The Everything App and the Separation of Powers

In the era of Big Tech ‘Cloud-ism’ or ‘Late Capitalism,’ the de facto three branches of government are mass media, intelligence, and finance. And if we add municipal authority to Montesquieu’s trio, its parody, replacing the town square and marketplace, would be Big Tech’s digital platforms.

Drawing these four cardinal functions together is the idea of an ‘everything app,’ which threatens to concentrate our ability to receive information (media), manage our bank accounts (finance), and make purchases and express opinions (online platforms), all while tracking the citizenry (intelligence).

On one level, the incentive here is convenience. The advantage of an ‘everything app’ isn’t that all these functions will be in one place (your phone’s screen is already one place), but that you can carry out online activities (buy train tickets, get food delivered, check your bank statement, send a message to someone) without having an account with each activity’s service’s provider. 

Of course, you could reproduce this same convenience by staying signed into Google or Apple and using their apps. The mini-programs on WeChat or AliPay are effectively different apps, and the latter are effectively operating systems. Given the presence of companies like Google in the West, the market incentive on the consumer’s side that led to the rise of ‘everything apps’ in China has not really existed in the U.S. or Europe. This is the obvious problem into which Elon Musk’s desire to turn X into an ‘everything app’ has run. 

In whatever way it is conceived by people like Musk, however, the ‘everything app’ does seem to merely be a private-sector term for a more general tendency towards full-spectrum consolidation of citizen/consumer interfacing with public and private entities. For his part, Musk has described WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, as “an investor and adviser to Tesla,” which is not terribly encouraging for those fearful of Chinese-style social credit systems.

The problem with concentrating diverse functions (on an ‘app’ like WeChat, a company like Google, or through a digital currency linked to something like a Green Pass) is obviously that it makes it easy to track and control people, predict and engineer social behavior, crack down on ‘wrong-think,’ etc. It would also contribute to the further, massive concentration of wealth and disempowerment of society at large, given the market around data.

Musk’s ‘everything app’ project would therefore seem inconsistent with the billionaire’s stated opposition to certain World Economic Forum projects and his stated opinion (at least so far as AGI is concerned) that not every possible innovation and technology represents a positive development. 

Just as we may limit some applications of AI or mandate low-tech spaces, for example, in school, so as to develop young people’s mental agility, we may decide that there is no real advantage for the common good in massively concentrating data. 

The point of beginning this discussion by likening mass media, intelligence services, finance, and online social media platforms to branches of government is that the same logic that once kindled enthusiasm for the so-called ‘separation of powers’ applies to them as well. 

We should consider whether the concept of an ‘everything app’ is problematic in itself and whether its convenience can be reproduced without actually concentrating  the ownership of data. 

This idea should be considered key and not an issue of technical advancement but of ideological priors to which advancements must be made to conform—an obvious application of the principles of distributism and of the Neapolitan ‘economia civile’ school of Antonio Genovesi central to traditional economics.

Let us end by proposing the following manifesto-style guiding points for a proper incorporation of advancing technology:

1. Increasing the efficacy and convenience of citizen and consumer interfacing with public and private platforms should not entail concentration of data collection and ownership.
2. Technology should be localization– and decentralization–friendly by design in order to preserve and potentiate
   1. local culture and the beauty of cultural diversity, on the one hand, and 
   2. local community engagement, group deliberation, and sociability, needed for proper human flourishing and a sense of fulfillment.
3. Mandated low-tech spaces, based on the principle that human flourishing comes before mere time-saving convenience. Aspects of the human personality can atrophy when we don’t use them. This includes memory and mental agility, which slacken terribly when we use a calculator, even for simple math. In the case of math, for example, we should resort first to the head, then the abacus, then the calculator, then the computer.
4. Education for willpower, focusing on avoiding technology addiction: schools in particular should foster discipline in young people and the cognitive structures, including memory, needed to engage tools like AI properly. In particular, it should be explicitly counted as one of the aims of schooling to give students enough discipline to hold themselves back from the powerful, compulsive, addictive draw of chasing the infinite branching possibilities AI suggests to them (what Kierkegaard called the “despair of possibility”).
5. Technology should abstain from anthropomorphic presentation in order not to interfere with our ability to relate to each other and, in the case of younger people, to be properly socialized. If AI needs to imitate human beings for the sake of ease of interaction or in order to serve a user (for example, to simulate interactions for someone learning to interact on account of some socially deleterious disorder they’re trying to work around), then it should be limited to this as a pedagogic tool. It shouldn’t be allowed to replace human interaction.