Super App and Democracy

• Musk-Twitter Incident

Is the centralization of data anti-democratic?

Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app

Why an everything app is a bad news for liberal democracies and free markets

• Many technology entrepreneurs dream of an "Everything App", a smartphone application that will deliver everything to everyone on the planet.
• Elon Elon Musk has become the latest investor to declare an ambition to build such a super-app wanting to emulate the success of WeChat, a Chinese super-app.
• The Everything app presents massive risks to personal, economic, and political freedom.
• As John Gruber of Daring Fireball says, "It's no coincidence at all that WeChat is the only "everything app" anyone can cite, and it comes from China, an authoritarian regime.
• It doesn't benefit users that WeChat dominates all aspects of digital life . It helps the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party.
• The user is socially locked into a 'private' company for performing any or all socio-economic functions.
• Public policy must act to prevent firms and apps from acquiring socioeconomic dominance in the first place
  • Nurture a competitive market.
  • Promote open public digital infrastructure with interoperability.
• At a deeper level, Elon Musk's desire to emulate the Chinese model alerts us to the danger of the interests of Big Tech increasingly diverging from those of liberal democracies.
• Preserving our freedom may indeed be their most important corporate social responsibility.