Big ideas: from Ericsson to Microsoft; from Facebook to TikTok
Chapter 1 of "Our Media In Motion: how social life became marketing strategy and relationships became fiction"
Think about two trillion dollars managed by a single person. That might be an overwhelming experience of awareness, but this kind of money exists, and governments are more than cognizant. Just look at the Bank of China, established in 1912, who has exceeded that mark. But we’re not supposed to play the hemispheric dispute game. If we focus on Microsoft, a company founded almost a decade after Jimi Hendrix debuted, we’ll think of the 1970s with a mix of skepticism and profound curiosity. My dad was born in 1962; two years later, Brazil was called a communist threat by the American government and the military took control over the refuge of then president Goulart. But mind you, it wasn’t the American military.
The latter would enact a foreign policy of neutralizing threats like they were deadly viruses, which is quite a morbid thing to talk about, but here we are, after a pandemic hit us and took almost seven million lives worldwide (according to German data analysis group Statista). The military in Brazil, on the other hand, would be less meticulous and more cruel, which is where many draw the line. If we’re skipping the stories of artists in Brazil who had the lyrics to their songs censored and faced interrogation, and indeed come back to the question of technology and money, we’ll see that the demand for personal computers grew exponentially, and Microsoft seized the opportunity; but it wasn’t without a fight. Before Gates decided to be a philanthropist, he made sure his successors had many tools at their disposal, including legal protections to operate at the top of the world economy -- if you don’t count the Bank of China, or rather, its several subdivisions. Microsoft was capable of investing nearly seventy billion dollars in a video game company, Activision Blizzard, while people were too scared to go out without a mask on, but the price of domestic gas in Brazil had already gone from 70 with just one zero in the previous decade to around 130 real. These guys were talking about billions. It’s the classic breakfast conversation at Bloomberg, the finance-focused network running live expert analyses on weekdays: they were talking about a ten figure plus transaction -- I’m not sure if they only count the zeroes, but I was never good with numbers. It begs the question: who were these people before they could do such a thing?
Microsoft began specifically in the year of 1975, when Gates took his Hardard knowledge to build operating systems that functioned as electronic interpreters, founding the company. What they were interpreting is somewhat unknown. Eric Clapton debuted solo in 1970. What we know is that this was before Iron Maiden and after Black Sabbath. But it doesn’t matter so much. There’s a lot of electronics involved in making music, but the capacity to store audio files in a digital format wouldn’t be developed until a completely new generation was teaming up, the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl. We still bought CDs, even then. Vinyl, the format popularized in their predecessor’s time of fame, was abandoned to favor a whole new industry that used what many people don’t even know were called CDs as an abbreviation for Compact Discs. Stereo players, automobiles and even computers were designed to make the CD possible to listen to, but guess what? The first CD you ever bought was from Microsoft, when you had to install Windows, the essence of their business. But that happened in 1985. Brazil was in uproar to call for direct elections and take out the military from power, which happened in 1984. After the drafting of a new Constitution, in 1988, when Sarney was in power, the Brazilian people saw an election process that would be marked by scandal and end in impeachment, with Collor. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but Nirvana ceased in a tragic event, and what was happening in my country was the election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the man who would enact a plan for a new currency in our country, which stays up to now, in 2023. But how does that change anything in the technology world?
As I’ve tried to illustrate, technology companies are willing to pay very big amounts to make sure their business is unbeatable. That happened with the video game industry, but it could have been music. The internet, of course, made this path a little more complicated. And would you imagine: a president has their daily thoughts transcribed, and they read: “A manic depression runs through my soul”; “Hey now, baby, get into my big black car”; “What is this that stands before me?”; “Selling their whiskey and taking their gold, enslaving the young and destroying the old”; “I’m so horny, but that’s okay, my will is good”. What could possibly happen with these people, if they were to enjoy positions of power? If technology was made to ensure communications were easier, then what about these phenomena of mass-media and gatherings of people that seemed to have a lot of passion and such a devoted spectrum of people willing to participate in the dissection of their discourse several times a day? The politician had the media covering their every move; the musician was trying to focus on the art of making music, but partnering up with media companies. This dialogue is odd enough to suggest, but its interconnectedness with technology tools of today is undeniable. Artists are actually struggling, if not financially, mentally speaking. Having all the attention on them is rewarding, but can lead to trouble. And I bet that Dave Grohl doesn’t like two-factor authentication, one of the processes created to make the internet safer, along with PIN codes and even facial recognition in order to access the Personal Computer. But to talk about what the shift to social media represented, we have to take many steps back, and this is merely a provocation.
In the 1990s, Microsoft, the trillionaire company of today, had to face the accusation of monopoly before the American Federal Trade Commission. Word and Excel, its biggest products, could do a lot and made things easier for many businesses and individuals. Several books wouldn’t have been written without a program that processed typing electronically. When the topic was music, companies set the price. Stores all over the world sold the finished product, but in order to consume it, you needed another product. Microsoft cut the middle man. But that was after it could prove that making file sharing the most important feature of their business wasn’t hurting consumers, but helping them -- a concept that would turn around decades later. Something happened in the new millennium that made a lot of heads turn: the dot-com bubble burst. Basically, a lot of people were thinking that having a presence on the internet was inherently good, but they didn’t necessarily have good business models. Did we learn any lessons? Microsoft did, and it lost some money after trials against monopoly accusations; but today, it is what it is.
In the music industry, if we wanna stick to that metaphor and think about media in a more technical way, everyone remembers what it was like to watch MTV. The awards like The Grammys and even in film, with the Academy Awards and the Oscars Ceremony, were bought off for transmission rights and translated for decades, at least in Brazil. But leaving film aside -- for convenience -- and focusing on the music, we might remember what happened with Napster. Founded in 1999, it distributed music without limits, and at the time, it reached 50 million users. That sparked a lot of attention. Famously, Metallica, a band of characters so controlling they wrote “The Master of Puppets”, decided that their copyrights couldn’t possibly be infringed by some teenager with computer skills. And so, arguably, a lot of people who could have seen success with distribution of their work were in the midst of an ideological and media war.
Then the internet evolved a little more. Social networks had their beginning. MySpace was founded in 2003, then Orkut in 2004 and Bebo in 2005. Back then, there were a few visible elements that made it more than a number on the yellow pages (that bulk book that people used to grab, especially in the 1990s, to look for pizzerias). The names could also be user names; the profiles had gender, age, location and a lot of specific details about you that you were supposed to write yourself: it was the beginning of the “bio”, which was what people called these sections that were not commercial (so everyone thought), but rather, social information. Very soon, people started to upload pictures to these websites, and the chronological order gets mixed up with the culture and elements that one took from another. Bebo, for instance, had a “favorite tracks” gadget, where the artists you listened to the most were one click away from you and associated with whoever chose to put that track on their profile: it helped with their sense of identity. Way before Snapchat, if we’re talking simple, or Meta, if you’re thinking about an entire world based on the idea of interactivity through fictional elements of characters and scenario design, Orkut experimented with a feature called Buddy Poke, where 3D avatars did things to each other like, literally, poking. There’s even a joke, which certainly tells you old you you are in my country: the meme “nobody pokes me”, which was actually mispronounced and maybe because of that, became so popular: “nobody tokes me”.
Users were looking for interaction, in unprecedented scale, shape or form. Does that mean everyone became friends with everyone? Not quite, but they surely did know Tom, the standard for whenever you signed up for MySpace. Famously, Orkut developed the concept of “communities”, similar to Facebook groups of today, but arguably more well-organized -- the moderators were there, too. Google saw the network’s potential, but when it joined the hype of social media, in 2011, it just had to catch up with too many things. Not that they didn’t. The acquisition of YouTube, in 2006, was the driver of most of their decisions, at least in the public view. Before that, Brazil saw what social networking was like with Fotolog, a sort of desktop Instagram, less easy to click on. And I’ll tell you why I think that’s important.
Part of why I decided to write a book on the history of media, with many connections made but no need for constant explanation, was that I saw some of these things as they happened; but later, everyone in traditional media would have the dominant opinion. People are not allowed to say the F word on Instagram. They weren’t allowed to post nudity on Fotolog, which started before all of the networks mentioned, in 2002; but that didn’t stop people from creating a world of adult live streaming and the infamous PornoTube, which obviously came after Google’s favorite new toy -- and gained a lot of popularity after it featured videos of celebrities such as Britney Spears, also from the world of music. As many came to realize, Metallica’s outrage in having their work stolen on the internet was not the same kind of thing Britney Spears had to endure after the leaked video, and so the role of piracy is crucial to understand how these events unfolded, and later on, to debate what today is called “open source”. But arguably, for arts, you can mention Creative Commons as an organization, started after the creation of the Free Documentation License, in 1998, that fought for knowledge to be spread without the notion of property. It was freedom of thought, for real: what some call copyright, they called “copyleft”.
The interesting phenomenon, however, is that YouTube took the moment where adult live streaming was booming, pornography was at the top of the Alexa rankings (before Amazon, that used to be a website dedicated to internet engagement measurements), and told everyone: “broadcast yourself”. We don’t know if that came with the burnout at editorials and tired public hosts of TV journalism, which would make sense, in a time where many also tried to blog: “do it yourself, if you think we suck”. The artists of that period gained a sense of popularity hard to grasp, because TV was still trying to maintain the right of exhibition. Movies were not allowed on YouTube -- that would’ve made cinemas go broke. It was a more or less calculated move. But very soon, The Pirate Bay and similar websites would be made famous, which has been recently fictionalized in the Netflix series “The Playlist” -- and the birth of that network alone deserves another book, but the questions are so similar that comedy actors like Paul Rudd joked about Mr. Skin (in Knocked Up, from 2007) and Hollywood icons like Kevin Spacey won best picture awards among mentions of porn stars (in American Beauty, from 1999).
You can now guess where my story with the internet began. Normally I’d give you time, and today I’d ask you to click on the link below to see what happened; but this isn’t the case. Technically, it all started in 2003, when I created my first Hotmail account, which I used I think exclusively to sign up to Fotolog. In 2004, my career in music started, not as a career, but as a pastime. Regardless, after just one picture of me playing the drums had been uploaded to the internet, a wave of hateful comments came pouring in, and my friends and I found out they were boys who studied in my girlfriend’s class, while I was one year younger and still starting high school -- being threatened with broken bottles in front of a public building, at a time when people didn’t film anything and we relied very much on community and the basic services we still can call on, but without any sophistication. The main harasser had a rich dad, and doesn’t need to be named -- because, honestly, I don’t even remember. There’s an event that was registered in that period: one of these boys used MSN Messenger to call someone on camera, and showed his parts; the girl took a screenshot, made a montage and posted it on a piece of paper at the classroom door, for everyone to see. That must’ve been embarrassing. My first time doing that sort of thing would only be in college, in 2010, and my relationship with that same girlfriend was changed by many events that we had to face together, some of which are related to technology and our socioeconomic condition: while most students could afford all books in the syllabus and order from Amazon, we barely had SMS.
I know that I was turning 15 and playing my first drum kit on the same day: August 5, 2004. We basically jammed some Iron Maiden: to tell you how much drama there’s always been in my life, the first song I ever played in my life was Aces High, with that crash pause in sync with the bass and three notes on the snare.
But while I was in high school, what we did the most, besides playing music, was talking on MSN Messenger (owned by Microsoft) and sending testimonials on Orkut. That was a sort of compliment in long form, where we told someone about the impact they had in our lives and suddenly got very emotional, elongating vowels unnecessarily and trying to express feelings with double T’s with an underscore in between, which resembled tears. Other people, when they had less of an affectionate relationship, used to write the number 8 followed by many equal signs and a D at the end. Testimonials were proof of how strong a friendship was, and you just had to do it. People, especially couples, wrote several of those. It was all, of course, very different from the LinkedIn recommendation -- the latter network took a while to really popularize, though it was created also in the same period, 2002.
There was no musical in high school, but plenty of music. That’s when I played covers of many Japanese bands, something that happened out of an interest from my friends and myself, playing in a drum machine at the shopping mall’s kids entertainment section. My girlfriend, for an entire year and before we officially started dating (the third of November is a personal holiday for me until this day, many years after our separation), paid for the coins that you’re supposed to insert in the machine and then play 3 songs, much like you did with Guitar Hero, with some more prompty version of tabs or scores, and you just had to hit a few blocks from different colors in the right places, at the right time. I didn’t know that music was about energy; emotion; giving and taking; listening, experiencing and translating; reproducing to the best of your ability; practicing; improvising; hearing what people have to say about music; searching and asking for recommendations; getting impressed at a live concert and saying congratulations to the band members; drinking, being late, messing up, fixing things, getting hurt, but still making the performance good; performing, transforming yourself, allowing a trance. And she was betting on all of that, rightfully so: eventually, I’d dress up like Japanese visual kei artists, an androgynous look with makeup and big hairs dyed with different colors, chains and belts, silk and gloves and stockings. The bands I played, mainly L’arc en Ciel and Dir en Grey, along with a ton of others, from Gackt’s Malice Mizer to The Gazette, from MUCC to X Japan, from Siam Shade to Alice Nine and Luna Sea, were all part of a completely alternative narrative. I did listen to metal, still, and a few rock bands. There was U2 and Oasis playing in the kitchen stereo, which one day I decided to get from my home, not living with my dad anymore but still asking for favors, and that had been an anniversary gift to my mom. I remember us sitting in the living room, next to the big window, and watching the entire rock in Rio; I also remember the first recorded DVDs from the internet, with songs like And She Said, Cage and Bel Air. That was suddenly not just my world. As the songs looped, all the family, and most of the friends and also distant family, became absorbed in the Japanese world. And what the hell was actually going on in Japan? We only knew that Nintendo and Playstation had been disputing the market of video games for the last decade, and most of us were still catching up on that, not ready for the next generation. You could say that instead of focusing on computer games -- Counter Strike was the classic everyone was talking about, and I remember playing it as early as 2004 -- I focused on music; but it was the Japanese music most of all. Sony was, indeed, an entire world. The company made TVs, had an entertainment branch that produced original movies and TV series, its own TV channel, electronics in general. You had Sony earbuds, you had Sony stereos, you had Sony walkmans. We didn’t care so much about politics, but that period was a transition between Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe -- a man who would serve four terms, all under Emperor Akihito, who in turn would be the maximum authority in the country from 1989 to 2019, when his successor Naruhito assumed his role. Having an interest in History, he studied it in college and then went to a PhD in humanities, still under his grandfather Hirohito, or Showa. It matters to say that Japan is the third largest economy in the world per GDP, and a strong player in the auto industry and high tech goods. But in terms of culture, Japanese people notably have a hard time speaking English, and when they try, they might say things about Kurt Cobain, drugs and sex, like The Gazette did, which confuse a lot of people.
In late 2006, a major event in my life would change a lot of things in my way of thinking, facing the world and in daily habits: I was 17 and passed to study in the University of Sao Paulo, the biggest in South America. I had no idea what I was getting into. USP majors are an exclusive bunch. They’ve studied everything there is to know beforehand, and if they didn’t, they will. They’ll have, if not interesting, surprising things to say in a friendly dialogue, not because they’re friendly, but because they’re smart -- more than you. And out of 100 points, I think I got, like, a 42 and was very proud of it; but schools like Medicine, for example, only took students around 80 at the time I applied. I barely made it in Literature and Linguistics: the “cutting grade” was 38, one of the lowest of all courses. I suppose they all forget to mention that, despite the brightest minds of Brazilian thought having been professors in the School of Philosophy and Humanities. I learned about names like Antonio Candido, Alfredo Bosi, Roberto Schwarz, in the field of Literary Critic, besides the foreign ones, like Friedrich Jameson. In Linguistics, there’s just too many to name them all, but I suppose Noam Chomsky is the most famous, and in my area, people like Eni Orlandi and Lúcia Santaella, who actually teach at different institutions, but were part of the curriculum and their books were in the Florestan Fernandes library.
So I was left studying the classics. That means Aristotle and Plato, Homer and Ancient poetry. The first year was very challenging. I understood 10% of what I was listening to. I wasn’t even 18! But I moved, and was granted with a social program that helps students in need for housing and food. That’s how I even managed to stay and complete the course -- the rest was partly luck, partly dedicating myself to studying to the best of my ability. Before YouTube popularized TED talks and everything like that, these were simply the most amazing talks I’ve ever heard in my life, and I just didn’t know humans could do that. I learned how to read; I learned how to study; I learned how to talk -- and then, I suppose I forgot, after I left the campus. But living in a different city, on your own, which is an experience parents prepare their kids to have all over the world by the time they’re 18, is something quite complicated. Back in my city, I had a strong circle of friends and my girlfriend’s family supporting me most of the time, and of course mine helped me as well, in many ways -- but not as much. And it’s not worth going into details, but rather asking the reader what kind of experience they might have had, and the role of support networks in their lives, especially if we are up for having a discussion on what relationships became and what social life represents, to whom.
In the world of Humanities, you’re taught how to read and write all over again when you’re in college. That means instead of looking at your punctuation or spelling, and then later on moving to topics like elements of rhetoric in the argumentative essay as well as the syntax of sentences and phrases (and how these are different concepts), you might be reading Oedipus and thinking about causality. And what the hell is causality? Well, everything has a beginning, a middle and an end; these are sequential elements in traditional narrative. From that to Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House” or Edward Estlin Cummings’ “what if a much of a which of the wind”, it’s a skip. In defense of humans, structure over improvisation wouldn’t be a moral compass for musicians just like it shouldn’t be a moral compass for the homeless living in a city of millionaires. Would you ask someone to look at the numbers coming from the S&P when they can only measure their luck by holding onto one cigarette and a piece of bread? Adequate housing and proper shelter are in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But even if you don’t post anything on your homepage, your ideas might need shelter -- to be protected.
So we learned about plagiarism. The students were still comparing outfits, girlfriends and boyfriends, grades, but later on each one would take a lesson: to brag about the car because they earned it or to cry about the chicken on the table that your dad cooked even though you’re a vegan. I wish I could appropriately compare soy milk to Tesla, but the exercises we had as we learned about “contrast” were more about the calm after the storm. And then, it’s worth mentioning a powerful meme (something that plagiarism lessons in 2008 didn’t quite predict): we’re not all on the same boat; it’s raining, some people have yachts, some are getting wet as the water fills up and some are drowning.”
But how do we live a social life, away from our parents and relatives, with another circle of friends? How do we bond? There were the people raising hands every time the professor quoted someone; there were the girls selling truffles at the entry hall; there were the library goers, sitting with piles of books; there were the smokers, dressed up with band T-shirts; there were the people waiting at the bus stop; there were those sitting for a snack and those getting xerox copies of the next chapters in the syllabus. You remembered a few faces, after some contact. And then, in a completely different place of the world, that was the stroke of genius that made this apparent nerd become one of the most influential people on the planet: what if we could keep track of those faces, and connect based on your liking?
To do that, some have learned while others seem to have pledged never to mention it, the young man hacked into the university’s systems. But it wasn’t a better social life or a better college experience, as in social assistance, that he was worried about: it was a website working on the basis of hit or miss, hot or not. And we’re not sure if that led to happy couples or was a contributing factor to curb the rampant sexual harassment in campuses, including stalking -- before the word was popularized. What we know is that, later, the project would be called Facebook, and it would change the world.
Profiles had many entry points. From gender and date of birth to political affiliation and bands you liked, as well as an activity log that was developed to be shown to users who wanted to review or keep track of it; from pictures to posts (the famous “big text”, as we call it) and later, reactions: Facebook pivoted before everyone started thinking about the NBA -- or did they? The notion that “you need to stop seeking approval”, my dearest friend would tell me, is nothing but the truth, and I’m not gonna raise a hand, but that’s because my hands are busy writing this down. It works, doesn’t it? We hope so. The numbers meant something. My most liked picture ever was (here we go again) me playing a pink guitar with Hannah Montana’s name written on it. Much glitter, wow. But it wasn’t like Barack and Michelle. It was just around 30 or 50 people. I say 50 because I remember it was big; but it was probably like 30. People liked the band, friends liked songs I posted by other people, but the movement was already going in another kind of direction: content creators on the spotlight. And here’s the catch: Facebook said that “it’s free and will always be”. Well, but the recent numbers, meaning 2022, reveal the company made around 80 billion dollars during that year. That’s how big they got. With that, I believe you can hire very competent professionals to analyze, for lack of a better word, data (and nobody cares about your pronunciation). Priscilla Chan was from the Biology background, and started Biohub, back in 2014; Sheryl Sandberg started Lean In, a women and young girls’ empowerment movement, but dedicated to fostering better workplace culture. You may ask: what does that indicate? Well, Frances Haugen told us a little about one of their products, but that was before TikTok took over.
When I say “took over”, I know it’s inaccurate. TikTok is a machine of fabricating fake perceptions and pushing guilt-trips, shame-trips, bullying-trips and just about any kind of crazy editing skills that you can imagine, formerly just in 15 seconds, repeatedly or not (but the views keep counting) and possibly one after another, with a quasi-magical swipe. The people who used TikTok must have thought the swipe was just faster; therefore, everybody should trust that app and not anything else. It’s just like Spotify: so what if it’s Swedish? But then, of course, the Chinese context would creep some people out, but only adults were talking about it. Even me, as a young adult, thought that products from China were, as we often said in Brazil, lower quality. There’s even a phrase: “shing ling”. Similar things have been said about products from Paraguay, which are supposedly “fake”; but the context, nobody even cares to think about. Facebook is global! Except that many countries reject it, and we don’t even know what people are doing on the internet -- a persistent truth, no matter your perspective.
Before TikTok, there was of course YouTube. But the videos people loved so much, and the icons who would be made on the platform, from comedians to musicians, big and small (from The Bro Bible to Ricky Gervais; from Andy McKee to Justin Bieber), had to deal with the constant harassment from fans. They didn’t call it harassment, but instead accepted fame as a price of recognition and status. Many would not, and so thousands and thousands of musicians decided not to post, every single day, although they were awfully talented, thinking: “what’s the point?”
Soon, and with the help of Twitter and its headline-friendly format, TV vehicles and also magazines and newspapers would take on social media and “pivot to video”. The idea of “broadcasting yourself” was what Google later had to call “low quality content” when you tried to run ads on your website, even though Brazilians had to pay over 600 real just for a domain. That’s more concerning Automattic, the company that bought Tumblr (later discussed), than Google. The point is that professional video would tell people what the standard was, and everything else was just “viral” -- but happened to be decent quality.
Back in 2008, people like me were lucky if they had a Sony Ericsson Walkman. And so my dad bought me one. I downloaded songs from The Pirate Bay or 4shared, maybe some Orkut community with a trusted link for a hosting website, and I put the mp3 in the storage. You needed a cable to transfer files. I suppose they were thinking about pictures, and the resolution was 2 megapixels; the iPhone 13 has 12. But here I am, still working with a 2 Gb SD card, while there are SDUCs -- Secure Digital Ultra Capacity Storage Card -- which exceed the terabyte mark; for example a PNY 1T SDXC today costs 156 dollars on Amazon.
But Ericsson was a Swedish company, which had implemented many systems in Brazil in the pre-military period, making 80 thousand telephone machines each year in 1956. They had demonstrations, very early on, of what a mobile video call would be; but that would take decades to implement. The world saw 3G, and it saw Bluetooth, a technology implemented by Ericsson. The first telephone machine in Brazil was actually ordered by the Emperor Pedro II, in 1875 -- a very long time ago, before the abolition of slavery. A lot more information is available by searching for Ericsson History on YouTube, and for those who want to go into the history and latest developments alike, they can look up morse code and 5G, which Ericsson considered staking in when Chinese giant Huawei announced it to the world.
What matters, though, is that today we live in a world where the most popular application for mobile phones in the world is owned by the Chinese, and American and British authorities think that’s a national security problem, but they have no problem making their surveillance a third party service with global cheap labor employed. From captcha factories in India to language transcribers for AI in Brazil, there are many services that complement what the megacorporations can’t do -- but announce so proudly they’re taking the right measures on. We know that nobody writes anymore; everything’s a video, with heavy editing -- blogs are gone. And what’s the value of a book? What about forums, a format where replies were expected to move discussions forward? It turns out that more people are interested in seeing who’s a girl with big breasts that they’ve seen (and want to share with their friends, for some freaking reason) than to debate things like the solutions for a structural problem or a reform of policy: for example, making the website Omegle.com rated 18+.
But before those websites (and along with the infamous Chatroulette, Shagle and so many others you lose count; along with the video calling services, like Whereby, Zoom itself, Linkello, TinyChat (a much older initiative), Twitch, Discord and familiar names and the new ones, like Olive and Litmatch, without forgetting about Wink and Hoop, we know there were forums where people shared contact information, and now we just have no idea where people start to abuse their skills to undermine your freedom and security -- which sometimes comes from within the platforms, not some group that decided to target you. If blogs and forums died, we saw gifs almost take over (anyone remember Gifyo?) before Instagram even existed, and way before TikTok decided to showcase its model as the secret of success.
Microsoft had an IPO in 1986. That’s very important to know in the business world. But we’re not talking about business, we’re talking about everyday activities. Nobody cares about Visual Studio, few people remember the Nokia deal, and nobody wants to hear about Bing, even now. Activision Blizzard is going to prove that the corporation has nothing but greed. Github will make you question that, but the legal proceedings of the 1990s will make you think twice. After Open AI’s acquisition, in. 2021, it reached the astounding 2 trillion valuation. But only about 3 million people have visited the Microsoft Wikipedia article, where 84 editors have contributed. In the entire planet, 84 people have thought about this critically -- the rest were silenced. And they talk about China. Maybe we’re trying to understand their context of business, in a model that’s completely opposed to capitalism as we know it, but we’re failing. Maybe it’s the surrounding factors. And maybe it’s none of that, but rather, ordinary people trying to make use of these technologies without thinking of the big picture.
It matters to quote Anthony Giddens, who writes, in “Consequences of Modernity” (1991):
“The advent of modernity gradually rips off space from time while fomenting relations between absent beings, locally distant from any situation happening face to face. Under the conditions of modernity, places become increasingly phantasmagorical: that is, the place is completely penetrated and framed in terms of social influences which are very far away (...) Modern organizations are capable of connecting the local and the global in ways that would have been unthinkable in more traditional societies, and in doing so, they routinely affect millions of people’s lives.”