How to Deal With the Monopoly of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple

Remember the time when people didn’t know that a bag of Doritos is a bad for our health? People just couldn’t put the bag down.

Fast food made our lives happier and much more efficient but only till we realized how much salt, lipid and sugar they contain.

The food companies made us addicted and we did not wake up soon enough. They damaged our waistlines and our planet.

The revolution of becoming mentally obese

Now, we have entered the mentally obese era which relates to the technologies we use. Our phones are glued to our hands.

Technology and all these platforms we use on a daily basis make our lives much more efficient, in the same way that the food revolution made our lives more efficient.

We need to pay attention to what’s happening because we don’t want to wake up decades later to say that we have become mentally obese.

Not unintentionally

Our addiction to the devices and platforms is not unintentional.  It’s not an accident you encounter with them, they implant themselves deeper into our lives.

Furthermore, we don’t just merge with machines we merge with the companies that operate those machines and set the rules for the machines.

Think of companies as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Their values end up being our values. This power threatens our democracy and public voice.

The new monopoly

Therefore we should not underestimate the power of those 4 corporations Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple who are creating a monopoly, by buying more and more market share & different segments.

For example, Google starting with Google cars and their acquisition of Waze. With their ambition of taking over the world they leave no opportunities for competitors.

As Amazon swallowed so much of the retail sector they decide which products will be sold, in the same way Google decides which ads you will see.

The Facebook engine of manipulation is manipulation set up in a way that Facebook controls what we hear and only shows the things that they want us to see.

“Stay human”

Is this all inevitable? Or is it possible to find the right balance?  Can we find a way of learning what it means to live a good life? According to Franklin it’s possible to stage some kind of collective intervention where we say:

“You know what, these technologies are great. We don’t need to throw our phones into the ocean, we don’t need to give up on search engines or google.

But we can start to impose rules, we can start to teach moderation, we can start to find a way to live with these new technologies and these wonderful developments in such a way that means that as we merge with these machines that we do it on terms that work for us. We have to stay human!”