The Problem
We Are Completely Dependent on our Phones Now
In 2020:
There are 3.5 billion smartphone users around the world
1.5 billion smartphones are expected to be sold in 2020
77 percent of Americans have smartphones
47% of US smartphone users say they couldn’t live without their devices
62% of smartphone users have made a purchase on the device
In-app advertising will rise to $201 billion by 2021
99.3% of all internet use in China is via mobile devices
Approximately one-in-five American adults are “smartphone-only” internet users.
46 percent of visitors to this site are using their smart phones.
Average time spent on smartphones a day is 2 hours and 51 minutes.
Average smartphone owner will interact with their phone 2,617 times a day
In-app advertising is almost a $200 billion industry! Where does that money come from?
These Companies Have All Your Data
You don’t have access to your own data. These companies LOVE having your data, because it keeps you on those platforms and deters competitors. Many of these companies sell your data to others for a profit. Most of them have your credit-card number. They have gone from being in the service business to being in the persuasion business.
From the Pew Research Report on Americans and Privacy:
70 percent of adults believe their data is less secure than it was five years ago.
72% of Americans report feeling that all, almost all or most of what they do online or while using their cellphone is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies
47% of adults believe at least most of their online activities are being tracked by the government.
38 percent of adults say they sometimes read a privacy policy
81 percent of Americans feel they have no control over the data companies and governments collect about them
Your Data is Their Fuel
Today, we use Siri, Alexa, and Google to help us answer simple questions and do small tasks. In the near future, these platforms will become much more powerful. Do they work for us? No. They work for the shareholders of their corporations. As an example, Amazon won’t sell you an Apple Homepod because it competes with Alexa.
In a few more years, your entire genome will be available digitally. Companies like Amazon, Pfizer, and CVS will be happy to “make it easy for you” by storing your data and using it to create your next custom drug. The more you store your data on corporate servers, the more “sticky” those platforms are, and the more you become their most valuable asset.
The price of convenience.
How “free” is all this? An active Internet consumer spends at least $1,000 more than s/he has to each year by clicking and following ads or using known platforms rather than finding better solutions. That’s about $100 billion in the United States each year. The companies in these ecosystems are going for vendor lock-in, to make sure you have a frictionless experience that keeps you logged in at all times. They aren’t going to tell you where to find a better deal. When everything is easy, the one thing that isn’t is switching.
What Does Pay To Win mean?
Pay to win means the companies that pay the most get the largest share of your attention. This - plus terrible regulation - is why we now have giant tech companies that keep buying up challengers. The playing field is not level. These are winner-take-all markets.
This is how much you are worth to:
Google: $182
Facebook: $158
Twitter: $81
LinkedIn: $69
Yahoo!: $70
Amazon: $733
eBay: $474
Alibaba: $621
Yelp: $25
Perform to Win
In the world we want to build, companies compete and win on the merits of their products and services, rather than on social-media messaging, gaming search engines, celebrities, repetition, clickbait, pop-ups, and media manipulation. In the world we want to build, companies will continuously have to keep upgrading their offerings, because they will be competing for customer dollars every day, rather than having customers trapped on their platforms.
Have you ever noticed that companies will offer you a deep discount to switch from a competitor but will make sure to charge you full price, even if you have been a loyal customer for many years? They know people are lazy. Once they get set up on a platform, customers don’t leave, so they no longer offer deep discounts. That’s the price we pay for all the convenience they deliver.
To be fair, companies like Amazon work hard to keep prices down. But Amazon has other ways of making money - their retail margins are too low for other retailers to compete against, and they make most of their profits on web services, which is why people talk about breaking up Amazon. Any seller who wants to sell through Amazon must play by Amazon’s rules and pay Amazon’s fees. There are many cases where Amazon has competed unfairly with companies on its platform - using their product sales to determine which products they should make in-house, forcing sellers to use Amazon fulfillment, and other tactics. Even though Amazon has only about six percent of US retail, Amazon acts as a monopoly in many cases.
We Are All Being Sucked In
Algorithms of the big tech companies influence the thoughts of more than one billion people each day. The platforms we spend the most time on are corrupt by design. Our tools have gone from helpers to overlords. They are designed for addiction and monetization. This creates:
Addiction
Depression
Loss of choice
Higher prices to consumers, who pay for all the marketing in the long run
Adversarial online and offline behavior
Confusion between information and marketing
Political manipulation
Asymmetry: winners have data, losers give data
Big companies get bigger; small companies have much less chance to succeed
To learn more about the problem, explore our site. Be sure to see the statistics page.
Next: The Solution