What the main problem with ‘tech companies’?
Most people think that the problem is privacy, data ownership, control or monopoly. These are critical problems, but they’re all second-order problems.
The primary problem is that billions of people need something so badly that they’re voluntarily giving away their privacy, data and control to corporations, and this harms our economy, society and information in ways that we’re not paying attention to.
This website explains that ‘something’ that people need and how we can give them a better version of it.
A brief explanation of the problem
Every person on the planet needs to interact with other people – to trade with, share with and receive information from them. To do that, we’re constantly inviting people to interact with us – to buy from us, sell to us, meet with us, read our information, provide us with information and so on. These invitations – these offers – are the organizing principle of our economy, society and information.
As we make and receive offers, however, our attention is consumed and made scarce – we do not have enough attention to find the best offers. To do that, we need external offer processing – something outside of our brains which gathers, considers and filters offers on our behalf. This is why we use Google, Facebook, Amazon, newspapers, shopping malls, television stations and supermarkets – they’re aggregators who generate maps (simplified representations of offers) which we use to navigate and participate in our economy, society and information.
These aggregators do not create free markets – they distort their maps in order to take our money, efficiency and opportunities. In doing so they have distorted our economy, society and information and may, if we don’t bypass them, hollow them out until they collapse.
The solution is to provide a different form of external offer processing. They need their own tool which aggregates (gathers, considers, filters and processes) offers on their behalf. Then we can have privacy, data sovereignty and control (because we no longer need to give it away in order to interact with other people).
The problem in detail
We cannot solve the problem without fully understanding it. To do that, please read these articles in the following order:
| Offers & Attention | How does our economy, society and information function? What prevents us from participating? |
| External Offer Processing | How can we find the best offers (and navigate our economy, society and information)? |
| Aggregators | What do aggregators (search engines, social networks, etc.) actually do? |
| Techno-Kleptocracy | What are the aggregators really doing? |
| Collateral Damage | What problems are caused by aggregators? |
The solution
The solution is to aggregate offers in a completely different way, which gives control, privacy, data and freedom to individuals.
Learn about The Solution