The 

Church of Twitter

has had a busy week. The mobs either crowning

Elon Musk

as contemporary

Martin Luther

or another 

billionaire

buying his way into societal 

infrastructure

.

Independent of this, my friend remarked that if

Facebook

were to disappear tomorrow that there would be non net-negative impact to society. My usual response when someone bashes

big tech

is a recoiled defense to how big tech is necessary for our current lives. Like what shall we ever do without

Uber

driving us around or delivering food to our bellies? Or what shall we ever do without 

Google

search? I know all this stuff seems so scary to distance ourselves from because we've gotten so used to it but we'd be better than fine without them. The question of is big tech necessary for our current lives isn't even the right question to be asking. I find more useful to examine our current lives and how we feel about it.

My friend used to engage in a

group chat

via Facebook Messenger. When Facebook went down for a few days apparently they just all switched over to 

Telegram

and now they are there. And if Telegram didn't exist I'm sure they would've figured something out. Maybe something with 'worse' 

UX

, but it would still allow the boys in that group to communicate all day err day.

It seems scary to not have Google search at our fingertips or Google Calendar or Google Maps, but we would just adjust. We have a populace filled with engineers able to build modern software that services 500-1000 people on commodity 

cloud

. But because of the financial incentives most of them are either working to incrementally optimize the big tech suite or trying to create the next big tech suite.

I imagine a world where people use more bespoke 

software

, that doesn't require bulletproof uptime or the slickest of user experiences. I imagine a world where people can not only understand that they don't actually need to be instantaneously connected to every other person on the 

internet

, they have the courage to live that out.

Yeah we needed Big Tech to get this army of 

designers

and developers. Yeah we needed them to get today's level of software know-how. But now we don't need them. When you drive into a big city, what you notice is the skyline.. the downtown. But much of the life happens in neighborhoods you can't see from afar. After I turned 25 or so I stopped going to the downtown areas whenever I visited a city. Nowadays big tech spaces seem just like that. But hey, some people like living downtown. Most don't.