10 billion tiny scratches

We have all heard the phase 'death by a 1000 cuts' but when we are thinking about entities as big, well-resourced, powerful and manipulative, as the Big Tech companies which rule our digital spaces, no individual can get close enough or have enough strength to make a cut.

So we tend to fall back on the lazy solution of regulation. We think that only nation states are able to make a cut on these companies and hope that they will, cumulatively, eventually inflict enough cuts to kill or at least tame the monsters.

Maybe nation states will regulate effectively, but maybe they will find that they lack the political will and power to make and enforce effective regulations. Maybe they will find that rogue states emerge with weak regulations which allow these suprajurisdictional companies to evade regulation. Or maybe all regulations are doing is slightly increasing the costs of carrying on as before.

Regulosolutionist thinking stops there. It assumes we have no other weapons against these companies, no other means to constrain their behaviour, than regulation. But we do: we the users can form a consumer movement which resists them.

This is because their power rests entirely in the switching costs of leaving their platforms. So you weaken them by making the non-monopolistic, non-oligarchic alternatives stronger and more attractive.

Every time you send a message by Signal or Session or Matrix or even just SMS, every time to cross-post to Mastodon or Pixelfed, even if you are still using WhatsApp or iMessage or Messenger or X or Instagram or ..., is a tiny scratch on the skin of these monopolies. They won't feel that scratch. They won't feel a 1000 such scratches. But they will feel 10 billion such tiny scratches because each scratch strengthens the alternatives and thus weakens them. The loss of money from these 10 billion messages and posts going elsewhere will not hurt, but the loss of power to keep users locked into their platforms will hurt.

Think of switching costs as similar to the costs of emigration. Just knowing there is another country you could move to does not make the move worthwhile for you. For that you need to know that the destination country is somewhere you would want to live. So let's make the alternatives places everyone wants to live. One message or post at a time.

Each scratch is an exercise of freewill resisting the domination Big Tech exercises over us. It is the ground swell of freewill against domination which ultimately overthrows any dictator. All we need is 10 billion tiny scratches.

If switching feels too hard, just scratch.


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