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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 need and building a personalized portal to the world (even a personalized world, in some cases) they’ve got it covered — and when they don’t, they have the money to cover it. Then again, we might ask at this juncture whether we actually need any more of what the big platforms provide. Or, for that matter, even what the upstarts offer as alternatives.
There’s a danger in assuming that the game the big platforms play is the only game to play.
The buzz around Tik Tok or Clubhouse is, in the end, excitement over what’s largely a repeat of what we already have, or have had recently. Tik Tok drew immediate comparisons to Vine, the defunct video-based social app, the key aesthetic difference being that Tik Tok is arguably far stranger — not to mention its significantly larger mainstream cultural influence.
