Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

This type of open interchange is certainly technologically possible, if not completely straightforward. As Sinan Aral, an MIT professor who has studied social networks since the early 2000s, told me, networks ‘all have the same messaging formats now anyway: textual messages, video messages and stories’.38 To make this shift a reality, though, governments would need to act decisively. Nations could mandate interoperability, especially for services that reach a certain size – perhaps 10–15 per cent market share. By waiting until a company had grown to this scale, it would allow founders to innovate and explore markets – while signalling that future success will bring additional civic responsibilities. And the principle need not be limited to social networks. Imagine if a gig worker could bid for jobs across dozens of relevant platforms at once and carry the track-record they have earned from one service over to another. Or in the case of healthcare, where a patient could access their medical records independent of the provider behind them. In each case, power would slowly shift to the person and away from the platform.