Elon Musk Wants to Replace the Government With X the Everything App

After innovating the worlds of space travel and electric cars (and decidedly not innovating the world of making tunnels), Elon Musk has decided his next step is to build “X, the everything app.” The platform formerly known as Twitter will ostensibly become a one-stop shop for all that people do on their phones: banking, watching videos, messaging, calling, gaming, and, of course, shitposting.

Musk may be unique, but his ambitions are not. There are plenty of platforms trying to do the same thing: create a digital ecosystem in which you can live your entire life. In fact, back in the summer of 2022, he even noted that his inspiration for X is WeChat, the Chinese everything app run by Tencent.

However, his ambitions to create a catch-all platform for the masses may be misguided at best—and downright nefarious at worst. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what WeChat is if you think you could build such a thing for a Western audience,” Graham Webster, editor of Stanford University’s DigiChina project, told The Daily Beast.

Yet, in the U.S., we have a host of apps that are ostensibly aiming to do the same. With your Apple ID or Google account, you can sign up or pay for stuff almost anywhere on the internet—and, increasingly, anywhere in real life too. Both companies offer a suite of products that let you conduct much of your working and playing under their helpful supervision.

Watching YouTube on an Android phone using Chrome swaddles the user in three layers of Google product, just as the money you ApplePay your cousin via iMessage on your iPhone transits through three slices of Apple. Meta is on the action too, albeit with arguably less success: In Zuck’s ideal world, you would strap on your Oculus Rift to do a ticketed Metaverse meet-and-greet with your favorite Instagram star that you paid for using Libra, Meta’s cryptocurrency that flopped in 2020.

Regardless of their success or failure, the core ambition is the same: It’s a competitive “race for an everything app.”

Such an app would be extremely convenient. After all, who wouldn’t prefer a single log-in to countless subscriptions, platforms, web stores, and softwares? But the reality is that an everything app might also damage democracy. That’s because tech moguls aren’t making them for the same reasons they make products or businesses, but for the reasons that people start governments.

These apps are meant to shape the way people experience reality so that it becomes easier to pursue the platform’s vision for how the world should work—whether that means colonizing Mars, preserving human rights, or never having to do what someone else tells them to do ever again.

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Seeing the major tech companies as institutions attempting (or stumbling into) the task of governance is a point of view that many researchers are coming around to. Shoshanna Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, sees the “governance of governance” as the logical result of the tech platforms’ business strategy: as more and more of life happens on the platforms, they end up with increasing influence over what and who people know. “Concentration of economic power produces collateral concentrations of governance and social powers,” Zuboff writes.

Both the European Commission and FTC chairperson Lina Khan have already concluded that in the United States and Europe, platforms like Apple, Amazon, and Google “essentially function as regulators” in the sectors of the economy (such as the App Store) which they control. Similarly, Instagram and TikTok regulate the behavior of influencers who rely on their platforms to create, distribute, and promote content; while Google regulates web publishers through SEO rules that prioritize "expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness,” according to the company.

As one European official quoted in Zuboff’s most recent article opined, “these companies currently have the power to constrain the choices of democratically elected sovereign states. They are the gatekeepers of society.”

The Western WeChat

Of course, the governance power of a tech platform isn’t just a Western phenomenon. China’s WeChat is one big app that contains a series of mini-apps inside of it, often made by other companies. WeChat’s nearly 1.3 billion users log on to pay their bills, buy presents for their kids, find love, doomscroll, collaborate remotely with coworkers, order food, and look at pictures of other people’s vacations.

As a business idea, a Western WeChat clone is enticing: centralizing (and gathering data) on all these activities could make you a lot of money. According to Webster, though, WeChat was “happenstance,” and succeeded in the specific cultural and economic situation of China, where it was “insulated from international competition” by the government—a privilege X doesn’t enjoy.

Nobody cooked up the idea of WeChat in some high-level Communist Party meeting. But from the beginning, the government made use of the platform. The app has been braided into the way the CCP administers the country. Not only does WeChat help to implement government censorship, but the platform is also reportedly used to intimidate dissidents and track citizens living overseas.

The app also flexes power in more subtle ways, which are reminiscent of the power Facebook or other social media platforms have. The app formats discourse, supercharges it with an algorithm, has censorship baked into it, and touches on every aspect of life from the most public to the most private. Perhaps Chinese tech blogger Lawrence Li put it best in a conversation with Sixth Tone: “It shapes our minds and cultural lives.”

A major government crackdown starting in 2020 brought WeChat’s parent company Tencent to heel, because “they were becoming so powerful unto themselves that it was an intolerable level of influence,” according to Webster. Tencent, like American tech giants such as Amazon, had become central to cultural life, and gotten big enough to dictate terms to smaller companies that needed to use its platforms.

But in a larger sense, Tencent had become too pervasive and too influential to roam off-leash. China’s everything app and digital ecosystem was not planned—but the CCP was going to take advantage of it regardless. “When the government sees some problem or opportunity, it operates within that framework that’s been built,” Webster explained.

The construction of that framework is where the power of WeChat, or any everything app, really lies. Like in China, the surveillance platforms in the U.S. are increasingly creating the “framework” that governments, companies, and individuals operate within. As they grow to encompass more aspects of life, they take on more governance functions.

In other words, the bigger these apps get, the more they become like governments rather than tech companies.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

According to biographer Walter Isaacson, every business decision Elon Musk makes is about saving humanity. The threats he believes he is saving humanity from include (but are not limited to) the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and the “woke mind virus.”

Building spaceships and electric cars are only part of his world-saving solution: There must also be hospitable institutions in place. Mars colonization can’t be tied up in bureaucratic red tape.

Back on Earth, the efforts of Apple, Google, and Meta are just as profound and world-altering—although their politics might be more along the lines of the western neoliberal ecosystems they came from, rather than the science-fiction novels Musk loves.

Understanding everything apps as political projects doesn’t mean they aren’t also capitalist ventures. Neither does it mean the people building them know what they are doing. But no matter how you slice it, more and more of the most important decisions in our society are made by the platforms we use every day—and the people who build them.

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