > Monopoly, the board game, is often held up as a demonstration of capitalism, teaching players how business works. I don't think I need to read any further.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  He's probably referring to the game's roots as a tool for promoting Georgism[1]. That sentence is pretty far divorced from reality though (unless you let "often" do an awful lot of work. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
- wiredearp 4y ago
  It is literally why the game was invented and how capitalism works. I can't tell if you are in denial of this or if you believe it so evident as to be a waste of your time. https://survivingtomorrow.org/monopoly-isnt-a-game-it-s-a-prophecy-a3644ad09a92 https://survivingtomorrow.org/monopoly-isnt-a-game-it-s-a-pr...
  - dandare 4y ago
    > It is literally why the game was invented and how capitalism works. literally - "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"
yboris 4y ago
For an amazing proposal for "every property is always up for sale" see the book Radical Markets The authors argue that self-assessment of property is the best way to evaluate property - allowing for fair tax collection. If you undervalue the property, someone can buy it through an app. If you overvalue it, you end up paying more in taxes. It's a genius proposal that is worth exploring (by reading the book and by trying in the real world). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/radical-markets https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Sounds kind of terrible. A world where pissing off a rich person means you could lose your home.
  - ip26 4y ago
    Sure, but if a pissed-off rich person is willing to buy it, doesn't that mean your home's highest and best use [1] is as a rich person's cudgel to make you miserable? So really, as a God-fearing capitalist you should be all for it! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use
  - namlem 4y ago
    Or you go around intentionally pissing off rich people in order to bait them into buying your home for double its value simply by doubling your property tax.
- t-writescode 4y ago
  How does this intended model deal with billionaires buying up _everything_ so it can be theirs and ruining people's homes and livelihoods, etc? I could easily imagine companies going out and buying all the houses, or nearly all of them, and then renting access out to them, or replacing them with apartments so they can fit more bodies in them. It absolutely feels like an even worse potential monopoly.
  - deleted 4y ago
spaniard89277 4y ago
It's not only that. Twitter will clog any device. Say goodbye to twitter app.
droptablemain 4y ago
The system of "liberal democracy" has already created an environment where we're totally locked in with a few very large corporations -- Google, Meta, Apple, PayPal.
- Karellen 4y ago
  * neoliberal democracy
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- twblalock 4y ago
  You listed four options that consumers have to choose from. Our market is already different than the one that led to an "everything app" in China. Whatever Elon builds will have to compete with all of those existing options, most of which are backed by major players with deep pockets. The result of such competition is going to push everyone in the space to try harder, which will probably benefit consumers.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    those are not four options i can choose from. each one has a monopoly to some aspect in our lives. there are no viable alternatives to facebook. there are no alternatives to apple if i want to reach a significant amount of people (all iphone users) likewise there are no viable alternatives to google play or youtube if i want to reach a lot of people with my apps or videos. ok, there probably are some alternatives to paypal, so that one is weak.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Paypal has some alternatives, but try to receive payment for dirty stuff or wrong think and you'll quickly discover just how wide the VISA/MC arm is. Currently crypto is doing some heavy lifting here, but it has its own issues.
    - cgrealy 4y ago
scaredginger 4y ago
I think it's a bit hypocritical to target China and WeChat here. Many of us don't have a realistic alternative to Apple or Google for our phones. I also can't root my Android device because then my employer's MFA app won't work
seydor 4y ago
The web is an everything app, and despite capture by incumbents it is still the most open platform we have and it is not illiberal. The reason for that is open standards that are not owned by anyone. We need open identity standards and open payment standards so we can have an everything web that is liberal. But governments have to allow those things to happen. Right now their legislation favors the incumbent monopolies
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > But governments have to allow those things to happen. I very much doubt that. Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The real roadblocks are the current protocol-holders like Apple and Google - their ability to profit off these technologies leave them in direct opposition to what you consider progress. And if iOS/Android doesn't adopt your open standards, you can forget about the general public adopting it.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The ones that are in favor of that already have open payment systems running (a lot do). If your country does not have one of those nowadays, it's because it's not important for the government.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    > the government would be all-for open payment standards The caveat to that is to have regulated players the gov can control up to a point. Basically official banks. Since the dawn of commerce governing entities have made critical efforts to regulate circulating money, there's no reason our current govs would allow that aspect to get out of their hand without a fight (that's basically why Facebook's crypto effort got canned)
  - afarrell 4y ago
    The government would also want such a system to conform to anti-money-laundering and sanctions regulations.
asim 4y ago
Open source, open protocol. The superapp is the holy grail of consumer experiences but it's only been achieved in a very insular and siloed manner. The old model was ecosystem based and required large players like apple, Google and Microsoft to build operating systems. One level up WeChat and others have done it as a mobile app. I'd argue we could standardise that model as an open ecosystem but it's going to be damn near impossible to do with that goal upfront. It's more likely some open source niche use case could kick it off but after a decade of wishing, I haven't seen it yet.
tristor 4y ago
This is essentially the point of the book The Circle.
the-printer 4y ago
What if we just like, didn’t use the app?
photochemsyn 4y ago
There are already 'everything apps' in the 'western liberal democratic world'. They're just broken up into entities controlled by what are essentially holding companies - Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Microsoft/Github/LinkedIn, etc. Go another level up and you find that all these corporations are tied together by a very similar set of majority shareholders (Blackrock/StateStreet/Fidelity) who also have their fingers in everything from fossil fuels to military procurement to pharmaceuticals and internet/phone providers. The only real difference with China is that there, the state actors sit at a higher real-power level than the corporate actors, while the situation is essentially reversed in the USA, with politicians and bureaucrats being little more than mid-level managers in the corporate hierarchy. As far as the claim that Monopoly, the board game, is often held up as a demonstration of capitalism, the word unregulated should be inserted. Here's a game (I call it Risk-Opoly) that would demonstrate how capitalism actually worked in Europe right before World War One: take a half-dozen Monopoly boards, each representing an individual country/region, and let each game proceed until a clear winner on each board became apparent. Then that winner can buy machine guns, tanks, fuel, artillery, shells, ships and soldiers to attack the other boards. This of course is not the only way Empire-scale wars break out, but I think it matches European/American/Japanese/Russian industrial-era history pretty closely.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > The only real difference with China is that there, the state actors sit at a higher real-power level than the corporate actors, And China has it right here. It's as important for corporations and the wealthy not to be above the law as it is to have civilian control of the military.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    And how's that going for Chinese citizens?
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      Not too well. Are you saying the Western corporatocratic model is going all that much better for... I was going to say, its citizens, but given that you seem to be championing the economics-over-politics perspective, for its consumerist-cattle-slash-proletariat? The main (or only?) difference seems to be that our Masters are capitalist robber barons in stead of their communist political apparatchik ones. Yi-fucking-ppie.
kome 4y ago
I love the design of this website.
stephc_int13 4y ago
All the big players seem to be striving for this "everything app". The only reason I use Twitter and HN is because of their focused nature. No Twitter map, Twitter Mail, TwitterOS, Twitter Games etc. I don't want them, and I will actively move away from any products exhibiting this kind of unification strategy.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Is it just me or is everything in society has to revolve around enabling liberal democracy? As another example, lots of immigration in kingdoms is fine because newcomers can not change the rules everyone has to live by, but in democracy the fight is not over how immigrants would help or hurt society but over how they are going to vote. And I get it that decentralized decision making is a safeguard against corruption and tyranny. But at least in America it has become like cryptocurrency, consuming all the energy to solve one potential future problem. Maybe one out of thousand citizens can be randomly chosen to travel to an election convention and hear directly from candidates / have time to research issues properly rather than relying on tweets from everything app? And then politicking on traditional or social media would become useless.
- duxup 4y ago
  I think it reflects a concern, less so a “must enable”. We have concerns about infinite scrolling on our well being too.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
App-think is going to become the new group-think?
BrainVirus 4y ago
Maybe. The real question is how many people in tech saying this would say the same thing without that Tweet by Musk.
kiawe_fire 4y ago
It doesn’t actually matter if there’s an everything app or not - even markets with competition, like the US news media, or even our current social media landscape - are subject to the same concerns of cohesive and authoritarian-like control over a population, for which the author expresses concern. Forcing apps and services to adopt open standards is also potentially problematic. If a government body chooses the standard, then they can also exert control over the limitations and features that must be implemented. I do think we need legislation to promote openness and interoperability, but that does not have to mean that every thing anyone builds must adopt the same set of standards - only that they allow for and accommodate certain user actions and accessibility.
- w0de0 4y ago
  > Forcing technology innovators adopt open standards is also potentially problematic. And also, you know, the foundation of the internet and all it has bred.
  - kiawe_fire 4y ago
    I don’t really understand. Open standards are great. Forcing every company by law to adopt a single open standard will have positive implications more so than not having any open standards, but it will also very much lead to the same concerns of centralization that the author expresses. In any case, the “foundation of the internet and all it has bred” and the standards driving it are an excellent example of why competing OPEN standards are good, and why forced adoption of just one standard would be harmful. So, I’m honestly not sure if you’re agreeing with me or if I’m missing something.
oefrha 4y ago
> It is practically impossible for person in China to opt out of WeChat. I call bullshit on this one. All necessities are also covered by AliPay, and you just need to convince your contacts to communicate through good old phone call/SMS/email/one of the alternative chat apps. WeChat only dominates all aspects of your digital life if you let it. There’s a huge amount of competition for every single aspect. Citing Gruber on this topic is as good as citing a random Chinese person on Facebook usage in America. Source: got by in China myself with practically no WeChat usage, certainly nothing essential, for a long time.
- physicles 4y ago
  True, Wechat may have totally monopolized social (after ten years in China I literally know zero people who don’t use Wechat for that), but it shares its status as the Everything App with Alipay. Currently you’re basically a non-person if you use neither Wechat nor Alipay. By non-person, I mean it’s impossible to travel by plane or train, visit most places of business, or make purchases at most of said places of business. We can thank Covid for the first two. The payment stuff is that it’s just so damn convenient that I stopped carrying cash years ago, and so did everyone else, so most merchants look at you sideways if you whip out some maos when it’s time to pay.
jawadch93 4y ago
[dead]
adultSwim 4y ago
US is a decade behind China's WeChat. I think we should catch up.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
It seems to me that Musk's "Twitter acquisition will accelerate X", is just a lame attempt to make his apparent acceptance of being forced to buy Twitter to be part of some pre-planned big brain move, rather than a late night stoner 54.20 joke gone wrong. Twitter's problem is how to remain relevant in a world where the teenagers have already moved on to newer, cooler, apps like TikTok and Snapchat. Repackaging Twitter with clones of TikTok and Snapchat seems highly unlikely to work. See FaceBook and Google's failed attempts to capture the TikTok user base. Turning Twitter into a 4chan-like "free speech" haven, infested by Trump and the MAGA crowd doesn't seem it would exactly add to the attraction. Making Twitter users pay per tweet (another Musk suggestion) ain't gonna do it either.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  From the perspective of Twitter, the presence of groups you hate doesn't pollute the platform, it gives you something to engage with. From the perspective of civilization, it lets people get a little bit of perspective (including, in fact primarily, nuts).
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Nobody cares about groups they hate being there. They hate groups they hate getting attention, and worse, people agreeing with them. And so those groups must go.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
    It depends on what Musk wants to do with Twitter. If he doesn't care about profits and just wants to use it as an attention whoring outlet, then perhaps it doesn't matter so much, although I'd guess it's MSM being willing to publicize tweets that is the real attraction. However, if Musk's goal (or, at least, one of his goals) is turning Twitter around as a company and making money from it, then keeping it family/advertiser friendly is very important. There's a reason Coca Cola isn't adverting on 4chan (or Truth social for that matter), nor is MSM promoting it.
danielrhodes 4y ago
There's a reason people use everything apps in other countries: 1) It reduces the number of apps you have to download, which in countries where data is expensive for the average person, is a big deal. 2) The proliferation of internet enabled services is still relatively new. So from a branding perspective, it is easier to communicate one service rather than many different services. The US saw a similar phenomenon in the everything app known as AOL back in the 90s.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Liberal Democracies have been bad for liberal democracy lately.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
"Engineers and management professionals generally lack a broader education in civics, humanities and ethics, they are poorly equipped to make socially responsible choices." Looking at the list of world's worst tyrants, I don't see many engineers by education, mostly civics and humanities.
wizofaus 4y ago
No disagreement that forcing everyone into one closed commercially owned ecosystem would be a very bad thing. But I do wish there were more open standards that allowed universal methods of securely conveying information to and engaging in transactions with other specific people - email is really the only such standard currently and it's obviously not fit for purpose (certainly not on the "securely" part). It would still leave room for competition/choice between actual apps or service providers used, even if it's true the browser market is effectively a duopoly now.
Roark66 4y ago
It is also funny because there is no way in hell Google and Apple are allowing "an everything app" in their play stores. They very much dislike apps that don't have a very clearly defined purpose.
emodendroket 4y ago
I mean this kind of thing already exists, doesn't it? Kakao is kind of an "everything" app and obviously Apple, Google, Facebook, and others have similar aspirations. I'm going to be honest, I find it easier to stay in the same handful of ecosystems myself.
jwmhjwmh 4y ago
nova22033 4y ago
Don't worry. He's going to build the everything app in the next 2-3 years..which means we have, realistically, 20-30 years..
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Sounds like a job for our American Silicon Valley douchebag overlords!
barelysapient 4y ago
I mean, getting deplatformed from the everything app is gonna really suck.
lucasyvas 4y ago
Saying an everything app is bad for liberal democracies and free markets is an accidental admission that the leading operating systems are also bad - A super app is called an operating system. I've been droning on for a while now that the winners in the OS space will control literally everything. They can steal any idea from any third party developer for their own and integrate it into the OS. You cannot beat that. They can read/write all data. They control the networking and random number generators. We place a mountain of trust in the operating system, and while I despise Apple quite a bit, I'd never bet a cent against them because they have seemingly done the impossible - they control (virtually) all aspects of the hardware, software, and services. That is insanely valuable and equally terrifying given their market position. I will be sticking with libre software as much as I can, but we've entered crazy territory. Apple can basically control telecom at this point by saying they are removing the SIM tray or whatever and even the telecom has to lower their head and go along with it. If you could have a native iOS shopping experience, it would demolish the usability of Amazon and nobody would use Amazon after a while. Any experience is fair game for the operating system - it will absorb whatever it wants to and leave the corpse of your app and service on the road.
mclightning 4y ago
Why are we even entertaining the idea? Just stop taking this guy seriously.

348 points by nitin-pai 4y ago

And then there will be apps within the everything app and one of these apps will want to become the everything app within the everything app. Funny.

daveslash 4y ago
It's apps all the way down. Jokes aside, you're absolutely right - "Facebook Apps" have been a thing for over a decade. And before Facebook, AOL was like an "Everything App" that had apps within it. Same story.... new marketing folks.

butterfi 4y ago

Our phones are already SuperApps, this is an attempt at redistricting.

pjerem 4y ago
This. OSes already are "SuperApps" having access to basically everything.
eternalban 4y ago
What do you mean by redistricting? Expand please.
- indymike 4y ago
  Redefining who controls different parts of the ecosystem. For example, making it so apple mail is not the main controller of email on iphone, or the app store being the main controller for getting apps onto the device. It's just put everything in one app, and then have control. It's not very creative, and is really just a centralization play.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    Thanks.
etiam 4y ago
Agreed. Given the headline main thrust it's a shame so many are effectively forced to using one out the duopoly already. Some compulsively "modern" countries have in practice made subjugation before either Google or Apple mandatory for full functionality in society. Identification, payment, access to information about common goods, etc, have already been burdened with an abundance of friction for someone who's not constantly carrying one of these tracking and monitoring devices.
Levitz 4y ago
A phone is a physical purchased good though, that sets it in a whole different category, you can't prevent someone from getting a phone, generally, and he has freedom to choose how to use it. The implicit requirement to have a phone is a whole different matter that can be argued about, but that conversation is also about mail addresses or bank accounts and even further away from what the article comments on.
mortenjorck 4y ago
This is the real reason WeChat exists and that there's no equivalent (or market for one) in the west. The built-in apps on iOS and Android for messaging, payment, mapping, photo storage, and so forth serve the needs of a majority of users while consolidating market power for the platform operators Apple and Google. These integrated experiences had gaps in China, which were filled by Tencent, which then became a sort of virtual platform operator, essentially running its own virtual set of built-in apps on top of foreign-made operating systems. There's no market for a replacement for a built-in app suite in the west so long as the existing ones are meeting users' needs, which is why we haven't seen Facebook succeed at this. I'm not sure where Musk thinks this market for the "X app" is going to come from.
- oefrha 4y ago
  > messaging, payment, mapping, photo storage It’s funny, out of the four things you listed, WeChat does not provide half of them. So much for “everything”.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> It’s no coincidence at all that WeChat is the only “everything app” anyone can cite, and it comes from China, an authoritarian regime. It makes sense that it would come from a more authoritarian country first. But Whatsapp, say, could add payments and similar features if they were valuable to users. This is all commentary on something Elon Musk probably said in the hope that investors would fling cash at him, of course.

bombcar 4y ago
The internet is the everything app; it's currently somewhat decentralized but it's becoming more and more centralized every day. And the benefits of centralization are immediate and obvious; the downsides are hidden, localized, and not clear.
- newsclues 4y ago
  The internet isn’t an “app” but browsers are.
- criddell 4y ago
  So if an everything app is terrible for liberal democracies and free markets and the internet is the everything app, then it follows that the internet is terrible for liberal democracies and free markets.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I would be inclined to agree, though whether that shows more the problems with liberal democracies and free markets or with the internet is still to decide.
  - butterfi 4y ago
    The internet is to apps what roads are to cars. Don’t blame the road for bad drivers.
    - bombcar 4y ago

null_object 4y ago

I think John Gruber[0] already said all that needs to be said about this latest Elon Musk fantasy: 'who looks at Twitter of all things and says “I’d like to see this expand in scope such that a lot more, if not all, of my digital life can be here”?' [0] https://daringfireball.net/2022/10/everything https://daringfireball.net/2022/10/everything

tomcam 4y ago
Which of these two gentlemen understands the zeitgeist better?
- null_object 4y ago
  > Which of these two gentlemen understands the zeitgeist better? I sort of understand the downvote for citing Gruber (I'm no fan of his Apple adoration, either - although I don't see it's relevance in this context). But Twitter?? I have Twitter redirect automatically to Nitter in all my browsers, but even ignoring the technical shortcomings of the platform, it's mostly such a sewer of garbage these days, I honestly think Gruber was right in this case.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I think I understand the intent and indeed the article links Bloomberg article suggesting the same. Musk envisions it as US WeChat. I hate it, but I hate it the same way I hate Paypal. Idea though is not far fetched and is way more sustainable than effectively running a bot farm mixed with corporate PR and customer service, but there I go being a luddite.

gw99 4y ago

Isn't that the intent of it? Same as purchasing Twitter?

tomphoolery 4y ago

I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is already taken by X.com which he founded, but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook, and the reason why other social networks like Instagram and Twitter exist _at all_ is because Facebook could not keep everyone on their network. Lest we forget, Facebook was the ONLY social network people used for a good long while, at least when I was graduating HS and entering college. You had Facebook for actual social networking, band/music pages on MySpace, and everything else was essentially porn bots and pedophiles, aka "spam city". So you have to wonder, if an everything app actually is a good idea, why couldn't the one company who had the most opportunity at the perfect time with as much funding as they could possibly need...not be able to do it? Just because something works in China, doesn't mean it will work everywhere else. Actually, I would say that if something works in China, your best bet is that it _won't_ work anywhere else. TikTok being a notable exception.

rsynnott 4y ago
And TikTok is maybe proof that the "everything apps" don't work so well even in China; if they did then there would, by definition, be no need for TikTok.
- jlmorton 4y ago
  Note that WeChat has a Douyin-competing product, "Channels."
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Oh, sure; so does Facebook. Douyin/TikTok is clearly the market leader in both its incarnations, tho.
- chrischen 4y ago
  Also Taobao/Tmall and Alipay is completely separate. WeChat certainly filled in a lot of holes in iOS such as QR code scanning (which didn’t get native support until a few years ago) so it provided a sort of OS within the phone OS to get a utility knife of features being used in China that Apple neglected. But I wouldn’t say they have complete domination of all markets. Keep in mind QR codes were a thing in China since the early 2010s, whereas the US didn’t start adopting QR codes until the later half of the decade when Apple finally made QR scanning part of the OS… because Apple was hell bent on making BLE beacons a thing. So our “everything app” was iOS and Apple literally held us back by 5-8 years regarding QR code adoption just because of some corporate agenda…

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

Good business are created by the pressure of natural selection of capitalism. Everything App assumes that some company that started with an app for something specific will magically skip the entire natural selection of capitalism in all other areas. That's never going to happen, for the same reason that communism is interior to capitalism: central planning is much more inefficient. A startup succeeds or fails on its own. A company trying to do everything will have to include a lot of failures. The real problem is that all those companies eventually get bought and eventually end up as a team of some giant corporate which then abuses it. Pre planned everything app won't happen in capitalism, by Elon musk or anyone else, but an app that bought all others can happen.

andrewla 4y ago

Can we back up a second? An "everything app" is not a well-defined thing. Projecting whatever fears you have about the threat to liberal democracy onto the blank slate of an "everything app" says much more about you as a writer than it does about the concept of an "everything app". It's being taken as a given that WeChat is an "everything app" and that Elon Musk was using "everything app" in that (not universally accepted) context for the meaning of an "everything app". The article makes some tolerably good points about concentration of power and that's totally fine, but putting it in this context just seems silly.

nitin-pai 4y ago
Yes, your take is reasonable going by what’s in the article alone. It does not cite Musk’s expressed desire for Twitter to emulate WeChat. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/tech/everything-app-x-musk-china-wechat-learnings-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/tech/everything-app-x-musk-ch...

mellosouls 4y ago

Most of these criticisms already apply due to the dominance of the existing tech platforms in the west; its hardly new for the threat to liberal democracy from deplatforming to be voiced - perhaps though there is added urgency for those who now see it potentially affecting themselves and their beliefs.

mradek 4y ago

I wish I could go back in time and just curb crypto from growing into the current tumor it has become. Decentralization efforts applied to app servers and services would have been such a better use of time and energy imo. If there was a protocol for cab hailing, and anyone could roll it out for someone to connect to their network (like xmpp), and anyone could offer to become a driver or play another role like customer support, they earn their local currency and are a part of their local economy. The same protocol could be used in Norway and in Taiwan. There might be a gap that’s too hard to fill, and someone else could create another protocol that works in their local economy, maybe like a matrix protocol. They’re completely different but serve to solve the same problem of real time communication. Then Elon’s super app could offer users a platform which tries to implement multiple protocols, or have a in app protocol marketplace which is the sub apps. Apps for buying shoes, or buying groceries, or hiring movers. Users could become consumers or agents, so they can both work for various protocols and spend their money on them. They would be vetted and backed by the super app. It would be fully decentralized, except for the payment part. If you have everyone on your platform you don’t need to issue tokens and other bullshit. Just build something useful and they will come.

scyclow 4y ago
What exactly is precluding someone from building this today, regardless of the tumor?
- donatj 4y ago
  It exists. There have been a number of decentralized cab hailing apps. I was never able to get a single cab on any of them. The problem is decentralized apps have shit advertising budgets.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Which is because there's no money in it. If you build a centralized platform, you get to act as a middle man and skim off profit off every transaction, which you then reinvest in advertising and feature development. On the other hand, if you build a decentralized platform, you've essentially commoditized yourself: you can't skim off profits, because if you do, a cheaper node will just pop up, leading to a race to the bottom.

unity1001 4y ago

How is that so very different from now, where everything is already tracked and controlled by a handful of megacorps who seem to be able to cut access to their app at will...

nicgrev103 4y ago

I really don't get the value proposition. Isn't it startup 101 that you should not try to boil the ocean and be the everything of everything for everyone.

airforms 4y ago
That's startup 101. Twitter is not a startup.
bombcar 4y ago
Musk's playbook has been kind of more on the ocean-boiling side of things (SpaceX, for example).
- nicgrev103 4y ago
  True, however, even then the initail focus was very spesific: Make a reuasable rocket. An everything app does a range of very different things like ride hailing, food delivery, cash transfer, chat, etc etc.
Levitz 4y ago
You go to the cinema, point to its location, purchase tickets for 5 of your friends, you give them their tickets and they pay you back, all within the same app. Adding payment processing to a chat app is just really, really convenient. I'm Spanish and we have a thing called "Bizum" here, you can send and receive money from and to anyone in your contact list instantly and free of charge. It's hugely popular even with no chat implementations.
- MisterSandman 4y ago
  I call BS on that, chat and payments haven't gone well together in the past. The friction of sending money to another person is very low, I don't think people really care whether it's on the app they're already on, or they have to switch apps. Venmo tries to push it's messaging features but nobody really cared. People use Venmo because it's free transfers, they don't need a new chatting app that mixes money with memes. Welathsimple Cash tried that here in Canada but hasn't been terribly succesful either, and so has WhatsApp in India. The reason WeChat become popular because it had first movers advantage and used it's reach to be the first payment service of it's kind. People didn't use it because it integrated with chat, they used it because it was good.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

I don't want an everything app, I want an app full of app stores. A marketplace of marketplaces.

bergenty 4y ago
Gross. So every shop has to make 25 versions of all their codebases and builds.
- nileshtrivedi 4y ago
  Marketplaces are only for distribution. It absolutely does not require separate codebases or builds, the same way a .exe installer can be made available on 100s of websites.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    Right; if Apple won't allow porn apps, then someone should be able to publish their iOS porn app on a marketplace for porn apps. Same amount of work, but more choice for app vendors & users.

emptyparadise 4y ago

We already have an everything app. We have at least 5, in fact: Microsoft Windows, macOS, Ubuntu Linux, iOS, Android.

airforms 4y ago
Those aren't everything apps, those are everything platforms. You can barely do anything (other than browsing the web) with Windows alone, with no apps installed.
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  You can't really do anything on WeChat either without connecting to other services - exactly what the web browser is bundled for.
  - slmjkdbtl 4y ago
    Lots of people use it just for messaging (maybe not now since everyone NEED it for covid related mini-apps to enter places), but I get your point

elonhype42069 4y ago

I'm sorry, but maybe we should just stop giving all of Elon Musk half-assed thoughts so much airtime? Just ignore the guy for a minute and the world will be a better place, "liberal democracies" included By parroting his tweets to drive clicks to your own blog you're contributing to the problem, just like journalists putting him (and, formerly, Trump) on "breaking news" articles 24/7/365

loceng 4y ago
Just because he's only shared a short tweet about something, you're automatically assuming he's only half-ass thought about it?
- jjeaff 4y ago
  I think it's pretty clear from the majority of his tweets that most are the result of a half-assed thought process.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MisterSandman 4y ago
  Considering how his "full-ass" attempts at creating a self driving car or Hyperloop are going, yes?
code_duck 4y ago
This article has some decent points but I can’t imagine why someone would think that a one line tweet from Elon Musk merits an entire article. Just 2 weeks ago Musk informed us we would be able to use Tesla’s forthcoming truck to cross “seas that aren’t too choppy” because it will be “waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat”.

rospaya 4y ago

Within a span of one week Elon tweeted about two democracies conceding territory to autocratic regimes. An everything app that he would control is just an extension of the same mindset.

deleted 4y ago
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loceng 4y ago
Why are you assuming it would be a walled garden and where users don't have full data and network mobility - ideally required through laws that don't yet exist in most places?
- rospaya 4y ago
  We don't have any idea how that would work, since the only "everything app" that exists is in China. OP's blog is saying the same thing - it's a move towards monopoly and it might not work otherwise.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gjsman-1000 4y ago

At what point do we realize that anybody can be a critic, anything can be worth criticism, and being a critic is very easy while doing anything of practical value is very difficult? The moment we realize this, I think that we should stop giving critics so much influence and acting like their criticisms are automatically valid for being criticisms. (Maybe it's just me, but I have increasingly low respect for critics because it is actually such a lazy, easy job that drags down everybody even trying to do something.)

dEnigma 4y ago
The healthy response to that situation is to just look at whatever good points critics raise, work on them, and ignore the rest. But best to check with someone else if "the rest" really doesn't contain anything valid that you should pay attention to as well.

chatterhead 4y ago

Elon's best move is to launch a Twitter-wide cryptocurrency that can be earned through watching advertisements, disabling adblockers, sharing data, and direct dollar swaps. He should create a third-party ecosystem for journalists, vendors and government validated "citizen IDs". All voluntary, but with incentives and benefits. If people thought the "checkmark" was a big deal just wait. There will be all sorts of tiers of validated personhood which will grant access to things others don't get by being anonymous. It's going to become a private company; and the currency doesn't need to be an open-trustless system; but rather a deanonymized one that won't trade on exchanges and won't be subject to the SEC rules the same way Dave & Busters isn't. Then, he should open Twitter up to share conversions from coins and sell Twitter back to the people as a people-owned and managed social media giant. He could double his money in less than 24 months. The first step of course is putting me in charge of the whole damn thing. - La Flama Blanca

dandare 4y ago

1st sentence: > Monopoly, the board game, is often held up as a demonstration of capitalism, teaching players how business works. I don't think I need to read any further.

aidenn0 4y ago
He's probably referring to the game's roots as a tool for promoting Georgism[1]. That sentence is pretty far divorced from reality though (unless you let "often" do an awful lot of work. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
wiredearp 4y ago
It is literally why the game was invented and how capitalism works. I can't tell if you are in denial of this or if you believe it so evident as to be a waste of your time. https://survivingtomorrow.org/monopoly-isnt-a-game-it-s-a-prophecy-a3644ad09a92 https://survivingtomorrow.org/monopoly-isnt-a-game-it-s-a-pr...
- dandare 4y ago
  > It is literally why the game was invented and how capitalism works. literally - "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"

yboris 4y ago

For an amazing proposal for "every property is always up for sale" see the book Radical Markets The authors argue that self-assessment of property is the best way to evaluate property - allowing for fair tax collection. If you undervalue the property, someone can buy it through an app. If you overvalue it, you end up paying more in taxes. It's a genius proposal that is worth exploring (by reading the book and by trying in the real world). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/radical-markets https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...

jjeaff 4y ago
Sounds kind of terrible. A world where pissing off a rich person means you could lose your home.
- ip26 4y ago
  Sure, but if a pissed-off rich person is willing to buy it, doesn't that mean your home's highest and best use [1] is as a rich person's cudgel to make you miserable? So really, as a God-fearing capitalist you should be all for it! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use
- namlem 4y ago
  Or you go around intentionally pissing off rich people in order to bait them into buying your home for double its value simply by doubling your property tax.
t-writescode 4y ago
How does this intended model deal with billionaires buying up _everything_ so it can be theirs and ruining people's homes and livelihoods, etc? I could easily imagine companies going out and buying all the houses, or nearly all of them, and then renting access out to them, or replacing them with apartments so they can fit more bodies in them. It absolutely feels like an even worse potential monopoly.
- deleted 4y ago

spaniard89277 4y ago

It's not only that. Twitter will clog any device. Say goodbye to twitter app.

droptablemain 4y ago

The system of "liberal democracy" has already created an environment where we're totally locked in with a few very large corporations -- Google, Meta, Apple, PayPal.

Karellen 4y ago
* neoliberal democracy
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twblalock 4y ago
You listed four options that consumers have to choose from. Our market is already different than the one that led to an "everything app" in China. Whatever Elon builds will have to compete with all of those existing options, most of which are backed by major players with deep pockets. The result of such competition is going to push everyone in the space to try harder, which will probably benefit consumers.
- em-bee 4y ago
  those are not four options i can choose from. each one has a monopoly to some aspect in our lives. there are no viable alternatives to facebook. there are no alternatives to apple if i want to reach a significant amount of people (all iphone users) likewise there are no viable alternatives to google play or youtube if i want to reach a lot of people with my apps or videos. ok, there probably are some alternatives to paypal, so that one is weak.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Paypal has some alternatives, but try to receive payment for dirty stuff or wrong think and you'll quickly discover just how wide the VISA/MC arm is. Currently crypto is doing some heavy lifting here, but it has its own issues.
  - cgrealy 4y ago

scaredginger 4y ago

I think it's a bit hypocritical to target China and WeChat here. Many of us don't have a realistic alternative to Apple or Google for our phones. I also can't root my Android device because then my employer's MFA app won't work

seydor 4y ago

The web is an everything app, and despite capture by incumbents it is still the most open platform we have and it is not illiberal. The reason for that is open standards that are not owned by anyone. We need open identity standards and open payment standards so we can have an everything web that is liberal. But governments have to allow those things to happen. Right now their legislation favors the incumbent monopolies

smoldesu 4y ago
> But governments have to allow those things to happen. I very much doubt that. Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The real roadblocks are the current protocol-holders like Apple and Google - their ability to profit off these technologies leave them in direct opposition to what you consider progress. And if iOS/Android doesn't adopt your open standards, you can forget about the general public adopting it.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The ones that are in favor of that already have open payment systems running (a lot do). If your country does not have one of those nowadays, it's because it's not important for the government.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > the government would be all-for open payment standards The caveat to that is to have regulated players the gov can control up to a point. Basically official banks. Since the dawn of commerce governing entities have made critical efforts to regulate circulating money, there's no reason our current govs would allow that aspect to get out of their hand without a fight (that's basically why Facebook's crypto effort got canned)
- afarrell 4y ago
  The government would also want such a system to conform to anti-money-laundering and sanctions regulations.

asim 4y ago

Open source, open protocol. The superapp is the holy grail of consumer experiences but it's only been achieved in a very insular and siloed manner. The old model was ecosystem based and required large players like apple, Google and Microsoft to build operating systems. One level up WeChat and others have done it as a mobile app. I'd argue we could standardise that model as an open ecosystem but it's going to be damn near impossible to do with that goal upfront. It's more likely some open source niche use case could kick it off but after a decade of wishing, I haven't seen it yet.

tristor 4y ago

This is essentially the point of the book The Circle.

the-printer 4y ago

What if we just like, didn’t use the app?

photochemsyn 4y ago

There are already 'everything apps' in the 'western liberal democratic world'. They're just broken up into entities controlled by what are essentially holding companies - Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Microsoft/Github/LinkedIn, etc. Go another level up and you find that all these corporations are tied together by a very similar set of majority shareholders (Blackrock/StateStreet/Fidelity) who also have their fingers in everything from fossil fuels to military procurement to pharmaceuticals and internet/phone providers. The only real difference with China is that there, the state actors sit at a higher real-power level than the corporate actors, while the situation is essentially reversed in the USA, with politicians and bureaucrats being little more than mid-level managers in the corporate hierarchy. As far as the claim that Monopoly, the board game, is often held up as a demonstration of capitalism, the word unregulated should be inserted. Here's a game (I call it Risk-Opoly) that would demonstrate how capitalism actually worked in Europe right before World War One: take a half-dozen Monopoly boards, each representing an individual country/region, and let each game proceed until a clear winner on each board became apparent. Then that winner can buy machine guns, tanks, fuel, artillery, shells, ships and soldiers to attack the other boards. This of course is not the only way Empire-scale wars break out, but I think it matches European/American/Japanese/Russian industrial-era history pretty closely.

pessimizer 4y ago
> The only real difference with China is that there, the state actors sit at a higher real-power level than the corporate actors, And China has it right here. It's as important for corporations and the wealthy not to be above the law as it is to have civilian control of the military.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  And how's that going for Chinese citizens?
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    Not too well. Are you saying the Western corporatocratic model is going all that much better for... I was going to say, its citizens, but given that you seem to be championing the economics-over-politics perspective, for its consumerist-cattle-slash-proletariat? The main (or only?) difference seems to be that our Masters are capitalist robber barons in stead of their communist political apparatchik ones. Yi-fucking-ppie.

kome 4y ago

I love the design of this website.

stephc_int13 4y ago

All the big players seem to be striving for this "everything app". The only reason I use Twitter and HN is because of their focused nature. No Twitter map, Twitter Mail, TwitterOS, Twitter Games etc. I don't want them, and I will actively move away from any products exhibiting this kind of unification strategy.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Is it just me or is everything in society has to revolve around enabling liberal democracy? As another example, lots of immigration in kingdoms is fine because newcomers can not change the rules everyone has to live by, but in democracy the fight is not over how immigrants would help or hurt society but over how they are going to vote. And I get it that decentralized decision making is a safeguard against corruption and tyranny. But at least in America it has become like cryptocurrency, consuming all the energy to solve one potential future problem. Maybe one out of thousand citizens can be randomly chosen to travel to an election convention and hear directly from candidates / have time to research issues properly rather than relying on tweets from everything app? And then politicking on traditional or social media would become useless.

duxup 4y ago
I think it reflects a concern, less so a “must enable”. We have concerns about infinite scrolling on our well being too.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

App-think is going to become the new group-think?

BrainVirus 4y ago

Maybe. The real question is how many people in tech saying this would say the same thing without that Tweet by Musk.

kiawe_fire 4y ago

It doesn’t actually matter if there’s an everything app or not - even markets with competition, like the US news media, or even our current social media landscape - are subject to the same concerns of cohesive and authoritarian-like control over a population, for which the author expresses concern. Forcing apps and services to adopt open standards is also potentially problematic. If a government body chooses the standard, then they can also exert control over the limitations and features that must be implemented. I do think we need legislation to promote openness and interoperability, but that does not have to mean that every thing anyone builds must adopt the same set of standards - only that they allow for and accommodate certain user actions and accessibility.

w0de0 4y ago
> Forcing technology innovators adopt open standards is also potentially problematic. And also, you know, the foundation of the internet and all it has bred.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  I don’t really understand. Open standards are great. Forcing every company by law to adopt a single open standard will have positive implications more so than not having any open standards, but it will also very much lead to the same concerns of centralization that the author expresses. In any case, the “foundation of the internet and all it has bred” and the standards driving it are an excellent example of why competing OPEN standards are good, and why forced adoption of just one standard would be harmful. So, I’m honestly not sure if you’re agreeing with me or if I’m missing something.

oefrha 4y ago

> It is practically impossible for person in China to opt out of WeChat. I call bullshit on this one. All necessities are also covered by AliPay, and you just need to convince your contacts to communicate through good old phone call/SMS/email/one of the alternative chat apps. WeChat only dominates all aspects of your digital life if you let it. There’s a huge amount of competition for every single aspect. Citing Gruber on this topic is as good as citing a random Chinese person on Facebook usage in America. Source: got by in China myself with practically no WeChat usage, certainly nothing essential, for a long time.

physicles 4y ago
True, Wechat may have totally monopolized social (after ten years in China I literally know zero people who don’t use Wechat for that), but it shares its status as the Everything App with Alipay. Currently you’re basically a non-person if you use neither Wechat nor Alipay. By non-person, I mean it’s impossible to travel by plane or train, visit most places of business, or make purchases at most of said places of business. We can thank Covid for the first two. The payment stuff is that it’s just so damn convenient that I stopped carrying cash years ago, and so did everyone else, so most merchants look at you sideways if you whip out some maos when it’s time to pay.

jawadch93 4y ago

[dead]

adultSwim 4y ago

US is a decade behind China's WeChat. I think we should catch up.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

It seems to me that Musk's "Twitter acquisition will accelerate X", is just a lame attempt to make his apparent acceptance of being forced to buy Twitter to be part of some pre-planned big brain move, rather than a late night stoner 54.20 joke gone wrong. Twitter's problem is how to remain relevant in a world where the teenagers have already moved on to newer, cooler, apps like TikTok and Snapchat. Repackaging Twitter with clones of TikTok and Snapchat seems highly unlikely to work. See FaceBook and Google's failed attempts to capture the TikTok user base. Turning Twitter into a 4chan-like "free speech" haven, infested by Trump and the MAGA crowd doesn't seem it would exactly add to the attraction. Making Twitter users pay per tweet (another Musk suggestion) ain't gonna do it either.

whatshisface 4y ago
From the perspective of Twitter, the presence of groups you hate doesn't pollute the platform, it gives you something to engage with. From the perspective of civilization, it lets people get a little bit of perspective (including, in fact primarily, nuts).
- bombcar 4y ago
  Nobody cares about groups they hate being there. They hate groups they hate getting attention, and worse, people agreeing with them. And so those groups must go.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  It depends on what Musk wants to do with Twitter. If he doesn't care about profits and just wants to use it as an attention whoring outlet, then perhaps it doesn't matter so much, although I'd guess it's MSM being willing to publicize tweets that is the real attraction. However, if Musk's goal (or, at least, one of his goals) is turning Twitter around as a company and making money from it, then keeping it family/advertiser friendly is very important. There's a reason Coca Cola isn't adverting on 4chan (or Truth social for that matter), nor is MSM promoting it.

danielrhodes 4y ago

There's a reason people use everything apps in other countries: 1) It reduces the number of apps you have to download, which in countries where data is expensive for the average person, is a big deal. 2) The proliferation of internet enabled services is still relatively new. So from a branding perspective, it is easier to communicate one service rather than many different services. The US saw a similar phenomenon in the everything app known as AOL back in the 90s.

imwillofficial 4y ago

Liberal Democracies have been bad for liberal democracy lately.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

"Engineers and management professionals generally lack a broader education in civics, humanities and ethics, they are poorly equipped to make socially responsible choices." Looking at the list of world's worst tyrants, I don't see many engineers by education, mostly civics and humanities.

wizofaus 4y ago

No disagreement that forcing everyone into one closed commercially owned ecosystem would be a very bad thing. But I do wish there were more open standards that allowed universal methods of securely conveying information to and engaging in transactions with other specific people - email is really the only such standard currently and it's obviously not fit for purpose (certainly not on the "securely" part). It would still leave room for competition/choice between actual apps or service providers used, even if it's true the browser market is effectively a duopoly now.

Roark66 4y ago

It is also funny because there is no way in hell Google and Apple are allowing "an everything app" in their play stores. They very much dislike apps that don't have a very clearly defined purpose.

emodendroket 4y ago

I mean this kind of thing already exists, doesn't it? Kakao is kind of an "everything" app and obviously Apple, Google, Facebook, and others have similar aspirations. I'm going to be honest, I find it easier to stay in the same handful of ecosystems myself.

jwmhjwmh 4y ago

nova22033 4y ago

Don't worry. He's going to build the everything app in the next 2-3 years..which means we have, realistically, 20-30 years..

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Sounds like a job for our American Silicon Valley douchebag overlords!

barelysapient 4y ago

I mean, getting deplatformed from the everything app is gonna really suck.

lucasyvas 4y ago

Saying an everything app is bad for liberal democracies and free markets is an accidental admission that the leading operating systems are also bad - A super app is called an operating system. I've been droning on for a while now that the winners in the OS space will control literally everything. They can steal any idea from any third party developer for their own and integrate it into the OS. You cannot beat that. They can read/write all data. They control the networking and random number generators. We place a mountain of trust in the operating system, and while I despise Apple quite a bit, I'd never bet a cent against them because they have seemingly done the impossible - they control (virtually) all aspects of the hardware, software, and services. That is insanely valuable and equally terrifying given their market position. I will be sticking with libre software as much as I can, but we've entered crazy territory. Apple can basically control telecom at this point by saying they are removing the SIM tray or whatever and even the telecom has to lower their head and go along with it. If you could have a native iOS shopping experience, it would demolish the usability of Amazon and nobody would use Amazon after a while. Any experience is fair game for the operating system - it will absorb whatever it wants to and leave the corpse of your app and service on the road.

mclightning 4y ago

Why are we even entertaining the idea? Just stop taking this guy seriously.