I guess I’m a bit of a tech-head.
I don’t know why I feel any ambiguity about that: I’m contemplating signing up for the new subscription package to theverge.com and that’s pretty much the dictionary definition.
I fell in love with Apple products in the 90s, back when their help feature was so genuinely helpful that it would ‘manually’ circle the button or menu item that you needed in red.
I’ve written before (elsewhere) about how I love to discover what the absolutely most bleeding edge technology is, yet I only like using the most low-tech solutions in my actual life.
But since Trump’s re-election I have somehow lost all my mirth regarding bleeding edge tech. It’s a joke that isn’t funny anymore. I find it sort of distasteful, in a way that’s hard to articulate.
So, as a way to articulate it, I gave it a name.
But first, a little tangent.
Vichy France
Early in World War Two, when it became apparent that their military forces were about to be overwhelmed, the French government was divided about what to do next.
Should they move the government to North Africa and continue fighting the war? Or should they effectively surrender and collaborate with Nazi Germany?
The latter faction won, and for a few years (until Germany eventually invaded anyway) the new French government was an ‘independent’ puppet state. They weren’t ordered to embrace Nazi policies, but there were ultra-conservative factions in the ruling elite that had been there since before the first Revolution, and they had now taken power. So even though they weren’t taking orders from Germany, they might as well have been.
They moved the centre of power away from Paris to the resort of Vichy, and ‘Vichy France’ was born.
Vichy Tech
I’ve been looking for an analogy for how the Tech world seems to have changed since the Trump election, and this was the comparison that made sense for me.
On the surface, the re-election of Trump, after the insurrection, the criminal conviction, everything… it seemed to mark a huge shift. But now I’m wondering if things really changed that much, or if this is just the first clear visible indicator of what has been happening behind the scenes for years.
Watching so many powerful figures in the US, particularly the big tech companies, pledge support for Trump before he even won the election was revealing.
Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter were once quirky upstart outsiders, but over time they grown so successfully that they’ve become online empires. The phrase ‘walled garden’ gets banded around, but realistically ‘digital nation state’ fits more. These platforms have tried to become not just everyone’s town square but their news network, their workplace, their shopping centre, their cinema and arcade, as where as the place they keep all their important documents and photos of people that they care about.
There was a time when they provided these services so efficiently and conveniently that their dominance of our future seemed inevitable. Now they don’t even do that anymore.
And now whenever I see tech news about these companies, I feel like Captain Renault felt about Vichy water in Casablanca:
You know websites are still a thing, right?
It’s slightly embarrassing that it took the video below by (tech writer and scourge of Crypto Bros) Molly White, to state the obvious and make me realise (and I’m paraphrasing here): “You know that websites are still a thing, right? They still work! They didn’t go away because they became any less useful to us. They went away because they became less useful to Google, Meta, Apple and the rest.”
For years, the biggest reason why the old web—websites, RSS, email newsletters, blogs—was a pointless endeavour was because everyone else was on the new web of social media platforms.
Right now, those flocking back to the old web are likely to be very small in number. But if you’re someone who’s getting increasingly disgusted with Vichy Tech, those might well be your people!
And there might be one more significant factor in favour of Team Open Web. Once upon a time Google Search was so useful that it was essentially the front page of the internet. (Sorry, Reddit – it was never you.)
Now Google Search is… well…
That’s a post from Bluesky, the app which basically rebuilt Twitter on the principles of the open web. It allows links! It allows a reverse chronological feed of the people you actually follow! Websites are back, baby!
And Hank Green summed it up in a Bluesky post when he said:
“Spending a month on Bluesky has created a whole new model of a fight we need to be having right now. Not liberal vs. conservative or whatever, but respect vs manipulation. I am tired of being manipulated everywhere I go. That’s why I like it here, I feel like I’m in charge for once.”
I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendgroup.