How many different websites or apps do you use?
Typically, I will ask this question of anyone I meet - an inquiry usually met with general confusion, especially if I ask about websites - what are those? Out of the answers I get, most are socially-focused apps that are large platforms. Because of the way we all tend to sort interactions on these services, they actively occupy our Dunbar number (the amount of sociality we can keep up with). They compete for our mind-attention-time, a limited resource that can be exhausted through developing patterns of repetition: addiction.
I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four. — Tom Eastman
If apps and websites (or the hybrid webapp) are identical in function for the user, then surely the website is more convenient to access from anywhere and also more space efficient? The answer lies in user habituation. You must travel to a website, while an app is already occupying your phone's space. You can modify webpages to block ads, filter content, killfile users and topics, remix and mangle the formatting, redirect, and even program within it - while an app is an impermeable monolithic product with entrapment (like intentionally bad file exports) and surveillance mechanisms. Furthermore, a website has to repeatedly request permissions and jump through more hoops to begin the process of absorbing your personal data. You can ask a website to never (or only sometimes) access your data - but for many apps its an "allow one time" for an app and you've traded it all away while you use that app - likely forgetting that you've done so. These are the reasons why every website is asking you to sign in, and constantly attempting to redirect you to the app. Typically, very aggressive private information is a gatekeeper to even seeing something on the site - making modern Esau's of us all - trading our permanent information for the immediate gratifications of (para)sociality.
What's even more fascinating is that the addictive cycle of "engaging with content" is also one of trained docility and lack of productivity (in the most direct sense of the term). The panem et circenses ("Bread and Circuses") strategy at scale. The more you consume, the more you wish to consume, the more you wish to consume, the less you wish to question or create. While any creative pursuit needs some inspiration - I think its safe to say we are in deeper waters than that.
The most important thing to remember about computers is that we made it all up. If you remember one thing it should be this. We gave an electric charge a meaning, we gave collections of them the ability to create more electric charges automatically - usually following processes defined by other electric charges. All of our hardware, and in all eventualities our software, rely on only that fact alone. Beyond that, the systems and structures we have invented have been free to roam throughout our understanding - applied to whatever systems or mathematics or art we wish. Any excuse for a computer to not understand us, to misbehave, to co-opt our information, to push us into any decision - is something that has been explicitly invented by a human and is not inherent in the machine. This is not a new concept: Ted Nelson made this point in 1974, terming these instances of the computer demanding adaptation of the human: "cybercrud". Further along this arc, information itself has no meaning without a structure imposed by an observer, the bits that make up your entire life may mean nothing to a computer built a hundred years from now. Information is a completely anthropocentric concept and is not inherent in matter.
The marvelous among us that created these machines dreamed that they would be the means to solve every problem, an infinitely modifiable tool to address the infinitum of challenges that our species would ever hope to overcome. We now live in this world of promise - more power and memory than we'd ever need - and yet there seems as if there is a gentle fog settling over all of it. A mist of middlemen seeking to find every corner of a world of free expression and charge for the ride. We must resist the patient process of control that is being applied to our machines.
“We live in a world of Applications, but if you think about it applications are one of the worst ideas anybody had. [...] Applications kind of draw a barrier around your ability to do things, what you really want is to gather the resources that you need to you and make the things that you want out of them” — Alan Kay
I fundamentally reject the app as an atomic (indivisible) unit of software, and further reject the idea of discrete applications and the hyper-managed stores they inhabit. The axis of technological advancement seems bent intentionally through design to be orthogonal to that of open technological control structures and the advancement of genuine culture (as opposed to propaganda). Namely, the more advanced/convenient the propaganda machine becomes, the harder it is to resist content control, subtle censorship, eventually bordering on impossibility because of the structure and source being closed. Tearing something wide open and flipping the power dynamic to serve the users should be a readily practiced, openly available, and aggressive tactic used by every enterprising artist or technician of computers. To push forward what can be created, instead of allowing gatekeepers to simply charge for access to old media - a anti-cultural force drowning out the rapid advancement of new forms of media. We must quite literally strive to make things that no one knows how to charge for yet, confusing the forces at work to maintain the status quo. Within this fight for the future is the truth that the computer is what we decide to make of it, not what it decides to make of us.
We have to continue to create software that is interoperable, open, modifiable, and pointing towards a better future. We must maintain that authoring, publishing, and verifying new types of content and information is a battle that the computer is built to aid each of us in whether our goal is a difficult provable mathematical theory or a piece of art. We must continue this exploration because we have problems now that we do not have solutions to, and to solve those we need greater formulations of our unique contexts - not rehashed old systems. By formulating more and more unique contexts we accept that at the core of the experience of being human is to not know - rather than to pretend that the computer knows everything.
For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing, but I knew I should find that they knew many fine things. - Socrates (via Plato)