Hegemonic Capture in the Piped Society
digital architectures as global pipes, ordinary person's de facto nonchoices, the rise of Meta's hegemonic control of community through WhatsApp, and society – an indifference that makes indifference
The worlds we live in now are mediated by digital architectures. Little of life as we navigate and experience it would exist without two pipes: the pipe delivering the goods (90% via shipping), and the pipe streaming signs through screens in hands. We live the pipe dreams of the piped society, and we will live its consequences. The piped society mediates the embodied propinquities of our community of fate, giving feedback in the form of discursive fatalism, delivered on the socials, and plastic fatality, delivered by Temu and Amazon.
The digital is not separate or minor; we do not ‘log on’ to ‘cyberspace’ to ‘surf the web’, then ‘log back out’ to our separate and entire meatworld banalities. The digital, as one of the key pipes, is a vital global hyperobject of existential infrastructure. We do not need it like we need potable water and sewerage in a big city, but we are as immersed in it as fish in a tank of our own making. Without the pipe of signs on screens we do not ‘die’, but we lose the war, and chaos ensues. Xina told us this only the other day, in its inimitable style.
‘Inside’ the ‘protection’ of the local sovereign, any urban life worth living involves enmeshment in ceaseless streams of signs. Streaming is what we do, in the piped society. In this piping we live by, to be separated from our phone means social death. But not only. Losing connection with the signs pipe means being locked out of our accounts, our computer, our banking. To lose internet access – constant, high-speed access, not this – is tantamount to being banished, lost, penniless.
So in the piped society, constant, steady streamed, highspeed access – it bringeth, and it taketh away. The digital is a fundament of the piped society[1], it is the cloaca of the vampire squid. Surveillance capitalism feeds on its digital exhaust; Xi’s digital totalitarianism eats TikTok shit, munches on the dumped pump of WeChat. We feed the fundament, it feeds us feed. The content monster grows, discontent contained by infinite scroll, a cloaca the size of 5+ billion, pulsing.
Much of what comes down the digital pipe is an ‘ordinary person’s de facto nonchoice’ (OPDFNC, [nonchoice]). We have no choice about the existence of content, nor do we have any says in its ‘fire hose’ flow. Mostly, we have no choice but to keep prosuming content, if we’re to remain employed produsers. No grind and hustle without content. No monetisable anxiety rage and ressentiment without discontent.
I’m writing this on Microsoft Word. In theory, as a Dropbox subscriber, I could use Dropbox Paper, or I could downloadLibre Office. As an Apple user, I suppose I could use Pages. If I was game, I could pump this post straight into substack’s interface here. However, the moment I have to interface with my workplace, Microsoft’s Office suite is 1:1 required[2], all the way through the backend. So whereas that certain kind of retiree or hobbyist can tinker with their Linux computers, like any person working for an enterprise, I must use one of two American corporation’s systems[3]. Before my workplace switched to Microsoft… I had to use Google’s suite.
So in the realm of the digitally piped society, the OPDFNC reigns supreme. If we are lucky, we live in the privilege of these styles of nonchoice. If we are unlucky, we are outside the digital, working in an abattoir or prison, or we are in Gaza and the West Bank, dominating or being dominated.
Nonchoice also applies to phones. To the OPDFNC of having a phone[4] is added the duopolistic Pepsi-Coke pseudo choice: Apple or Android[5]. Once on board my ‘personal’ OPDFNC, I do have a suite of app-level hypothetical choices. If I don’t like Chrome or Safari, Brave or Firefox; if I don’t like Google, DuckDuckGo, or Baidu. If I don’t like G Maps, I can use A Maps (but only on iOS), Waze (but it’s owned by Google), or OsmAnd (but I’d never heard of it). Only: this choice regresses back to a defacto nonchoice the moment a friend asks you to send them a dropped pin, and doesn’t or can’t use Apple Maps (like the majority) and hasn’t the foggiest idea what OsmAnd is[6]. So, in practice, almost all goes to Google, and so we live in a world where anyone can see a photograph of our house, in exchange for the affordances of the pipe, and ‘we’re cool with this’. To anyone from the twentieth century, this would be deemed a creepy and outrageous invasion of privacy, and a bad deal. To us, it’s one among many signature nonchoices of the piped society.
A similar OPDNC emerges the moment a small group contains Android friends, which, I’ve discovered, nearly every group (n=>2) has (especially if that group is out of the white middle class[7]). To the time of writing, Apple doesn’t allow iMessage with Android; in fact, they said they were maybe gonna, then decided not to[8]. So a subset social fact of life in the piped society is that we face the nonchoice of establishing and maintaining ways for groups to communicate between operating systems, with a limited set of app-level options that enable this, at population scale. A relatively invisible fact about Meta’s platforms is that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp got there, and now facilitate this[9]. Where communication goes and must go and go, incompatibility clogs the cloaca. Then as now[10], interoperability is what keeps the pipe piping, it’s what keeps the fundament flowing. As individuals, ‘we have no control over this’.
Before tightening the noose on the nonchoice, I want to spend a paragraph noticing that social media presents a stark contrast to these OPDNCs. Social media was and is a choice. In the piped society, no one needs to shred their head on TikTok (this is a choice you’re making), just as nobody ever needed or needs to be on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. We may want to, we may like to, we may feel we ‘cannot not’, we may be habituated, dependent, addicted, so lonely – we may fear withdrawal, FOMO, social death, or career suicide if we’re off it. All these factors are viscerally real, but they do not diminish the fact: nobody needs social media. It’s a fiendish trap for nearly everyone, but stricto sensu, it is an excrescence of the piped society. It’s where the majority of us choose to spend the excess of our lives (and hey, we need something to do while watching Netlflix, don’t we, cos it’s not excellent, is it), and there’s compelling evidence suggesting why we do it: but we don’t need to, and it is a choice, an ordinary person’s de jure choice (OPDJC). We can live without social media, and most of us now ‘know’ we’d have better lives if we did, but…. we still just choose not to. Why, actually?[11]
But the moment we need to co-ordinate, we do need to contact one another, as groups, in groups. Humanity – or, at least, this humanity, the humanity of the piped society – needs messaging interoperability.
As recently as 2013[12], much of this intra-group messaging, co-ordination, chat and gossip was done via… reply all email. At its best, reply all had an artful swirl, an iterative Linnean taxonomy of re: re: re: – but it required all participants in a thread to have been paying very close attention, often for weeks, not only to everything anyone had said, but the temporal order in which it had been said.
At its worst, in the offices of the 2000s and 2010s, reply all was a way for co-workers who can’t read the room to declare things to everyone, usually things that didn’t need declaring, that probably should not have been declaring (especially on reply all). Reply all was always half broken, never really fit for purpose, and only ‘worked’ for those who should never have availed themselves of it – and unfortunately it’s still not broken enough to be broken. But at least it as dwindled….
We never realised it at the time, but in those years in which reply all put us through its elusive pleasures and workplace micromisery, it did demonstrate the inexhaustible demand between humans: to co-ordinate, to chat, and to gossip.
Over the last dozen years, this tripartite communicative demand of the piped society has been met with the chat apps. Snapchat for teens and dick pics, Signal for the CIA and the surveillance minded, Telegram for grey hats, drug dealers, the FSB and the alt right, Discord for 2/3 male people, most between the ages of 16-35, and WhatsApp, for more than two billion people: by different measures between ¼ and 1/3 of the world’s population. In India, it has a monthly user share of 91%; in Brazil, 93-96% (different sites give different measures).
In my own ‘corner’ of the piped society (if a pipe has corners), WhatsApp has achieved a near monopoly on community: every sports club, every extracurricular activity, every single thing involving groups of parents and people at the scale of local schools and local neighbourhoods. It has become and Ordinary Parents De Facto Nonchoice, squaring the nonchoices, and creating the OPDNC², or maybe OP²DNC.
There’s a curious reversal of how things stood eleven years ago, when Facebook bought Whatsapp for nineteen billion USD and no one quite knew why, and that seemed really expensive (before Musk paid 44 bill. for Twitter). Back then, you might miss party invites from friends who just assumed you were on Facebook, ‘cos everyone was. In this piped society’s 2025, no one ‘in the community’ of ordinary parents/adults really ‘expects’ you to be on Facebook[13] any longer, nor Instagram, and certainly not TikTok, Snapchat, or Discord. But: in 2025, most everyone, and certainly all ‘ordinary community members’ I have contact with so far fully expect that everyone is on WhatsApp, is totally okay with being put into a school/ club/ members group on WhatsApp, and can be fully expected to read, follow, comment, participate – and make decisions involving time money and logistics based on what someone has mentioned off hand in the context of an emoji-heavy version of what is basically… a low res reply all. Now, your OPDNC² is to be stuck in a forever chat with local acquaintances, many of whom you soon discover have extremely diverse views on life, parenting, and what it is appropriate to say about their (kids’) bowel movements on a group chat with 50+ members (most of whom they wouldn’t clock on the street). 99% of it is verbiage-garbiage, but if your kid is on one of those chats, you can’t afford to miss what passes, and so, if you’re a ‘good parent’, you have to monitor it regularly, or you’ll/ they’ll miss lifts, downpayments, parties, etc etc – and you’ll be seen as an irresponsible, bad, rude parent. Who knew the digital future would be so infinitely-indefinitely banal and hard to escape?
At scale, however, this has a much greater meaning.
WhatsApp’s grip on humanity goes beyond local communities and parents. It’s not only the app for that. It’s kind of become the default messaging app for being a person involved in any kind of group, from India to Brazil to Russia – basically, everywhere except China. So: kinda by virtue of being minted enough to pay 19 billion dollars for something that plugged the lil’ interoperability gap insisted upon by Apple between 2007-13, Meta has achieved the threshold of creating a OPDNC at near-global scale[14] with an instant messagin app that still has a logo showing its VOIP lineage as a kind of pumped up Skype. Wild.
What does it mean that a key part of the communicational architecture of the piped society is owned by Meta, a private corporation whose track record indicates it has an entrenched culture that blinks at its own gross moral turpitude – Cambridge Analytica, Myanmar, fascism-without-moderation – and is headed by a CEO who appears whose basic level is skeezy cringe like this and staring down Bezos’ partner’s cleavage during the Inauguration?
So far, it’s hard to say. According to one account, Zuckerberg kinda let WhatsApp do its thing from 2014–2019; since then, there has been in-house recognition of its importance, and attention on monetising it. As he says in his usual GPT style,
“Now that everyone has mobile phones and are basically producing content and messaging all day long, I think you can do something that’s a lot better and more intimate than just a feed of all your friends”.
Before you say ‘…and what that means, or feels like, is anyone’s guess…’, notice the social fact of a set of customers comprised of 2-3 billion people, imagine that any one of those customers could reach the AI-driven bot of said corporation, without having to hit an individual website, premises, or call centre. This was introduced in 2023. In Brazil, according to the report linked just above, 30-40% of Nissan’s sales come through WhatsApp. Before you say wow, notice also that this means that Nissan is now dependent on Meta for nearly half its sales in that jurisdiction.
What about us in all this? What about the ethics of this, what of its politics? “Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society? A better world?”.
What we know from our experience of two decades of Facebook is that social media, which promised to connect us with friends, induced an epidemic of loneliness, turning many people into “irritable toddlers”, and clearly breaking Trump and Musk’s brains, as Know Your Enemy and also Jaron Lanier recently noticed. “Before social media, the two had vastly different personalities: Trump, the socialite; Musk, the nerd. After, they converged on similar behaviors.”[15] The more specific claim here is about Twitter; it was Twitter that broke Musk’s brain, Trump’s brain – the brains of a few people you know, probably, especially during and after 2020-1.
This may be true, but is it this all it has done to all of us? Tony Tula goes further in his satire, speaking as his character, B (who may/not be Tony Tula):
“It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face” (Rejection, 232).
The (so far, sofa) reality of chat apps is barer, baser – pared, compared to the socials. Unlike the ‘loneliness disguised as war’ that is a lot of Twitter, and more, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp are actually describable as ‘social’: maybe this is the moment from which social media becomes real. Yet the chat apps also harness the actual need of humans to co-ordinate in private: this is why nearly all government groups use those three apps, across nearly all countries outside of China. In Australia, major political decisions appear to be cooked up when a politician has a Friday night brain fart, and their staffers become a Hyperactive Hive Mind in order to seventh guess what that means: many of the ‘decisions’ of our governments we are witnessing were cooked up in such group chats. Many, an increasing number, are not good decisions.
Surely this has a more to do with the culture of contemporary politics than the apps… but does it? Spare a moment for some hardcore technological determinism. In McLuhan, this is a cold medium, not hot – and it does things to people, no differently to the Broken Brain oligarchs Twitter has co-produced, and the Sky News Gippsland Qanon Uncles that Bannon and Cambridge Analytica helped normalise on Facebook (using data Facebook gave Bannon, which everyone… kinda blinked on…)
Chat apps also harness the incredible normative power of community, the near-compulsory, highly compelling force of OPDNC² (emanating ‘up’ from the banalities of parental duties and community service), AND and the irrepressible desire to gossip among ‘friends’, in what you believe to be a private conversation (precisely when a bad reply all or an iffy LinkedIn post can get you fired, and maybe soon disappeared).
And by dint of its near monopoly, it is Meta that now has a global grip on all these sets of OPDNCs – in which nine out of ten of us are enmeshed.
I feel like this is a problem, not only because of the pitiless moneypump indifference of Meta’s culture, but because in using anything they provide, we render ourselves exploitable. Collectively, we are handing ourselves over as an exploitable mass of a few billion and growing, and I find our denegation of this both dangerous and upsetting.
What I’ve encountered in trying to raise this is that almost no one has concern, let alone ‘shares my concerns’. This tone of indifference has a new and specific texture, one that’s different to the fetishist disavowal of the Insta or X addict. With WhatsApp, I am met with nonresponse. It’s as quiet as WhatsApp. Raising something about WhatsApp, in my experience, is like expressing a preference against flush toilets or drinking water: you seem weird, you seem a bit tinfoil, you seem touched. What I can’t say – which would seem weird – is that, to me, this is the nonresponse of people who have internalised the loss of control over their lives and choices that dependency means in the piped society.
We get angry at people online and feel lonely ‘with’ people online – but we never notice the pipe, and, socially, in this culture, it’s almost impossible to have legible anger at its grip on us. If information is a difference that makes a difference, then the current cultural atmosphere is an indifference that makes indifference.
We’re all collectively culpable here though. Living the ‘oh well’ of an OPDNC², sighing at the fact of dependency on the infrastructure of the piped society, in my view, is one part of the reason why there is no broad public resistance right now to a very shitty and deteriorating status quo. In sticking with The Standard Package, we remain dependent on an evolving – and now, with WhatsApp, rapidly monetising and automating – set of affordances that, in subtle ways, remove choice and entrench dependency, while creating a cultural atmosphere in which mildly depressed debility permeates everything that lassitude and ennui haven’t already tainted.
We have reached a new threshold for Mark Fisher’s reflexive impotence: in 2006, it was the ennui proper to neoliberalised university students in England. Two decades later, reflexive impotence is our unstated resignation to slow motion catastrophe. We’ve become ‘cool with this’, in the way we’re cool with lukewarm take away coffee, maxed out phones and SUVs, chain deportation, and aerial bombardment of ethnic Others. To be sure, we don’t ‘get’ to these horrors just from using WhatsApp: maybe you are just using an app, maybe I’m wrong. But do you really think so, or are you brushing off what your dispirited heart is saying too? Personally, I feel grossed out by this current cultural atmosphere, subsisting in the chicken-or-beef pseudochoice of Apple or Android, and the OPDNCs of Microsoft-Google, or Meta-Meta.
Quinn Slobodian is the only prominent commentator I know who has really called this bullshit out, so I want to close this post by passing him the mic.
“You know, I'm calling us all out. It’s not… like… we're facing the problem. We're swimming in the water that they have provided. And it’s very become impossible to imagine what life would be like on land instead of in water, because we’ve been in it for so long. But that is the kind of, I think, Copernican kind of shift in thinking that will have to happen to… get used to walking on land again after… enjoying the water or something. I don't know if total defection can work, or alternative platforms, blah, blah, but it’s… certainly a demobilized time in the United States. There’s none of the kind of popular anger and uprisings that were happening after the first Trump administration, or indeed during 2020 – biggest street protests in American history. Let’s not forget successfully diffused… attacked by the right and co-opted and.. removed of any purchase by corporations and institutions, and turned into matters of bureaucracy and compliance and signaling and token messaging rather than something structural. So I think it’s a real challenge. I think that if we pay with their money and we talk to each other with their money, and we spread our every last idea with their services, then it’s difficult to know how one can escape that kind of hegemonic capture”.
[1] Although it remains as true it’s un-noticed that 80% of human activity is fossil fueled, and 90% of everything involves shipping – which, of course, is all now complexly digital.
[2] Along with its janky, intrusive, productivity destroying two factor authentication system …which, in essence, penalises anyone who keeps their piped workspace away from their phone – meaning that all the potential interruptions of a phone have to be dialled down or otherwise managed by the individual.
[3] By some estimates, Word still has 65% of the market share in word processing – a few months off its 42ndbirthday. Excel, which turns 40 this year, still has 80%. Like Pepsi and Coke, the battle for word processing and spreadsheets is structurally duopolistic: essentially, Microsoft is losing market share to Google. So Windows 3.0 and 3.1 ear Word had >90% share of word processing at its peak, between the late 90s to early 00s, now it’s a two-horse race: everyone who’s not on Microsoft… they’re on Google. It’s worth pausing to think about how truly inescapable Microsoft and Google are. If you work through the American internet, you have no choice but to use Microsoft and/or Google.
[4] Sting, famously, ‘chooses’ not to have one, and some very senior tenured professors and so on also have the exorbitant privilege of this choice, but if you need to grind and hustle, if you need to find a rental or a job or have a prospective employer call you back – you need a phone. Having an email address is no less 1:1 necessary for the function of welfare and taxation in this country, as in a growing number of others.
[5] Or Huawei’s Harmony OS and Android, in China. In the latter case, we are back to Alphabet-Google again, a company that also holds over 70% of the global phone OS market share (Android), 67% of global navigation (Maps), and 89.73% of the global search engine market (94%, in Australia). YouTube’s market share of streaming is also staggering – between 73–92%.
[6] Look on my maps, o ye mighty…
[7] Or an American teenager: 87% of whom have iPhones.
[8] As it’s built into iOS, cuz it’s encrypted, to keep out the plebs, so you buy an iPhone. This is typical of Apple’s MO of getting you in their walled garden and making you their forever bottom, in exchange for the smoother end user experience you’re totally habituated to. FWIW, I just got a newer reconditioned iPhone, so my eldest child could have my old phone, which is seven years old, and still totally works.
[9] An interesting internet hypothetical: what if Apple and Google had co-operated in 2007 to generate an iMessage that worked between iOS and Android, and had the functionality of WhatsApp?
[10] I’m old enough to have lived the agony of friends with cool games on the Amiga 500 that I would never, ever play on our home PC, while my friend had an Amstrad, that was ‘99% IBM compatible’, and wouldn’t load any of the Sierra Games we tried. It seems like it’s only in the past decade we see juggernauts like Minecraft and Stardew Valley available across nearly all platforms.
[11] …in part, perhaps, it’s the human condition, playing out in Tony Tula’s two subtexts: ‘Look at me’ and ‘How dare you’, and the two sub-subtexts, ‘Who am I’ and ‘Save me’ (Rejection, p.217).
[12] This was the approximate date when people in my circles switched over to WhatsApp (launched 2009-10), Telegram (launched 2013) and Signal (launched 2014).
[13] Lots of people are, whether for buy/sell/swap and Marketplace stuff, whether as part of local-scale political action groups (save our golf course! Fuck that golf course!), or as part of the Qanon Sky News Uncles of South Gippsland &c &c. But I’ve noticed that no one expects it: it has actually turned back into an Ordinary Person’s Acknowledged Choice (OPAC).
[14] In China, WeChat (which has many more features) occupies this role. Interestingly, WhatsApp is more popular than Telegram in Russia now, in spite of Meta’s other platforms being banned.
[15] Interestingly, Zuckaberg appears ‘unbroken’ by his platforms: blank as he ever was. Tentative proof that it is designed for humans, and only works on humans?