Big Tech Is Boring
Why nobody has any new ideas anymore
Five days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance in a Clubhouse chat room, the New York Times reported that Facebook is considering launching its own Clubhouse-style service. The two events are not necessarily connected — sources told the Times that Zuckerberg “has been interested in audio communication forms” — but the coincidence of the two is symbolic of both the way Facebook endlessly imitates its fiercest competition, folding copycat services into its own apps (Instagram’s Reels closely resembles Tik Tok videos), and how the tech sphere more broadly seems stuck in a imaginative rut.
The second might be a function of the first, as Shira Ovide argued last week. Big tech companies co-opting the ideas of their upstart competitors means there’s less chance we’ll see something new take over. “We’ve seen before that big leaps forward in technology can bring down industry titans, like the cellphone pioneer Nokia,” Ovide wrote. “But boy, it sure feels like the tech giants today are so entrenched, so good at what they do — and, perhaps, skilled at tilting the game to their advantage — that they simply can’t be beaten.”
Maybe Ovide is right in assuming that taking down Facebook or Google at their own game might now be impossible. When it comes to catering to our every individual…
