Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is particularly hard to swallow because every report of internal chaos reminds us that we may have sacrificed the most promising mode of online communication invented in decades by failing to identify it for what it was back when we had the chance.

Musk’s purchase should never have been possible in the first place because Twitter should never have been an asset. It is “the public conversation layer of the internet,” as founder Jack Dorsey once put it, and consequently has functioned as the de facto centre of our global alert system through the pandemic. It is astonishing that it is even still possible for one person to own this. It’s like owning email.

In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analogue, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data.

Call it the “evil billionaire attack” if you’d like. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house. 

The reason this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and then whenever possible they string them together into a network with the specific intent of making the gravity inescapable.

Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetised each time they are used.

A platform is better than an app, or so the theory goes, because you can use a platform to build multiple apps, or enable other developers and companies to build apps from which you might take a 30 per cent cut. Whatever its advantages, the Twitter debacle should spell the end of the proprietary platform as a serious technical undertaking, a high profile illustration that they are too risky to trust no matter how strong the code might be.

The overly conservative approach to intellectual property that makes things proprietary in the first place is also a liability that compromises everything a company might create because it empowers billionaires to kill them. Whether or not he actually destroys it, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a case study in how to destroy something, a model for the next billionaire who fancies a social media empire. Our communication channel for the next vaccine we might need is now at risk.

It doesn’t have to be this way, because there is already another platform out there. You just have to know where to look.

Blockchains fight this problem on the deepest level possible. It would be vastly more difficult, or perhaps impossible, for Musk to kill off a blockchain so long as a handful of users objected enough to continue operating independent nodes. Duplicating across many computers means the risk of losing access is infinitesimal; the blockchain is its own API. This comes with different complications, of course, but losing information outright due to a hostile party is not one of them. For example, when the Hic et Nunc marketplace for NFTs went under in late 2021, another version relaunched, putting a new wrapper around the same content. The blockchain acts as a shared resource that forces interoperability, almost like organic self-defence.

Or consider the case of WordPress, the early blogging engine that has since grown into increasingly elaborate general-purpose content management software. It now powers about 40 per cent of the open web, with which it is loosely synonymous. A huge economy has sprung up around it: companies that develop websites, developers who work for those companies, indie developers who work for themselves, many of them writing plugins which can be unlocked or extended with licensing fees.

This is all possible because the core is open source and encourages the same of its ecosystem. WordPress has been around for a long time and its straightforward RSS feeds decisively lost out to Twitter’s social features, so in 2022 there is a reasonable argument that it is a bit long in the tooth. But we must now understand it to be a bigger technical success than Twitter, simply because it is not at risk.

The rest of the web is even more bulletproof than WordPress because it is a suite of robust open protocols that can never be owned. Computers could not communicate at all without shared models, such as HTTP, FTP, and TCP/IP. The internet was built out of interoperability—even the parts we now think of as closed. There was a time not long ago when that was the whole point of building these things.

Interoperability can be immediately rendered useless if half of the handshake is disappeared, so the next requirement is that you have to keep it all online. The brief chaotic saga of “left-pad” turned this into a high-profile lesson for developers. Most JavaScript code of any particular consequence makes its way to a code hosting service called npm, which makes it available for other developers to import and reuse.

In 2016, an engineer who grew angry at the company behind the npm service protested by removing one of his projects, a simple function for manipulating text, which had a ripple effect across the software engineering industry as all the code that depended on it failed, and then the code that depended on that code failed, and so on. It was a hilarious mess, enough to prompt npm to change its policies. Now a software package published on npm can never be removed.

Perhaps npm itself could go away entirely, though. By about 2019, this began to seem increasingly plausible as the company struggled to secure funding. We were teetering on the edge of a catastrophe there – the entire web development industry, from small WordPress shops to large multinational firms, had come to treat as fundamental infrastructure a startup that was not yet on stable financial footing.

Companies with the resources to do so began archiving a backup copy of every package that was installed, as a hedge against the uncertain future facing npm. Even though the code was free and open source, access to it through the company running the hosting service was not assured.

And then in early 2020, just as the pandemic was emerging, npm was suddenly acquired by Microsoft, and to all outward appearances has run smoothly ever since. (Somewhere out there an overworked npm employee just screamed into a pillow; my apologies.) This was a natural fit given that about two years earlier Microsoft had also purchased GitHub.

Within about five years of its launch, GitHub had become the single most important website in the history of software development. It is essentially a web-based interface wrapped around Git, a standalone tool for managing codebases that was first released in 2005 as a means to work on the Linux operating system, and has since grown to become the standard for nearly all modern software development. GitHub quite clearly loves open source code – it’s the bread and butter, the primary content displayed on the site, the most important thing it does for most everyone except its occasional enterprise customers – but Git itself, the beating heart, takes this dedication to the next level.

One of the most revolutionary design decisions in Git is the concept of the “remote,” which refers to any copy of the code that exists elsewhere – in another folder on your computer, on a server, perhaps on GitHub. Or on a GitHub competitor, for that matter – GitLab is the most prominent alternative, and Keybase provides remotes to all its users; you can also tediously set up your own privately on most servers and computers.

Among other things, Git mediates the interactions with remotes, and no remote is ever intrinsically privileged. As a result, a codebase stored in Git has no canonical location, so it can relocate freely in response to threats.

I’ve been developing software with Git for many years, and it has shaped my thinking so deeply that at this point I could not live without it. Yet it still feels magical to send your code off to a new remote for the first time. With one command, you can copy years of work and gigabytes of code over to a new host, keeping nearly all the context, notes, information, mistakes and jokes intact.

It feels like you’ve hired professional movers to take all your stuff to your new home, which is a sensation I’ve rarely encountered in other technology products. Quite the opposite – the creator of WordPress recently reported that Twitter responded to user defections by explicitly switching off the ability to export user data via API on request.

Thanks to the efforts of the insufferable free software nerds who build Linux, in the Git ecosystem the cost of switching is so low that it makes the success of GitHub even more remarkable. GitHub is best in class because it has to be. Its product is built atop a tech stack that dictates another company must be able to come along and eat its lunch. One might even argue that in the absence of this mechanic, the market can never really be free.

• A Wired report