Ma Bell
Surely like many people trying to study and understand digital platforms in the 2020s, the question of 'what happens next' with Amazon, Google, and the other household names comes up when I read the latest in news or analysis. The question can be sort of frustrating in this form, though, so let's say instead: "where do platforms go...when they stop being dominant?"
I assume no society lasts forever. I can't think of one that has. Whatever hegemonic forces we feel rule the roost today will someday disappear, or perhaps transform in ways so fundamentally that sailors on the Ship of Theseus might recognize them. I also assume if I could travel to the year 1000 CE and communicate with people around me I would sooner or later come to understand the hegemons and hierarchies of that time and place. They'd be no less powerful to the people then than we might feel our own big corporations are in comparison to us, now.
Why say all this? I suppose because it's grounding. Ultimately you or I don't spend a great deal of time worrying about the Aztec Empire, Viking raiders, or even railroad tycoons buying up all our land. These were real enough threats to some people at some time. And we are also some people, at some time. So before getting started I like to shrink myself, my worries, and my era down to the blip of time that it all really is. Not to say it isn't important but that it's important in a relatively very small corner of time and space. It hopefully feels foreign and weird for you and I to worry about when or whether the French sovereign will raise estate taxes on us, or the Japanese emperor will call back the daimyo for a war council. Yet very smart people, some probably smarter than me, made careers worrying about this. All that digital ink and sweat we might spill over Google's tax-dodging or Apple's anti-consumer products is no less feverish than that of people who came before us, killing themselves worrying about the leviathans of their day.
Keeping the historical theme, I want to bring up Ma Bell, or Pacific Bell, or AT&T, the US American hegemonic corporation that exerted a great deal of effort trying to control the way people use telephones. They did really well for a very long time. Lots of people spent most of their lives only knowing telephones as a product of that company. But kids today wouldn't recognize the name, probably, and though I grew up with it still around, I don't think about it that much except perhaps the old 1990s telephone commercials that tried to outdo each other with clever taglines and sign up deals - I remember Sprint, and AT&T, and then Verizon...all throwing clever little clips that people would think of as 'TikToks' or 'Shorts' in 2026. They were just 1:45 minute TV ads in 1995.
Where did AT&T go? Why don't people think or talk about it anymore? It's still around, of course - it's a telecom. In line with US American cultural values, it was allowed to acquire competitors and start-ups, entrench its position, and elbow open a nice spot as an internet provider. It became part of the corporate furniture Americans believe is good business, or the best business they can get, and it is not "going" anywhere.
Ma Bell was the old name for what AT&T sprang out of. It was a conglomerate of telecom industries, too big and busted up, then it slowly mutated back into a conglomerate, like an unkillable nanomachine robot.
So I guess my question has to change again: where do corporations go when this is all over?
All this
To specify: By 'all this', I mean the particular environment in which US American culture has been wrapped around a preference for corporate action, a worship of CEO narratives, and an unquenchable thirst for intangible wealth in the form of digital numbers going up.
I'm not smart enough to make clear predictions about how or why the specific US system will change so drastically that historians will later argue not over whether it ended, but how (similar to the ends of Chinese dynasties, Roman reigns, or Central American kingdoms - everyone agrees they're 'gone' and the only fun left is arguing when and how).
I'm at least imaginative enough, I hope, to apply the same rules that every other society in history has hit: nothing lasts forever, and what you may think is your greatest achievement could be forgotten (can you name all the 'ancient' wonders of the world? how about the 'modern' ones?), while something considered minor might be the symbol you are remembered for (everyone knows Egyptians 'loved cats' and Mayans decapitated people, right?).
US Americans might be remembered for cowboys, guns, and trucks. Or we might be remembered for strip malls, freeways, and flagpoles (there are a lot of flagpoles in unexpected places in the US). I guess the point here is no society gets to decide what they're remembered for. That Caligula is a more widely recognized name than Augustus probably wouldn't make any Roman proud, and I can't imagine Peruvians are thrilled that most tourists see their country as a backdrop to Machu Picchu - impressive though it is.
So when US society transforms, what becomes of these big hulking weird tax-dodging corporations that hover around like empty ugly rainclouds? Firstly there's all the people working for them, and they won't go away. But I wonder if the infrastructuralization of corporations in American life actually works against their memory in history books. Rather than the remarkable, innovative, exciting places that their mostly fraudulent founders wish them look like, Amazon and Apple, etc. have become so commonplace in American consumer life that it's hard to have interesting things to say about them. The US highway system was considered by many at the time to be a remarkable achievement, if not flamboyant or particularly easy to symbolize or represent visually. It would be weird, though, if I were driving you down a long desert road with nothing to see on either side and tried to convince you that this - this experience of moving forward at high speeds for long periods going between two shitty cities - was a major achievement. It would be true without feeling particularly profound, like saying peanut butter tastes good.
I wonder if the surveillance economy of the current crop of corporations goes this way. In the 2000s, Facebooks glam-up of digital chat rooms and address books felt fresh and new, but only as much as the latest emo bands or pop stars: exciting but consumable. It was sort of that way with everything: flip phones in all their iterations were merely fun variations on what kids invented and reinvented in playgrounds year after year with two cups and a string. Tele(far) phones(sound) now are used the way kids used to pass notes in class: tiny, stupid messages made of mostly emotional and rarely rational content. It's rude to point, but I'll do it anyway: social media is little more than notes passed in class and bathroom graffiti.
Technology does not change the world; it reveals different versions of it. A train full of phones is a silent one; a home full of smart devices is full of careless people; cars spread cities out and make them less convenient; weight loss drugs make people obsessed with food. Tech pulls in and pushes out a set of the same human interests and impulses in different combinations, and with our short cultural memory and weakness to advertising, we think iPhones can be 'new'.
Corporations as Dirt
Do corporations become so commonplace and basic that they may as well be dirt? Advertisements, the voice of corporations, are largely considered as common and useful as dirt. How many people sat on couches clicking past ads as they channel surfed looking for 'something good' to watch? Put aside for the moment the intense nihilism of channel surfing - the avoidance of painful living through the embrace of meaninglessness - and focus instead on the unbelievable amount of energy people spent dodging ads. Now consider how much we try to avoid dirt: keep it off the rug, off the shoes, off the shirt, off the bed. Wash the clothes, open the windows, perfume the air, take a shower.
Ads are the dirt of the communicative world. They're not the soil - that's art - they are the sterile dead dirt of ideas, and like dirt they are everywhere unwanted but accepted as a natural inevitability in a culture based around communications.
By extension, corporations are dirt: you are what you eat, what you do is who you are. The primary purpose of corporations is to advertise their products in such a way that customers come, transactions are made, and profits help them survive. Dirt is, after all, land, and in capitalism all that can be imagined for land is development. Develop the dirt; develop the corporation.
Dirt is Hard to Remember
I can call on the basic semiotic signifier of dirt: light brown, dusty, chokes me if I breathe it in. I can imagine the dirt of a sports turf, the dirt on white carpet, the dirt turned to mud in the rain. But I couldn't name these dirts, describe them entirely well, or make you see precisely what I do through visual depiction. Dirt is dirt. You know what it is. You'll be dead in it, someday.
That's perhaps why dirt is somewhat forgettable. Nevermind its omnipresence; it's where all our bodies go one way or another. (If you protest that you'll be cremated and spread in the ocean, may I remind you what human ashes resemble? Dirt). That corporations should be the dirt of our communicative world seems appropriate. It's maybe a little nasty to say - like I was saying they were worth nothing, i.e. dirt-poor or so common as to be negligible. Maybe that's fun to entertain, particularly when the news about one of these big corporations is particularly anti-consumer or anti-democratic.
But let's move beyond that, because dirt is also what makes up the planet. If there's too much, farms die. If there's not enough, sea levels rise. It can erode and cause serious damage to the living ecosystem. A lot of corporations almost constantly erode: they hemorrhage money, lose or gain value in stocks rapidly, cut jobs, close factories, damage the delicate socio-cultural networks human naturally create in spite of and not because of big hulking corporations. Human society existed well before these specifically-constructed economic arrangements called 'corporations' existed, and will likely exist long after. It is amusing to argue that corporations are some kind of 'evolution' of human society that will never disappear, but it's hard to go very far with the argument when faced with corporations' net negative impact on the environment. It's nice that there are more jobs and more products at lower prices than ever (for some), but that isn't going to matter very much if we're underwater.
So goes dirt
I want to wrap this up. I think where corporations go, and where digital platforms go specifically, is towards something like digital dirt. They become forgotten first because of their ubiquity, and then because something else emerges technologically that pushes the world into a different variation of its shape and form. Perhaps local networks will have to get stronger again, as the large 'global' networks fail us. Perhaps hyper-independent networks will emerge, and technology will move from the mass to the personal, and corporations will no longer sustain large customer bases consuming standardized products (i.e., everyone will want a genuinely unique iPhone, and Apple does not know how to make those). Or perhaps generative AI will take over the duties corporations have done for us. How many AIs does it take to do Sam Altman's job? None - he doesn't have a real job.