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
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 thatās too hard to fill, and someone else could create another protocol that works in their local economy, maybe like a matrix protocol. Theyāre completely different but serve to solve the same problem of real time communication.
Then Elonās 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 donāt need to issue tokens and other bullshit. Just build something useful and they will come.
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.
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.
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/ra...
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.
Our phones are already SuperApps, this is an attempt at redistricting.
> 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. Thereās 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
This is essentially the point of the book The Circle.
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
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.
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.
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
We already have an everything app. We have at least 5, in fact: Microsoft Windows, macOS, Ubuntu Linux, iOS, Android.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, getting deplatformed from the everything app is gonna really suck.
It doesnāt actually matter if thereās 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.
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...
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.
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..
Maybe. The real question is how many people in tech saying this would say the same thing without that Tweet by Musk.
What if we just like, didnāt use the app?
Why are we even entertaining the idea? Just stop taking this guy seriously.
I don't want an everything app, I want an app full of app stores. A marketplace of marketplaces.
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 āIād like to see this expand in scope such that a lot more, if not all, of my digital life can be hereā?'
It's not only that. Twitter will clog any device. Say goodbye to twitter app.
Sounds like a job for our American Silicon Valley douchebag overlords!
US is a decade behind China's WeChat. I think we should catch up.
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.
App-think is going to become the new group-think?
I love the design of this website.
> Itās no coincidence at all that WeChat is the only āeverything appā 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.
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.
Liberal Democracies have been bad for liberal democracy lately.
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.
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.
Isn't that the intent of it?
Same as purchasing Twitter?
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.)
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
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.