Digital Babylon on Trial
What would happen if Meta got broken up?
In my Digital Babylon framework, there are three ways to think about the term “Digital Babylon”:
An event: the sudden and rapid ascent of immensely powerful technology and media companies.
An empire: the cultural, political, and spiritual forces those companies and their tools/services exert on us individually and collectively.
An epoch: the period of time where individuals, families, and churches must live as wise and faithful exiles amid God-ordained cultural and spiritual opposition.
Of those three key terms, two of them share a common theme: Big Tech. The coming of Big Tech is both an event and is itself an empire that exerts unfathomable pressure on those living in its shadow. It is hard for the average consumer to fathom the extent to which Google (which was just found guilty of illegal monopolization), Meta, Amazon, and others among the largest companies to ever exist have attained their status through erasing their competition and making life miserable for those who want to live and operate apart from their systems and services.
Antitrust law is complex and boring. I am not an expert on it and will not try my hand at summarizing a case that full-time writers like Matt Stoller have been covering for more than five years. Instead, I want to cut to the chase and explore what would happen if, after all is said and done, the Department of Justice finds Meta guilty of illegal monopolization and orders Meta to divest of one of it’s major companies, likely either Instagram or WhatsApp. Would that mean social media becomes less pervasive in our lives?
The answer is almost certainly no. Whatever happens to Meta in this trial, Digital Babylon still wins.
Scenario One: Meta Found Not Guilty
If Meta comes out of this trial without being forced to divest any of it’s major companies, Digital Babylon wins because the status quo remains unchanged.
Contrary to public sentiment, Meta is doing just fine. Facebook (the platform) and Instagram remain two of the three biggest social media platforms in the world with billions of users. WhatsApp is still the de-facto texting app of most of the globe outside the US. Llama, Meta’s developmental AI, is not a household name like ChatGPT, but it doesn’t need to be one to still be immensely profitable for the company—and its proving integral to Meta’s new AI smartglasses.
I have a piece in the works elsewhere (hopefully coming out soon) that goes more into this, but one of the most underreported tech stories of the past twelve months is that Meta has broken the barrier on wearable tech with their Ray-Ban AI smartglasses. Virtual reality headsets like the Apple Vision Pro were never going to see mass adoption—the last ten years of VR gaming’s failure to break into the mainstream was the best test-case anyone could ask for. But smartglassses are a different story. Asking people to wear bulky ski goggles on their head in public is a hard sell. Asking them to upgrade the glasses they already wear to be able to take photos, have AI, or have built-in translations? Turns out there is a significant amount of demand for that for both able-bodied and visually impaired users, which is the National Federation of the Blind recently said in a Wall Street Journal piece, “It’s giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford. . . We would like to see Meta continue to invest in this.”
Meta would not be going anywhere if ends up being found guilty of illegal monopolization. If Meta is not found guilty, even more so. With their Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp trifecta, they will continue to rake in more money than any normal person can possibly comprehend, allowing them to pivot into new markets any time they sense an opportunity. We have not reached peak Big Tech.
Scenario Two: Meta Found Guilty
If Meta is found guilty of illegal monopolization and, in sentencing, is forced to divest of one of its major companies, Digital Babylon wins because a weakened Meta will open the door to new American competition the likes of which we have not seen in a decade.
I’ve been following this story for years. Part of what gave birth to this whole Digital Babylon framework was my study of Zuckerberg and Meta for Breaking the Digital Spell. I am by no means an expert on the man, but everything I’ve seen from Zuckerberg over the past year in interviews suggests this man is ready for a new challenge. Algorithmic-driven social media is in a stalemate. Meta’s ad business survived its more potent assassination attempt at the hands of Apple and came out even stronger. Zuckerberg could coast from here on out and live comfortably for the rest of his life regardless of what happened with his social media companies, and that notion of kicking back and taking it easy is his kryptonite. The man lives for the fight.
But it’s hard to move on from the current game without a new challenger getting in the ring.
Meta (then Facebook) facilitated the rise of TikTok because only a foreign superpower could compete with an American superpower. If Meta’s competitive grip on the industry is weakened from within, it will trigger a new gold rush of American investors, companies, and platforms waiting in the wings for their chance at a slice of the pie that Meta has controlled for the last decade—even more so if something also happened to TikTok in its current drama. If the wave of new platforms over the past two years felt overwhelming to you, it would likely be nothing compared to what would happen if the legion of Meta’s potential competitors smelled blood in the water.
An additional consequence that would likely attach from this is heightened scrutiny on any future acquisitions Meta attempts to make. Knowing the deck will be stacked against them, Meta will likely drop the “buy the competition” move from its playbook, double-down on “copy the competition” move, and continue to invest more in emerging markets, like their new AI smartglasses. I know I talked about this already in the previous section, but I need to reiterate: if you’re not paying attention to what Meta is doing with its smartglasses and the quietly explosive success they’re having, you are missing out on the future of the company. But not only is Meta in a position to move on from algorithmic social media, they would have disincentives to not pursue other social media companies that may arise in its wake.
In short: monopolies stifle competition. Breaking up monopolies is a means of stimulating new economic and technical competition. If the DOJ gets its way, it will result in more, new social media, not less than before.
Understand the Empire to Live in the Epoch
Of the three ways to think about Digital Babylon, its easiest to talk about Digital Babylon as an event and epoch. Writing about Digital Babylon as an empire entails writing about big business and antitrust law and media ecology and many other topics that most people think “so what, who cares?”. It’s far easier to focus on the life we had before the Internet and how do we live faithfully for Christ when all the world is scrolling themselves to death.
But one of the things I personally have benefitted the most from this framework is the way that Event, Empire, and Epoch all reinforce each other. It’s true in the climax of the Old Testament story with Babylon and it’s true here as well. In order to understand one, you need to understand the other. In order to understand “how then shall we live?”, we need to understand “what empire are we living under?” and “how did this empire get here?”. Taking the time to understand Big Tech can be technical and dry at times, but its only when you understand the playing field that you’ll have clarity on how to play the game. God has called us to live wisely in a foolish age, which means we must understand the age we are living in to some degree.
But even though we live under the glowing gaze of Digital Babylon, it is not the only rule we live under. For those who are in Christ, his reign is not just over our lives, but over the kingdoms and empires of this world—Digital Babylon included. Our hope should not be in a change in our present circumstances, welcomed as that may be. Our hope is that just as God preserved his people in the Old Testament while living in the shadow of Babylon, God will preserve his church as they minister in the days of Digital Babylon. When we start from what we believe about God and his sovereign purposes and work outwards to our present circumstances, we can readily admit the situation is dire and confess because the Lord is in control, we have no reason to be afraid.
Thanks for reading. To all the new readers here after reading my Brick piece: welcome! The framework I mentioned at the top of the piece is the foundation of this Substack and what most of my writing flows out from. If you want to go deeper on that, you can read the “what is Digital Babylon?” piece and the “Why Digital Babylon?” piece. Both are outdated on a few points, but still capture the essence of my work well.
The piece I am working on next is something that I have alluded to in Notes for some time now and finally have the courage to tackle: Substack is social media, and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise. Look forward to that hopefully sometime next week.
Remember, together the people of God are passing through Digital Babylon into life,
Austin