KATE THOMPSON DAVY: If a Martian asks: take me to your ruler, you may have to go on Facebook

There are now three companies worth more than $2-trillion. On Monday Alphabet, the parent company of Google, joined Apple and Microsoft in this elite club.

Apple was the first to bubble up in 2020, with Microsoft joining earlier this year, and now Alphabet. Not bad for the youngest of the bunch. Microsoft and Apple were both founded in the mid-1970s, while Google was born in 1998. Alphabet as an entity is the result of Google restructuring in 2015. According to Bloomberg, Alphabet climbed to a $1-trillion valuation in 2020, making its growth rate arguably even more impressive than the market value number itself.

Another tech giant flirting with $2-trillion is Amazon, while Meta (Facebook’s new name) still has to grow a little more, but on this measure alone. However, as the rich like to tell us, money isn’t everything. On a social impact basis alone I think we could argue Facebook, sorry, Meta is the dominant one.

We can get lost in the debate of what metrics make sense for measuring influence, or we can look at their reach into our lives: do you tell Amazon’s Alexa to google that tech giants article you saw on your iPhone Facebook app? Or do you ask Bixby to bing them? Even here in the most unequal society on Earth these are household names. Even here, in the land of perpetual load-shedding, a place where the idea of owning a voice-operated virtual assistant that can auto-order your groceries must feel like science fiction to the average citizen, Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are nearly ubiquitous.

The products and services these companies provide touch an incredible number of people, but you can also argue that they have unsurpassed depth of reach into the very way we live, the information we consume, the shape of our debates. We not only plug ourselves into them all day every day — yes, me too — but we are connecting our children directly into the feed. We do this because it’s fun and convenient for us, and it lights up the pleasure centres of our brains with a drip feed of light, colour and affirmation.

Companies like this extend power and influence beyond the personal, too. The money they are sinking into the continent exceeds that of many direct foreign investors, they are funding start-ups, building schools and bankrolling huge infrastructure projects such as Facebook’s 2Africa submarine cable system. When this is finished in about 18 months the cable laid will reach 45,000km, essentially circling Africa and connecting to India. When these companies undertake this type of project they connect with local business and state representatives, on multiple levels.

Given the above, there’s a growing collection of voices asking if this arrangement, this scale and influence — which is really unprecedented in human history — should mean recategorising the tech giants in an even more fundamental way.

US political scientist Ian Bremmer is one such. In the November/December 2021 edition of Foreign Affairs Bremmer writes that digital powers are reshaping the global order and that “it is time to start thinking of the biggest technology companies as similar to states”.

In fact, he argues, they are able to move faster than governments, have unprecedented data on us, and are already starting to act like states, entering into what amounts to diplomatic relationships with countries. “States have been the primary actors in global affairs for nearly 400 years. That is starting to change as a handful of large technology companies rival them for geopolitical influence,” he writes.

The article is creating waves in certain spheres, but Bremmer isn’t the only one to make the claim. Writing in the Financial Times in early 2020 Marietje Schaake of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center says: “Tech and social media companies have become powerful global actors and their corporate governance decisions already affect the rights and freedoms of billions of people. But tech companies are now going a step further by positioning themselves as governments...” and cites Microsoft’s January 2020 announcement of opening “representation to the UN” and recruiting diplomats as her opening examples.

This, she argues, is just one way in which these companies act like they are above the law. To her mind, if companies want to act like states they need to extend “citizen-type” rights to their users.

Of course, there are various predictions about how this plays out. Bremmer does a good job in laying out the pick-your-own-adventure channels available to us, but it’s wider than his scenarios. Perhaps cryptocurrencies remake international trade, or tech companies align themselves with Western powers or China. Perhaps states make room for tech giants at the table or tech giants ultimately become the kingmakers.

Or perhaps you believe we’re mere moments away from a world in which the new corporate overlords supplant nation states. Bremmer (and I) are not betting on the latter, but for a nation with minimal global power the stakes may be quite different for us, so I’m not confident enough to rule it out completely.

Whatever the outcome, viewing tech giants through these lenses suggests we might need to rethink how we deal with them, what we agree to in exchange for lovely sea cables and pumping bandwidth. Or maybe, we’re just willing to take services however we can get them.

• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.