Welcome to the age of Monopoly and How to Fight Back
I hear you shout this is nothing new — what about the Robber Barons or any number of enterprises before or after.
Find out why this is different.
Platforms and the inter-connectivity of a world wide web has enforced a situation where being first to the table with a new technology wins.
Except when it doesn’t because you are replicated by the tech behemoths of the day.
- The path to this paradigm is simple.
- You create an incredible product
- People Start to Notice
- Tech giant begins to watch
- Tech giant offers something derisory
- You turn it down
Tech giant replicates your platform and disseminates to their millions/billions of users.
Gone are days of necessity for originality, long live the days of replication.
The need to go from zero to one has diminished to such an extent that if you have a larger platform and a new kid comes knocking at the door, you copy his services and hijack their market.
If that fails, you can’t steal their existing users, you cannibalise the potential areas for growth they were counting on instead.
Snapchat is in a bind; sell up or face death. With no IP or any of significance, Instagram can shamelessly clone their service and have more ‘active users’ than them in under 12 months.
Ouch.
Are potentially viable technology companies merely going to evolve into proof of concept for Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple?
Sell up or face death. You can’t compete with the existing platform because they are too big to fail. That platitude was often trumpeted disingenuously in the previous generation but it is my belief it has now been realised.
It sure feels that way and that is to the detriment of innovation.
The world’s most talented engineers are no longer seeking solutions to the world’s most noble problems, they waste their time engineering solutions to problems that have already been solved. Personally, I find this incredibly depressing.
Technology promises so much but recognises so little.
Television could have acted to educate a generation instead it robs the time of anyone who is stupid enough to consume it. Reality TV stars cross over to the mainstream and become influencers in their own right.
Welcome to modern life.
Our participation begins and ends as a god in the conglomerate’s machine. We nourish these companies by providing ever more of our personal information to them for free without receiving anything substantial in return. We forgo protections and security in return for seeing what our friends from school ate for dinner.
What the world lacks is any form of consumer protection or consumer facing product.
What people fail to realise is the collective power they wield.
Sure, Joe Bloggs couldn’t go to facebook and influence anything on his own, what if collectively 1m users banded together to demand change? What about 10m or 100m.
For too long corporations have dictated the terms of the agreement to consumers.
This no longer has to be the case.
The internet has passed through the first age of the internet. For me, this is characterised by the individual. You representing yourself independently and companies selling to people directly.
The next stage is equally as compelling, collectivity.
Why should the platform be nourished by the individual, why shouldn’t the individuals collectively operate as one and dictate the terms of engagement of the platform?
We are seeing this resistance with the peer to peer economy companies; Uber and Deliveroo most pertinently. People have realised that the Enterprise is bigger than them on their own. Together though they can take control.
The internet requires similar. History will show we were are all on the wrong side of the equation. We are the internet, we are the data we create, we are the insights and data that are derived thereafter.
You can either sit back and accept the exploitation being perpetrated against us or come together and belong collectively to a movement which will oppose this.
