Free Kill Process by William Hertling

end, nothing anyone does weakens Tomo. To actually eat into Tomo’s core business, there’s got to be a benefit to switching networks that applies to everyone on Tomo, not only a niche, and not only the few holdouts that aren’t on it. Whatever this new social network is, it must be resistant to a takeover from Tomo or to Tomo copying their features.
    How do you stop a giant who can squash or acquire everything and everyone that stands in its way?
    *     *     *
    The user experience designers send out draft screenshots for PrivacyGuard this week. I spend half an hour getting angrier, until I remind myself anger without direction is pointless. I need to channel my frustration. I’m torn between tracking down the next person on my list, and working on my Tomo alternative.
    I settle for a bit of both, investigating a guy down in the Bay area, because it’s easy to justify a work trip down there, and then working over an extended lunch hour on my new social network.
    That night at home I’m microwaving a burrito when the smell of cheese and beans suddenly triggers an old memory of eating out with my husband at his favorite Mexican place. My stomach curdles and I dump the food in the garbage, too upset to eat.
    I’m suddenly exhausted and crawl into bed, with my clothes still on. The mistakes I’ve made overwhelm me. Sometimes I feel trapped, doomed to somehow repeat things, no matter how hard I try to fight them.
    I’m wallowing in existential doubt one moment, and the next I sit bolt upright, then nearly fall over myself in my rush to get out of bed.
    Pacing back and forth in my living room, I experience a revelation. What’s true for dysfunctional people is also true for dysfunctional corporations.
    Even if I create a new social network with the explicit goal to do no evil, even if that is structured as a brand new, independent company, there will inevitably come a day when the company will repeat the mistakes of Tomo. If the new social network is so successful it wipes out Tomo (I’m giddy at the thought), then everyone in the world will be locked into this new company, and the barrier to switching yet again would be even higher.
    Then what would protect people’s rights, their privacy, and the ownership of their data?
    What the world needs is not a new social network that concentrates power in a single place, but a design to intrinsically prevent the concentration of power that results in barriers to switching.
    *     *     *
    When I arrive at the bar, Emily is already halfway done with her drink, a gin martini with one vestigial olive, and she’s obviously tipsy, her voice pitched high as she flirts with the guy next to her who radiates cockiness like a fifty-kilowatt transmitter, from his shiny shirt to his bulging pecs.
    I’m momentarily peeved, until I see she’s got a jacket slung over the barstool on her other side. The seat she’s saved is at the end of the bar, against the wall. Check. It’s within ten feet of the exit, and no chairs in the way. Check. My stump will be on the bar side, where less people will stare. Check.
    I’m reminded again of why Emily is quite possibly the best person in the world.
    I sit and the bartender nods at me, although he walks in the opposite direction, away from me. He’s busy, the after-work crowd hounding him, shouting out requests for drinks. He comes back a scant thirty seconds later carrying a mint julep and sets it in front me.
    “Your friend said you’d want this when you got here.” He smiles, and moves away again.
    Emily gives the guy she’s talking to a peck on the check, does a last teasing flip of her hair, and then turns to me. She leans in close, hugs me and says, “What a jerk!”
    I’m momentarily flustered. Is she talking about me? The bartender? Or the guy she was flirting with and kissed? The latter is the only plausible answer.
    “Why’d you kiss him?”
    “He’s hot and arrogant.”
    “Is that bad or good? Because it