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03 October 2024
note

Meta's Toaster Problem

Meta has a toaster problem in that Meta does not sell toasters.

Remember the guy who tried to build a toaster by sourcing all its raw materials? His name was Thomas Thwaites, and by his own account, the project was a spectacular failure. It turns out it's very hard to build a toaster from scratch. Who knew?

Thawaites' failed venture into kitchen appliance manufacturing is excellent news for Big Toaster. However, companies like Meta, which sell ones and zeros, do not share this competitive luxury. Barriers to building digital products have always been low.

This hasn't been a problem for Zuck, historically. The network effect has been on his side for over two decades, and his anti-competitive strategies have always worked like a charm. The entry barriers were always just high enough for him to kill off any social media reaching the App Store's top 100.

Lately, however, it seems everyone wants to make their own toaster. Thanks to the concept of decentralized social media and OpenAI's magic toaster-making machine, ChatGPT, even a digital novice could now cobble together a Fediverse instance over the weekend.

So, what do you do when what you sell is accessible elsewhere? Well, if you sell plastic bottles with water inside, you convince the consumer that tap water is dangerous. If you're a restaurant chain, perhaps you spread the rumor that a particular type of tasty rock dust is bad for your health, then turn around and use that tasty rock dust in the food you sell to differentiate yourself from home-cooked meals. MSG, by the way, is a gift from our lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Use it.

When General Electric started losing its monopoly in the lightbulb industry, it created the Phoebus cartel. When Debeers learned that diamonds were a common gem, it stockpiled supply and also created a monopolistic cartel.

So what does a company like Meta do when building consumer-facing dopamine machines is no longer a viable business model? It moves down the technology stack into infrastructure. It then lobbies Congress for a set of laws that would force small, independent platforms to use compliance-ready cloud services. It then gets really chummy with the leaders of these small independent platforms and throws a lot of money at seemingly innocuous technology foundations.

It changes its name, has the founder tell the press he wants to be remembered for something more than his money-printing platforms, and then spends a cool hundred billy on data centers under the guise of building a Metaverse.

In short, Meta is pivoting to cloud infrastructure, and one day soon, all these cool, quirky little websites on the "indie web” will use the Meta Cloud™ and all its regulation-compliant services.

When anyone can make a toaster, toaster-making companies start selling toaster-making factories that toaster makers must use under the threat of law. It's the American dream.

A good quote for all my Fediverse readers who still think Meta's presence in benign:

When it began, Facebook succeeded in part thanks to aggressive data scraping and interoperability with its competitors. By allowing its users to link their accounts to MySpace-which was much larger at the time-Facebook was able to poach users. Because users could send messages from Facebook to MySpace, and receive notifications from MySpace on Facebook, users chose to use Facebook as their MySpace client. Then, after it achieved scale, Facebook aggressively closed the door on interoperability. — Meta’s Interoperable Reversal

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Tags technocrats
Assumed audience fediverse