Google engine for searching, Gmail for mail, YouTube for videos, Meet for meetings. Discussing Whatsapp about Instagram and Facebook… People entrust their interactions with the world, social relationships, business, expression to a small bunch of global providers, look with hope and fear at artificial intelligence… Control is elsewhere anyway, technology familiar and alien. But if we look carefully through the online software stores for smartphones or go and see some computer magazines of the 1990s, we come across an incredible variety of programs, simple, complex, trivial, professional. Not rigid categories in which cowed consumers seek security and find themselves imprisoned, but a world of ideas, often realized, because software can be not only bought, but made, if not by all by many, even non-specialists. In many respects it's a return to craftsmanship, to people who, with the help of very advanced machines, make on their own things.
Top2. In The Generous Hands Of The Big Global Companies
Once every few minutes, my TV beams out a report about what’s on my screen to Samsung, the company that made it. Chances are, your TV is watching you, too, through a few nosy pixels on the screen. (Fowler, 2019)
The film I, Robot, out in 2004 and based on the stories by Asimov, depicts a scenario in 2035 where a single large company, providing humanoid robots to the whole world, is basically able to dominate it. As in The Invasion (2007), remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers of 1956, the division of the world between the good and the bad is not, in the end, so clear and absolute. In fact, the victory of the bad could bring a solution to some very big problems of mankind: no more wars, no destruction of the planet because of irrational behaviors. But this would mean giving up freedom, and the strong feelings that make human heartbeat, so the audience is happy when finally extraterrestrial or robotic solutions are defeated. Humans win, with all their weaknesses and the unwillingness to solve problems.
Figure 1. Source: Capala (2020) This is in fiction, in most stories. In the reality, freedom as so supreme a value does not seem to lead the actions and choices of the citizens of the earth, and not for the political choices of voters who in a democracy freely rely for example on a strong man or woman, with following advantages and risks. But it is a fact that, in front of a vast offer in the field of technology, most users choose to entrust themselves to a few gigantic companies, letting the tide flow, delegating to others most of the decisions and choices that ultimately have an impact on their own lives.
It’s a mechanism that works in many other fields: at the supermarket, I buy the pasta of the known brand even if the other on offer is better and today cheaper; at the book fair, instead of taking advantage of the presence of many small publishers that I can meet only there, I queue at the stand of the big house, the same one that has a bookstore or even many in my city.
Even outside of purely market mechanisms, it works in the same way with the political or religious leader, with the influencers, and with politically correct behavior. The gregarious nature of humans challenges reason, perhaps helping the individuals to overcome insecurities under the reassuring umbrella of what the majority do, of what and who they “know”. Knowing is in quotation marks, because having familiar a name in our mind does not mean at all that we do know someone or something. But we somehow believe to know her, him, it.