How To Beat a Superpower

In December of 1607, Puritans seeking religious freedom set the foundations of a colony on two hills near Plymouth Harbor. They didn’t know it at the time, but they won the first battle in a war that would eventually topple an empire. With a colony of 102 they started the process that would eventually lead to independence from the British Empire and the ascendancy of a new world superpower.

It’s a lesson for how to defeat a giant. A lesson we sorely need a time when our world is ruled by giants. As Mark Blyth recently pointed out (pages 10–13) our current economy is ruled by a small cadre of firms in each market sector. These firms increasingly set the rules for how we live our lives, what choices we make, and even who will rule us.

Netflix’s recent documentary The Social Dilemma talks about one such giant — Facebook, and the intrusive, manipulative ways it has been engineered to capture our attention, but they could just as easily be discussing the handful of other tech giants that influence every aspect of our lives — Google, Amazon and Apple, among others.

My point here isn’t to repeat all of the critical points made throughout the doc. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it — what I have to say here will be far more worthwhile if you do. I mostly want to focus on what to do about it. What can we do to stand up to a superpower? The Social Dilemma mostly ends by recommending greater regulation. I think this is a crucial part of the solution. Jordan Greenhall recommends a good way to think about it, but I don’t think regulation is ultimately enough.

Regulation is a crucial element of good governance, but we have to understand what it is. Regulation is hiring one giant to slay another, and there are many things that can go wrong in that process. Giants have wills of their own, are hard to control and can even end up colluding with the giants they are meant to slay. At best there are some victories, at worst we are watching a pro-wrestling match, but for certain mere mortals will be crushed underfoot in the process.

So how do you beat a giant, particularly a multi-billion tech giant like Facebook and do so without appealing to the whims of a gargantuan and distant government? The answer is so simple and obvious that it sounds idiotic — you create an alternative.

This may sound like a tall order. How do we create a competitor to a multi-billion dollar, tech behemoth? The task seems impossible until we discard a few assumptions: 1. That we have to solve the problem for every user of Facebook and 2. That the alternative has to be something that looks like Facebook. Once you discard those assumptions there’s really only one requirement to create a successful alternative to Facebook: that it be competitive; that people want to do it more than they want to do Facebook.

With that in mind, there is a simple recipe to follow, a recipe laid out by Plymouth and every other colony that left to establish independence from an empire.

First. Start small. Start with yourself. If you can find a personal alternative, you’ve already won the battle for yourself. If you can extend that alternative to your family or circle of friends you’ve won a decisive victory. Plymouth did not beat Britain by building a competing super power ex nihilo, they did it by creating a preferable alternative for a few people. If you can find a preferable alternative to Facebook that is adopted just by the community that matters to you, you’ve won. This point is crucial. Community determines reality. If you can find a small determined group that can share a firm set of principles, you can create magic. You can create a reality that sets rules for abundance and happiness divorced from the demands of distant corporate monoliths.

Second. When I say find an alternative, I mean any alternative, it doesn’t need to be social media, or even a technological alternative (although it could be either of those things) it just needs to be preferable. It can not be just a puritanical resistance, it has to be a trade that is a no-brainer; an alternative that is clearly better. It has to be more fun, more engaging, and more meaningful.

Like I said, the alternative could be technological. My daughter is a participant in a community based around the coding platform Scratch. It serves many of the purposes of Facebook for her while avoiding much of the icky stuff. She has a chance to connect with a worldwide community, but in a context where the emphasis is never on how you look, but the cool things you make. The community is run and moderated by volunteers and “Scratchers” with strict rules about bad behavior and exploitation, and there are no ads.

For me, I participate in the dharmaoverground forum, an online forum using 10 year old technology to connect meditation practitioners from around the world. The forum is funded by a single patron whose interest is in the transparency of meditation technology. He also happens to be available via email phone or Skype to anyone with a concern. I can connect with a community I would otherwise not have access to without interfacing with a platform built to absorb and manipulate my attention.

There are a myriad of reasons why these alternatives are successful, but I think it’s important to point out one critical feature — they are about connecting a group with a narrow niche interest. This is one of the main fronts where the battle against tech giants can be won — creating or participating in online communities in areas of interest to you. The strategic advantage is that we can build platforms custom tailored to the needs of the communities they serve, without being big enough for the incentives of wide scale manipulation to enter into it. In some ways it is a bit of a return to the internet of 10 years ago, but I prefer to think of it as reverting to the last stable build. We can go back a few steps until the ickiness is gone and continue to innovate from there.

Non-technological alternatives will likely mean rediscovering the lost art of civic engagement. There are needs that can only be filled and problems that can only be solved at a local level. A reading of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and George Vaillant’s Aging Well might be helpful in this regard. Find ways to interact with others in-person within your local community. Meet your neighbors, throw a block party, join a club or a church or a sports team. Join the PTA, become an activist or show up to city council meetings. Replace screen time with social time. Replace movie night with game night. The key is to make a commitment to find a way to interact with real people on a regular basis outside of work or family in a way that is engaging, fun and rewarding for you.

I’ve done a little of all of the above. I went to church once-upon-a-time. I’ve served as a member of my community council, participated in a weekly art night group, and a weekly meditation group. I’ve thrown block parties, brought cookies to my neighbors. I’ve been a regular at a coffee shop, worked at various co-working spaces and am currently in the process of building a robust board-game library. The critical move here is to just show up. Look for opportunities and just show up and keep coming back. Human nature will take care of the rest.

Of course, all of this is much harder with Covid, but let’s not kid ourselves that the retreat into our homes is somehow a step forward. Let’s hope that the necessary solitude of the current situation will teach us how much solitude sucks when things are “normal”. Let’s emerge with a greater clarity about how desperately we need one another and about how crucial it is to free ourselves from the false communities that treat us as commodities and build the true communities that treasure the value of our humanity.

Think carefully about what drives us to social media in the first place. What is it that we are missing and craving that we try to fill online? This question might best be answered by stepping away from social media, even if just for a season, and paying close attention to what remains in its absence. Maybe this ought to be the first thing we do. To successfully find an alternative, we have to understand the forces working inside ourselves. What does it mean to be happy, to find peace, to live a good life? The answers to these questions may be found sometimes in a loving embrace and other times in silence, but they will certainly require attention that hasn’t been otherwise sold to the highest bidder.