The Future of U.S. Big Tech and Social Media (and a Quick Thought on Manufacturing)

As the saying goes, it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but in a piece I wrote for the Baker Institute, I argue that the social media landscape is going to become smaller and more global, with U.S. big tech control declining. Is this just wishful thinking on my part? Maybe! But as I watch what people are developing around decentralized social networks, which connect to each other via protocols rather than operating like the walled garden platforms most people use now, I see a lot of energy and innovative products, which I think will attract new users.

Here are some key passages from the piece:

Decentralized social networks allow for varied cultures, approaches to algorithms, moderation practices, and business models to emerge, while at the same time providing for greater connectivity between products. In this new environment, people will be able to use a service where they feel comfortable, but still be able to communicate with others on different networks. If a young person chooses app A and their parents are on app B, both can still see what the other is posting.

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As things stand now, most of social media operates in “walled gardens.” In a decentralized world, however, everyone can build their own garden space but still visit the gardens of others. People in America can build a garden (or gardens), Europe can build, Canada can build, people everywhere can build, and the result will be more small gardens that will all be open for others to visit. Some of these gardens may be specifically designed to meet the demands of local users — for example in terms of a preference for limited data gathering and more privacy — but if done well any of them could appeal to people around the world with similar preferences.

The transition may be slow because people were first introduced to internet conversations through specific platforms, and it can be hard to imagine the online world as anything other than the app where they initially made connections or developed a following. However, as the user experience on these centralized platforms continues to degrade, and the decentralized experience continues to improve with more products and users, many of the holdouts are likely to come around.

I know it may feel like the internet and social media have been around forever at this point, but they are still in their early stages and people are learning how they work and what they want out of them. I don't think where we are now is close to the end point. We all, as users of the internet, have some small amount of influence on what things will look like going forward, so let's make positive use of that influence.

As a related point, something I wonder here is if the Trump administration's plan to expand U.S. manufacturing will contribute to the decline of U.S. Big Tech dominance of foreign markets. In a recent interview (at 47:48 of the video), U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer emphasized the importance for the administration of shifting the U.S. economy towards manufacturing. In response to the questions "What do you want the economy to look like when the president's term is up? In 2029, what should we expect to be different?," Greer said:

Well, what I would like, and this goes back to some of the metrics I talked about at the beginning, I want to have manufacturing as a higher share of GDP. I don't necessarily say a certain jobs number for manufacturing, because productivity can kind of have an impact on how many manufacturing jobs you have. But globally, the average in any given country, 16% of GDP consists of manufacturing. In the US, I think it's about 11%, or 10 or 11%, and then with your export dependent countries like Japan and Germany and China, it's much higher than 16%. I would like to see manufacturing as a share of US GDP as moving in that direction. I don't want to be 11% at the end of his term. I want to be much closer to that average of 16%.

If the administration wants the U.S. economy to have more manufacturing, tariffs and other forms of government economic intervention may be able to accomplish that to some degree (at a significant economic cost). But the question then becomes, if we are shifting resources to manufacturing, what are we shifting them away from? What will we do less of? For the reasons stated in the Baker piece, I can imagine certain tech related services are an area that may see a U.S. decline regardless of the Trump administration's manufacturing push, but having the government push the economy towards manufacturing and away from other sectors could exacerbate the shift.