Is Facebook Infrastructure?
Facebook is as natural in our lives as water.
At first glance, Meta seems like a consumer company. Its ubiquitous nature, whether in the form of a mobile application or website that opens in your web browser, goes unquestioned.
Facebook is as natural in our lives as water.
If you lose access to the latter, you won’t survive for long! Reliable access to water requires the necessary infrastructure for a society to run.
But what happens if you get disconnected from the former?
For example, the Russian government banned Meta from operating in Russia during the beginning of the two-year Russian-Ukraine conflict.
Another major disconnection taking place was Apple Pay and Google Pay ceased working in the immediate days after Russia invaded Ukraine.
It makes me think that Meta, Apple, Google, X, and many other consumer technologies we depend on are essential communication infrastructures in today’s modern society.
I only realized this recently after viewing tech through a geopolitical lens.
One could argue that social media companies became essential infrastructure during the Arab Spring revolutions of the early 2010s in the Middle East. These revolutions mainly started online on Facebook and Twitter and then happened offline, as people used the former to coordinate protests in person.
Individuals depended on these technologies to exercise their rights and make their voices heard against their various governments.
As software from Meta (Facebook) and X (Twitter) became ubiquitous in the early ‘10s, it’s important to note that they were seen as neutral platforms, that is, these technologies did not come with any geopolitical baggage that may favor one country’s interests over another.
Why is this all now so important? There are a couple of takeaways and questions:
I used to believe that the evolution of software from feature to product to platform to infrastructure was only a journey that enterprise startups could travel.
In light of my new perspective, it’s clear that consumer firms like Meta and X have also traversed that path as they grew. It’s not enough to be a platform business; all startups should aim to become the essential infrastructure needed to run individual lives and collective society at the most basic level.In this current era of intense geopolitics, will software, especially from Western countries, continue to be seen as a neutral technology by the rest of the world? If not, could we see the rise of more indigenous tech ecosystems that will compete with global firms like Meta and X as a matter of national sovereignty?
Does software enhance or restrict a nation’s sovereignty in today’s globalized world?
I’ll try to answer these questions in follow-up posts. Maybe Elon Musk is correct in saying that X is now the “de facto public town square.”
Soda