Post-platform Thinking (1)

Uber has been suffering a #DeleteUber backlash due its purposeless corporate politics, the perception of the company evolved from being a workforce empowerment tool into a clever self-induced slavery platform that ruthlessly crashes traditional economies.

Airbnb is loosing its initial coolness. An open, friendly, collaborative, ground-up initiative has been kidnapped by greedy, petty landlords and this group of noisy americans in the second floor that managed to wake up the whole neighborhood last night. The benefits of the sharing economy is quickly transforming into degraded destinations and upset local residents.

Facebook created the right conditions for any kind of bullshit to grow and penetrate the minds of millions of people, becoming the catalyzer of a global political turmoil.

A bit too late for good intentions, Mark Z.

For a while we felt ok with the idea of new, digital native platforms taking over traditional industries, at the end of the day these platforms are apparently built around the customer's needs. In fact, they won because they understood how a great user experience enables users to become a co-creator of business value.

But these kind of ground-up platforms are demonstrating to be a tricky thing to manage. As soon as they take off there's no way someone can control the complexity that emerges from them, and specially nobody can predict the profound, unexpected outcomes that generate.

My girlfriend and I seem to live under the constant anxiety caused by the pics of our friends in Instagram, everyone seem happy, beautiful, cool and capable of traveling the world all year long from one amazing place to another, while the rest of us spend our miserable lives inside some sad office. Nobody could predict that photo sharing platforms, the likes of Fb, Snapchat or Instagram, will turn around the way status is built and communicated, radically changing the focus of consumption to a level that we don't fully understand yet and opening new business opportunities to pretty fashion influencers and to the whole psychiatric profession.

We didn't understood either how the effect of Twitter in the young Middle East population would trigger first a revolution, then frustration, then repression and chaos; how Microsoft's crowdsourced IA will turn racist at the first opportunity, or how car sharing experiences may end in episodes of sexual harassment.

In a recent interview, Tim Berners-Lee pointed on some of the risks caused by the current architecture of the Internet, the platform of all platforms that he helped to create. The access to detailed personal data linked to smart targeting techniques via Social Media have the power of pushing hyper personalized messages that, as some of the world events are demonstrating, can shape the perception of reality, alter world views and benefit certain agendas. That's the most unexpectedly dystopian outcome -and the most scary one- of the good faith, democratic, open and empowering intentions that defined the beginning of the digital age.

Platform businesses are built on the optimization of the enabling capabilities of all their components, empowering users through technology and design in order to remove the need of an intermediating figure. It's the result of some kind of hyper-libertarian dream which goal is to behead every symbol of authority and give all power to people.

But, who would expect that some people are not nice,

...what a surprise.

I blame the User Experience Designers.

But that's another story...

Note: Very powerful comments on Tim Berners-Lee's article by Aral Balkan (via Media REDEF):

The Web we have is not broken for Google and Facebook. People farmers are reaping the rewards of their violations into our lives to the tune of tens of billions in revenue every year. How can they possibly be our allies?

https://ar.al/notes/we-didnt-lose-control-it-was-stolen/

Note: Bronwyn Van Der Merwe, from Fjord Australia, speaks about the same topic as part of Fjord Trends 2017: https://vimeo.com/206450134