Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:
* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.
The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.
Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.
The reason governments no longer fight huge corporations or even clear monopolies is also due to heavy globalization. If one government destroys a monopoly (a global mega-corporation) in its country, it may strengthen the monopoly (and the global mega-corporation) in another country. So the line of thinking is, "We don't like this nasty monopoly, but at least it's our monopoly."
China is efficient but largely because they don't actually have to obey the State. They are capitalist; they compete in the global market and follow market signals.
The CCP does put a heavy thumb on some scales, but so does every country. Perfect efficiency is not optimal when circumstances change, so states always enforce some redundancy.
There are many differences, of course, but just don't get the idea that China consists of monopolies in a command economy. They call it "capitalism with Chinese characteristics."
> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.
Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.
I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters
This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations, the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they want it to go.
I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of members of those organizations, but having a small state fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration - because for the state to be democratic and representative, it must be the most powerful organization in the area it covers, otherwise it’s just a tool for the more powerful to use.
In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
> In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations?
I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.
Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.
I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?
Like rock paper scissors, there are multiple dimensions to power and the state doesn’t always possess all of them. Media being the most obvious one (fourth estate). Federal bank another. As the split of government and parliament.
The state holds the guns, and if it doesn't hold the guns, it's not the thing I'm referring to as the state - fundamentally, the power of the state is the power of violence. Other actors may possess other types of power and other types of coercion, but those either leverage or are constrained by the state power of violence.
One could make an argument that the state does not hold a monopoly on violence. It holds a monopoly on the legitimization of violence. You're allowed to use deadly force to protect yourself from death or serious bodily harm in the majority of jurisdictions, provided it is not disproportionate. What matters is that the state declines to prosecute this, but does prosecute the person who hypothetically shoots someone on Fifth Avenue for no reason.
I am specifically not arguing the state has a monopoly on violence - as with the GP, people are imputing arguments I’m not making. It’s the fact that the state cannot have a monopoly on violence that forces the state to be powerful enough that its threat of violence outweighs others (and, bluntly, defines what the state IS, for all practical purposes: it is the entity whose threats of violence supersede all others.)
I'm actually not advocating for a reduction in the size of government bodies and I'm a bit frustrated about it. I'm not advocating anything about the size of government bodies (though naturally I have my feelings.) I'm confused why people seem to be intuiting this. I'm in fact doubly frustrated because I feel that people seem to be injecting modern political points into something that I feel predates many of our modern problems.
My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that come from large organizations are a property of their size. They may differ in that they're volunteer based, profit oriented, non-profit in a capitalist system, democratically organized, or several hundred or thousand more distinctions. But I'm going to feel just as disconnected from my national government as I will from the workings of Google as a small shareholder as I will from the NBA as someone that plays pick-up on a basketball court. The experience of going to a minor league baseball game is much more personal than going to a major MLB game.
To me the important issue is: the US specifically and the Anglophone West more broadly is seeing a decrease in its small institutions. This decrease predates the modern internet and social media landscape (see Bowling Alone.) I have many, many questions around this. Why is this happening? What is its effect on society? How can we reverse this? Is this something we can reverse?
It's an important issue to me because this trajectory is very different outside of the Anglophone West. Japan for example is not seeing the same decline in its small organizations as the US is, despite population reduction. If anything Japanese life is dominated much more by huge conglomerates than US life.
Hmmm... I would argue the disengagement of citizens and the lack of participation is not strictly because of organizational size. It is the fact these organizations cannot care less about their customers, citizens, or the law. These rogue organizations are typically large.
The cause of disengagement is that organizations, large or small, are not responsive to customers needs or citizens needs. In many cases, they are actively working to the detriment of their own customers and the country at large.
This is due to regulatory capture. It is that simple.
That's fair. I think a lot of reactions, mine included, are because most of the time when someone discusses the downsides of a large state, they're advocating for a small one from a libertarian lens, so I think I imputed motives to your arguments.
You're right about this generally, though. I've got two different theories for why this is happening.
First, I think the US is "individually nomadic" in a way that many other countries and cultures are not - it is unusual, at least in the populous areas, for someone to spend their entire life in one area, and doubly so for an entire family or community to stay geographically colocated long enough to really build durable organizations. I think this changes a bit as people get older, but it's quite normal for someone to move every 5 years or so between the age of, say, 20 and 60. Arguably this is driven by economics - job availability, especially for professionals, is a big reason for these moves.
I think there's something self-reinforcing about the trend, as well - notably, as, say, the focus in politics concentrates on the federal government, it becomes harder for people to really see the benefit in local politics. The repeal of Roe v. Wade, for example, is a policy made at the national level with strong impacts locally; similarly the recent change in policy around both trans rights and immigration are hard for people to look past towards local politics (I think this is a mistake - large politics are built on small politics - but I think it's a factor).
I'd also suspect impatience plays a part - it's hard to build an organization, it's hard to negotiate status and relationships, it's hard to keep something viable, and we've got a lot of easier routes to dopamine than bothering to meet up with other people now.
> The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors
I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it is required narrowly, to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and resolve disputes.
How is an entity with a monopoly on violence not the most powerful actor in the room? And in what way is administering the peace not constraining other actors?
Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.
You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, business, forums, fraternities, and politics. There is hardly a part of our lives anymore that isn't intruded on by national narratives anymore. There is a very fundamental question of why that is, why it's allowed, and who benefits from it.
Federalism is having power divided, so we have gone away from federalism, not towards it. And I personally believe very strongly that it has been disastrous for our nation to do so.
I find both sides of this discourse have value: the federal loss of regulatory powers WRT corporations, and getting grassroots going again. I feel like my neighborhood streets are not places anymore, they're entirely liminal. Nothing happens in these spaces, no playing or working, except as strictly necessary.
I really like the direction this thread is going. I've wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power, the other fears government power. If you allow two assumptions:
(1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
(2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc).
... then someone who is skeptical of abuses of power should be wary of both government and corporate/wealthy power. But that seems like an untenable position — you can't check the one without muscling up the other.
Is there a way to maintain a small, decentralized, local-oriented government that can still check the power of corporate/wealthy/majoritarian impulses and provide a social safety net?
> (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
At least when applied to Government in the form of "Representative Democracies" I think this overly simplistic view is not useful to analyze what's happening in the real world.
The assumption behind electing representatives is precisely that they will advocate and advance agendas on behalf of the majority - no matter their social status. However, for this to work it requires a populace that is sufficiently informed, educated, and intelligent to understand what sensible solutions look like.
Unfortunately, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others were wrong and even after 300 years of putting young homo sapiens through 10 years of public education and teaching them rational thinking this assumption turns out to be false.
Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)
I think the roadmap to the anarchist view is simple enough in theory - break up large companies, redistribute large piles of wealth, establish laws enforcing size limits, and, following that, scale government back and delegate decision-making to the affected individuals wherever practical. Ignoring the practical questions of how one breaks up, say, Amazon, the state has the guns, so if the state says Bezos loses his yacht, it is so.
The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.
This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.
I also don't know much about anarchist philosophy; would love some insight here if anyone can speak to that.
But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.
UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)
Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason, and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a book about it.)
> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.
I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.
I'd agree that too much concentration of power in any single organization, public or private, without any checks or balances, is a bad idea. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Historically, the executive branch of the US federal government has been kept more or less in check by (a) the legislative and judicial branches, and (b) voters.
> Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization
True, though (at least in principle) a democratic government is a very special organization because it (again, in principle) exists only because it's the people's will.
I think when we think about our social fabric and the empowerment that individuals feel, that this is more of a theoretical rather than practical argument. All of the disenfranchisement, the feeling that your individual participation doesn't matter, the inability to steer the goals of the organization around your individual opinions, these are all just as present in a large state.
Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people's will but not from your will, and that is the role of the small community organization.
- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b?
- Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?
- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?
There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades later. The same could be said for all the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few years.
Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part.
All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society.
We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.
> but who decides how those resources are deployed
The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects
And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have all money? Well because they are the best ones at allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at allocating resources? Because they have all the money.
Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field.
Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector.
In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity.
> And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)
Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.
It seems to me none of this is as clear cut as it seems. Government entities may hold shares in private companies, companies may act on voter's demands by accepting government grants. For some companies, government contracts are actually a main revenue stream - shareholders can jump up and down, if their supporters are voted out they will falter.
Corporations are still subject to law and ultimately under the control of the government. The current set of rules just gives them a fair amount of freedom to operate.
This only makes sense in a spherical-cow-in-vacuum world where government and business are somehow barred from communicating with one another. In reality, the "current set of rules" in many countries is a result of companies relentlessly trying to and succeeding in finding ways of influencing government. Political advertisements, campaign funding, lobbying, corruption, underhanded favoritism, countless other methods that are an amazing RoI for any business large enough to engage in it. Large enough corporations are resembling governments more and more in terms of value and power, and they use all of that power to endlessly try to bend the rest of society into serving their profit motive.
1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't have to be
2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote' is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person" and "your value and voting power is directly tied to your net worth" are in any way comparable. You and I have zero effective power over them, and always will.
> The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money.
It is not, eg. Zuck didn't control Facebook because he was a priori rich, he became rich because he controlled Facebook in a successful way. He gained those shares and that control with his skill and labor (and maybe one symbolic dollar or something).
No, a corp is only accountable to their board and the LARGEST shareholder. A single person can control an otherwise publicly traded company. Zuckerberg, for example. And not everyone can afford to spend their earnings owning companies. So what you get with a democracy is that power is spread out by default rather than concentrated in a single element. Default enfranchisement rather than the polar opposite. One at least nods politely at the idea of upward social mobility in passing while the other eschews all pretense as to the status of its party invitation.
The unit of power in stock corporations is dollars, while in democracies it is personhood. In the former, one person can acquire multiple units, while in the latter they cannot. There is an obvious difference.
Corporations only have any accountability in so far as the law of the nation-state they're incorporated in grants it.
Corporations only exist as a legal construct of other entities. Absent government, they wouldn't be corporations since there'd be no law to create them.
The problem is, when the majority is held by pension funds, ETFs and Blackrock... there isn't much governance in practice, particularly from the low-fee purely passive ETFs. And since government run pension schemes are on their way to the gutter in favor of stonk market private pensions, the share of such dumb passive capital will only grow.
If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used. Perhaps in the 21st century that has changed, but for me that falls under the "extraordinary claims" category with the corresponding evidence requirements.
The structure of giant corporations today is like those centralized societies that were so inefficient in your example. The mandates to put AI in everything are one example of out of touch leadership throwing money and effort blindly towards things of dubious value. The sycophantic managers, afraid that they will be eliminated for insufficient fervor for the board’s latest fascination, will seize upon anything to prove themselves loyal and useful to those above them.
By moving the locus of control, whether it be considered the ceo or shareholders, so far from the actual business and implementing mandates based on whatever the current fancy is and meaningless targets of growth on such a giant scale you get the same sort of excesses.
The current system is marked by irrationality and uninformed and ill considered decision making. With smaller organizations and actual business competition they would be held to account by their competitors or just by running out of money before something catastrophic for the greater economy happened.
This is an excellent point. Thank you for posting it.
Large monopolistic mega-corporations do tend to have the same issues that one would see in the old 20th century planned economies like the Soviet Union.
Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).
It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.
> If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used.
In some metrics (such as GDP), yes. And in other metrics (such as wealth inequality and health care), the answer is less clear-cut.
The West encompasses a wide gradient of private vs. state control over resources, and there are states which aren't typically considered Soviet or Western (e.g. Nordic states.)
I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)
On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
>
You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote.
You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
> Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.
Historically, there did exist experiments that not each person has the same voting power (for example the Prussian "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" [three-class franchise]):
Depending on the amount of taxes you paid, you were assigned to one of three classes. The sizes of each of these classes were chosen so that each class paid 1/3 of the whole tax volume. The votes in each class elected representants for this class.
The idea is obvious: those who pay a lot more taxes should have more influence.
Thus: each citizen has the same voting power is just the "currently fashionable" implementation of democracy.
Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.
You also have a "vote" as a consumer. The market could be much more responsive than a "democratic" system.
For instance, say you think pesticides are a bad thing. You can get 49% of the population to vote to the ban them and what do you accomplish? Nothing
No wonder people look at politics with despair.
If you can get 5% of the population to eat organic food on the other hand, you've reduced pesticide use by 5%. You create trade associations, the idea of organic food spreads more widely and maybe someday you get enough support that you can change the law.
I think California's system is a mess. It's been overrun with private interests bankrolling ballot initiatives and steamrolling them through. Add to that the Government itself sponsoring ballet initiatives that sale bonds to finance things that people don't understand really loans and it turns into a mess. I do like the ability to remove politicians from office via ballot though.
One idea that I think is reasonable is to use some kind of actual meetings.
Dividing people into groups of 50 or 100. Initiatives are voted on in these groups, if they are passed they go to the next level, 1000 people.
Sort of like that idea in the Yes, Minister episode about 'genuinely democratic local government'. The idea here is the tree structure is to prevent people to push initiatives other than as individuals.
I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal).
The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.
"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society."
Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.
"We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc."
Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
> Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.
The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally.
> Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Shinkansen.
Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
> The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated
You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events.
Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries.
Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.
Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money.
In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project
You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding.
I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when NASA took us to the moon?
Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC eradicated malaria from the United States?
Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build our basic social safety nets?
Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large groups: business, government, and (organized) religion. Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch.
The whole thing is worth a read too, it explains all the other military use tech that will arise from the self driving car ecosystem, further justifying the investment.
You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.
> Malaria
Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.
> Social safety nets
Not a science breakthrough
> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch
I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.
Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.
This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.
Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.
That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.
[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!
[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.
Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.
automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs.
the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:
That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.
Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
> for the greater good of all or advancement of society
I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-connected players.
When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent.
(NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)
* TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory?
* 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.
"Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?"
Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger scale.
As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as a non-profit organization.
The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given names like "Moore's Law." People like Hans Moravec predicted way back in the 1980's that the cost of compute would continue to decline and become cheap enough for AGI by the 2020's or 2030's. That's half a century ago!
Fair point, the first few gens weren't that expensive. And like I said I'm certain the scaling would've been discovered soon with some time lag. But the transformer paper was 2017, right? Just from a benefit -to- society perspective, assuming LLMs are a net positive in terms of productivity, perhaps reducing time to drug approval or improving government efficiency (1).. Isn't getting there just one year earlier worth it, if the gains really are that big? We could be talking lives saved via faster approvals or more efficient spending. My point is that a private company made it happen faster, as evidenced by them doing it first. A good thing sooner is valuable.
(1) I'm convinced at the very least LLMs can feasibly speed up paperwork.
The reason the world is so dependent on a single company is because it costs country-breaking amounts of money to keep-up with the semiconductor manufacturing technology. You can only have cheap semiconductors if there are very few entites building them.
You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a profound good impact on the population at large and it's not clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is excited for next product is not a good reason for centraliZation.
I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit.
The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.
Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.
Not a single one of those projects is preferable to a more equitable society. Maybe self driving, yes, but the impact of AI is highly dubious and uncertain at this point in time.
Following your argument we should just outright reject progress because, for the most part, humanity has been really really shitty. Also, how much thought did you put into it before writing that this type of society isn't sustainable? Can't the things that happened since (mostly, a massive wealth consolidation) be undone? Why?
Before WWII, middle-class married women were strongly discouraged from working for pay outside the home. If their husbands could provide, "respectable" women were expected to stay home as homemakers.
One could argue the opposite: that the mass entry of women into the paid workforce expanded the labor supply, contributing to wage stagnation and, eventually, the erosion of the middle class. But that wasn’t the only cause. Globalization, declining unions, automation, and regressive taxes were also factors.
Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.
>
And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.
> Surely you're not suggesting...
Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is plausible to happen.
They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)
They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter
A secure lifestyle and a good lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. We have the tech to enable something which at least somewhat approximates, and even if we didn’t, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the trillions of dollars spent on wasteful garbage like surveillance, ads, engagement-farming, etc were instead redirected towards research and development of technology which enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle.
What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house, I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice", but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both parents working a full time job to get more luxury.
I think the problem is that you are proposing a false dichotomy: that if they do not want one consequence of the current system, they should eschew the entire system.
But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.
>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids
If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom.
Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.
No? An easy comparison would be a world where the both partners work 20hrs/wk each, for a total of 40hrs, with the rest devoted towards, eg, childcare.
That addresses the reason for working (eg, pursuit of interests outside family-raising), while also eschewing the need for full time childcare.
You're basically talking about the shift system. A works for 20hrs a week, B works for 20hrs a week. A spends more time with spouse(A), who does the same at their workplace, and B spends more time with spouse(B), who does the same at their workplace. Sounds great.
But, it falls apart to the same logic GP proposed, that the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones. Households where people both work 40hrs = 80hrs will be ahead of those that work only 40hrs total. So everyone will descend to working 80hrs too.
Of course, taking mine and GPs logic to it's conclusion is silly - people will have a point where they stop comparing with others and tradeoff less money for less hours. But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high! And it only happens at an already very high salary. A 40hrs/week SWE might not go to a high finance 70hrs/week job, because they're already comfortably paid. However these two are top 1% jobs in the world, and the quality of life is probably not too different. But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung, which entails a much better quality of life (as a % increase)
> But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high!
Is it? 40hrs is quite low by historical standards. 100 hours per week was the norm in the pre-industrial era, and 60+ hours per week was still typical during the Industrial Revolution.
Labour advocacy groups were promoting 40hrs, much like the four day workweek is today, for a long time, but 40hrs didn't actually became the norm until the Great Depression, where capping hours was a tool used to try and spread the work out amongst more workers to try and resolve the high unemployment problem.
> But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung
While that certainly happens, it seems most people in the lower rungs are quite content to work 40 hours per week, even though working more would put them in a much better position. I dare say you even alluded to that when you chose 40 hours in your example.
It is not like 40hrs is the perfect tradeoff or something. As mentioned before, labour advocacy groups have already decided that 32hrs is even better. I expect many people end up working 40 hours just because "that's what you do" and never give it another thought.
> the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones.
If we assume both participants work 40 hours per week then it is true that the same household would have less income if one party stopped accruing an income and all else remained equal. But that doesn't necessarily hold true once you start playing with other variables. A higher income party, for example, may enable the household to have a higher income if they work 60 hours per week while the other party takes care of other life responsibilities to enable those longer hours.
A dual income household isn't necessarily the most fruitful option. In fact, marriage — which, while declining, is still the case in most non-single households — assumes that a single income is the ideal option. It seems that "that's what you do" without any further thought is still the primary driving force.
Lower rungs are definitely not content working 40 hours a week. They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.
I support the labour laws limiting an employer to 40hrs a week of a man's labour. This is important for people who really just want some employment and don't want to die. But the vast majority of people work two such jobs and try to get into the higher rungs of the financial ladder. Heck, even SDE3s in software companies work off-hours to become IC's and such, and I'm sure it's similar once you go down the executive route.
> "That's what you do"
That is definitely true, a lot of social fabric erodes when providing labour is turned into a psychotic thing. I'm not entirely convinced the labour laws we have today are enough to prevent this. My opinion is that we need to also have policies on the other side of the coin - i.e encourage family/extended family/communal/what have you living. Not "one child policy" level forced policies, but instead in the form of a good complement to strong labour laws.
> They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.
It does happen, as recognized before, but what suggests this is any kind of norm?
1. The median worker in the USA doesn't even make it to 40 hours of work in a week, only 34. What you say certainly doesn't hold true when dividing the latter in half.
2. Only 21% of the workforce normally puts in more than 40 hours per week. That could represent the lowest rungs, I suppose, but...
3. The data also suggests that those working long hours are more likely to be highly educated, high-wage, salaried, and older men. Does that really fit the profile of someone in the lower runs? Stereotypically, that is who most of us imagine is in the highest rung.
4. The upward mobility of which you speak is not typical. Most people will either stay on the same rung or find themselves heading lower.
First of all, I don't know where this specific example is coming from or how it relates to what I said exactly.
Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning families" versus "single-earning families" look kind of inconsequential.
The whole thread is about people who want to have a single wage earner lifestyle. That is where this all comes from, and how it relates. You too can live a single wage earner lifestyle in the US, but it will mean significant compromises to your standard of living.
Thanks, I missed the second part of this sentence:
> Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
I stand by what I wrote above. I agree with you that it is possible today at a reduced QoL and I also would like to see society distribute wealth more equitably, which might also achieve the goal at a higher QoL.
It’s naive either in the way you put it or at the very least in your eyes. There is a lot to be said about the narcissism of innovators radically rethinking anything and everything traditional just because we think we can do better by our current metrics.
If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have lost capacity for independent critical thought? Is that really the world you want to create?
It’s not just a “ChatGPT will replace you”. Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.
Our humanity is at stake no matter how we evolve this tech, because the tech evolves our humanity. It's not a one-way street. Culture, not genetics, is the dominant human evolutionary force today:
Reading your first three bullet points I thought you were dreaming about how much better the world could have been.
But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs.
If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).
I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it meant my contributions to society were more meaningful. Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is what's causing the overall decline in health that we're seeing in developed nations.
For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.
That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant drawback.
I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here.
It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.
It is also very hard to separate “socialist planning system” from “Russian Empire”. It isn’t like things were going swimmingly in Tsarist Russia and then they reentered a golden age in the 90s.
If anything this socialist system brought them to the height of their power and influence.
> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?
TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer.
Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower.
Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?
All those things could still happen if private enterprises pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt less.
All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority.
We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation.
Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.
> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.
They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can expect little support from the government (and surely no big subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many small business owners are extremely tough since larger stores were allowed to stay open while the small businesses were not.
I remembered incorrectly. They are getting "emergency declarations" support:
> Donald Trump called it "the largest AI infrastructure project in history", and he indicated that he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project's development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
So it might not be strictly a subsidy, but it surely is taxpayer-support.
This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.
Agreed, and that is why big countries should also be broken up. No more countries over 50m citizens. Many people in Europe don’t want the EU, but there’s really no alternative when competing with large countries like China and US.
It's the natural result of tech gaining value, and a lot of it staying closed source: Once you are scaling, scaling very high isn't that difficult once you have the best offering, and when you are big you can do optimizations that would be seen as wasteful at a small scale. streaming service that has wide reach isn't that different when it is dealing with 10 million or 100 million subscribers, but dedicating a guy for 3 months to save 2% of your costs through some arcane fiddling is much more profitable when you have 100 million, and then your costs per subscriber can be lower.
We also have plenty of problems that are natural monopolies. Take, for instance, credit card fraud detection. High level detection involves giving a risk score to a transaction. I sure can give a better fraud score if I see almost every transaction this card makes, and I have a very high percentage of visibility of all transactions in the world, than if I had to do the calculation by just knowing what, say, my boardgaming website has seen. The smaller contender has to be so much better algorithmically to be able to compete with a massive advantage in data quantity and quality.
And that's the real problem we have with monopolies right now: The bigger company often doesn't have a huge advantage because they are making extra shady deals, or they have to compete less, but because being bigger makes them more efficient in some ways that are completely above board.
This is the classic tradeoff. (it's similar to the bias variance tradeoff, or fox and hedgehog analogy)
Monolithic systems are scalable and efficient when well-governed, but brittle under errors or bad leadership (e.g. China closing its ports in the 14th century had centuries-long repercussions).
Distributed systems are less efficient but more resilient to errors and poor governance.
It’s not always one or the other though. American founding fathers found a right set of tradeoffs in designing checks and balances (like separation of powers) and federalism structures that harden the system against bad governance (though this is under strain today).
When you put it that way, the US constitution itself is about limiting the power of the federal government against the states (and individuals, in the bill of rights)
Nevertheless, state-level power, for a state government or business, is still far above the kind of sub-Dunbar number (~120 people) organisations that Tao is talking about, where everyone might know each other and the network can be organised by reputation and trust rather than through state-level laws or contracts (and the attendant forms of impersonal bureaucratic enforcement that come with those).
Edit: I don't mean to object to the general theme of your comment which is that power has become increasingly concentrated and unchecked, just to point out that even if those limitations that you mention had been retained it would still represent a society where the role of immediate trust-based relationships is diminished or eroded relative to the previous situation where these were the primary aspects of people's livelihoods and security
I would point out that, regardless of the US federal government's stance on monopolies, any legislation or civil action toward that end would be far less applicable today, because of globalization.
If your country prevents any domestic tech companies from becoming trillion-dollar behemoths, but such things are still permitted in at least one other country with a similarly-sized economy to yours, then that just means that all your smaller domestic tech companies are going to be outcompeted by the foreign trillion-dollar behemoth selling into your domestic market.
I dunno. It's not at all clear what "small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly" even means, over what time, and in what society. The post itself, as a piece of thinking, seems, charitably, a vague sentiment that might later turn into something that could be analyzed.
In general terms, in the US, in living memory, I'm not sure that large organizations occupy more space in people's day to day lives than smaller ones.
In the US, since say the 1990s, the percentage of people, say, working in small businesses are roughly the same. The number of local non-profits has exploded since over that time. The trend towards media consolidation that had occurred over the prior century would begin to be unwound, and tech consolidation would only partially reverse this. We have far more access to diverse points of view than most people did for most of the 20th century.
If there is there is shift, I suspect, it's not about where people work or interact, it seems mostly that businesses, small and large, feel free to dominate people, in a way that was considered in bad form prior to Reagan/Thatcher and the fall of communism as an alternative to the West that would be appealing to post-colonial societies.
But that's just a notion as vague as the original post.
Bell really really wanted this: It also proposed that it be freed from a 1956 antitrust consent decree, then administered by Judge Vincent P. Biunno in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, that barred it from participating in the general sale of computers
> The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network
For the record, this system where AT&T was broken up between long distance and regional local companies (called the Regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs) was a terrible solution to anticompetitive behavior and is one of many examples (some of which you also quote) about how the US is terrible at breaking up monopolies.
The problem is the RBOCs simply became regional monopolies and regional monopolies aren't really any better than national monopolies. By the 90s the RBOCs could become long distance providers by meeting certain criteria and of course the whole system was gamed.
What needed to happen is the exact same thing that needs to happen with national ISPs today: municipalities need to own, maintain and build last-mile infrastructure.
> The FCC's 7-7-7 rule was a 1953 regulation that limited a single entity from owning no more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations nationwide to promote broadcast diversity. This rule was a response to concerns about media consolidation and was eventually eased, then replaced by the 12-12-12 rule in 1984 and later abolished by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
If you're wondering how we got to the universe where every piece of mass media that's blasted at you is owned by <5 entities, look no further.
So much for diversity of speech or a marketplace of opinions. Speech is actively being funneled into a single box, and the box is owned and operated by a monoculture of media billionaires.
This forum in particular wails and gnashes its teeth anytime that big tech exercises control over publishing, while turning a blind eye to this rot in trad-media - which is a thousand times worse.
If I were made king for a day, the first thing I'd do would be to break up these conglomerates. You'd either be allowed to be a media conglomerate with the GDP of a small country and a reach of a hundred million people running an agnostic platform, or you're allowed to exercise editorial control. Pick one, I don't care which, but you have to pick one.
(That this isn't a popular position among people seeking to maximize speech and diversity of ideas is perhaps revealing of their real values - the promotion of the monoculture pushed by trad-media.)
This. I mean thats just one sector, but its spread across the whole: the whole of modern economic theory is one of competition that causes efficient markets. But when you look into the theory even a little bit, you realise it needs hundreds, even thousands of market players to reach an equilibrium thats worthwhile, and the existence of a large player even at like 10% market size can distort everything beyond usefulness. We're so far removed from that ideal in pretty much every dang sector that anyone preaching or believing in efficient markets is just foolish.
The Bell breakup was stupid. If you have some competing companies, but they meet up, and agree to divide the country into regions,
and then choose to not compete with each other, that's not at all free market capitalism. Capitalism requires competition in the market in order for market forces to actually work! Cars is another example where, in the modern framing, the dealership model is bullshit and manufacturers should be able to sell direct to consumers. And it does make a certain amount of sense. But if the argument is for smaller organizations, the fact is that local dealerships are smaller than, say, Ford, and so if the argument is that the dealership model sucks because the car dealerships have too much power and are abusing it, taking power away from them and ceeding it to an even bigger organization doesn't make a lick of sense.
Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of themselves.
I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering and shrinking away.
Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations becoming dysfunctional, but not dying because they have sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their replacements become large organizations.
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born
Historically at least I think we can examples of the opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less around social activities and more around aiding business and society.
Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread the risk around and help out each other.
For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks home which is associated with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have been branches all across Canada.
After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after that when legalized again became much less relevant because its need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian dance.
The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes.
The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession").
One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.
There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!
There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do you want to win, or do you want the game to continue? Because sometimes you can't have both."
I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the glory days of the 50s-70s, people wanted the game to continue - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then starting in the 80s, people gradually started sacrificing the game for the win, doing things that they knew would eventually lead to the collapse of everything so that they could come out on top. This is corrosive. Once it starts becoming apparent, everybody will start sacrificing the system as a whole for their own personal gain, because the system is dead anyway.
I think we're right on the brink of everyone realizing that the system is now dead, and bad things will likely come of it.
This is exactly the main lesson of Finite and Infinite Games. There are finite games, in which the goal is to win, and there are infinite games, in which the goal is to continue playing the game. Using this framing, one can account for quite a large amount of long-term, large-scale problems as breakdowns wherein some participants choose to play formerly infinite games as finite ones, thus crushing their competition but destroying the game itself.
I like this framing. There is an analogy with industrialization and pollution, in that the side-effects of industrial production can be safely ignored, unless those effects are cumulative. Social norms function in the same way. There is little harm in a professor kindly giving a passing grade to one undeserving student; when this becomes common, the cumulative effect undermines the value of a college education itself.
Perhaps a more mathematical framing looks to game theory, a la John Nash. In the prisoner's dilemma two equilibrium exist, the "good one" where the prisoners cooperate, and the "bad one" where they both defect. Good and bad is determined by summing the outcome value for both prisoners. Social norms help stay in the "good" equilibrium despite the occasional defection. Once the defectors learn how personally profitable it is to defect, it becomes common practice, the norm changes, and the society as a whole has switched from one equilibrium to the other, and society is, overall, much worse off. The path from good to bad equilibrium is incremental, cumulative, just like pollution. It's less clear to me what the incremental, cumulative path is going the opposite direction.
Game theory is exactly it. A bunch of simulations have shown that in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat, sometimes adding forgiveness. The fact that you will play again incentivizes players to cooperate. But as soon as the game becomes finite (i.e. you can see the end in sight), the optimal strategy becomes "defect", because your opponent also has the same incentives and whoever defects first gets the payoff.
Incidentally this also points to the path from a bad to good equilibrium. You have to throw away the big system and start with a system small enough that the participants will interact repeatedly. This rebuilds trust. Then you have to defend that system from outside influences, or at least carefully control them so they play by the same rules as existing participants. The act of defending your local community also builds trust - arguably [1] post-WW2 U.S. social cohesion was actually generated by the experience of defeating the Axis powers and then getting enmeshed in the Cold War. Finally you can gradually expand the system through carefully controlled immigration and naturalization.
Unfortunately, this probably means that the Internet, globalization, and likely large states like the US/China/Russia are all toast. And as Terence Tao's post here points out, large organizations are usually more efficient than small organizations. That means that as large organizations have outcompeted small organizations, the transition as those large organizations themselves become dysfunctional and disintegrate is going to be wrenching. We're going to lose access to several material conveniences that we take for granted.
It's interesting to wonder about why norms degrade at scale. Intuition tells me it's because stink-eye doesn't scale. Defectors in a small org pay a price external to the game, aka "reputational damage". But members of large organizations rarely suffer this, because they are strangers, and because "they are just doing their job". A half-formed thought, but perhaps it's half-useful.
When you are the 900 pound gorilla, "reputational damage" is no longer an effective check against bad behavior. This is the exact motivation for the trust-busting movement in the early 20th century. Now the US has regressed and we are in another gilded age.
> Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer... The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift...
I don't know, something something, Baumol's cost disease. You, like the other person who is vamping, aren't talking about stuff grounded in hard data.
But I'll meet you at your level:
(1) Do you think serving cheaper customers is easier or harder?
It's harder. Poorer people will break more things, ask for more stuff, require more intensive one-on-one service, as a matter of objective reality. I'm not saying this is good or bad, or that people don't deserve dignity and decency, but you are reaching for this complex, Americana cultural vibe, and you know, I can reach for a vibe too, "Man, it sucks to deal with people who are broke." Do you see?
(2) What would be the price of a life saving vaccine if people would "charge what it's worth"? What about "what they could get"?
Okay. So you got it 200% wrong. We charge what we could get for life saving vaccines, and for that matter most life saving generics, which is very close to $0, even though people would probably pay a ton of money for it.
Its this, "I wanna drag every grievance into every conversation" that is the problem, it's vibes that are the problem.
I associate the Hacker News forum with authentic, reasoned debate and sharing of personal experience and perspective. Your comment wants to engage in a kind of rhetorical pugilism that is very common in other forums, but is uncommon here. It is a style I personally dislike and find counter-productive for every topic, inflaming emotions and driving division rather than synthesizing a variety of perspectives into an interesting whole.
Speaking of vibe checks, the vibes in this post are worse than what you've replied to. "something something", "I'll meet you at your level", "Do you see?", "you got it 200% wrong.", are all very dismissive and hostile.
I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)
Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.
I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people.
Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area.
Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area.
YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it.
Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year.
I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.
The neat thing is that it it doesn't actually take much money to start up a new small organization if you want to. You can accomplish a remarkable amount with relatively little money.
Some friends and I just started a tool library in Central Oregon: https://cotool.org/
There some quite generous community donations of tools (not money) to get started. Startup costs were small, and now a couple weeks after opening we have dozens of members.
It scales nicely because we can just buy more or less new tools. It's very impactful to some people, and once started there's very little recurring expenses.
I guess the biggest one is "church". But to get into that requires accepting (or pretending to accept, I suppose) the horizontal memetic transfer of the specific denomination.
I go to church every Sunday despite having zero belief in Jesus or God as they describe him. The sermons are socially relevant and thought-provoking, the congregation is caring and fun with cool social events, and the good that they're doing in our community is inspiring.
I encourage HNers to try it! Just mentally replace "God" with "Nature" and "Jesus" with "Me" in every line and you have a good framework for self-reflection and appreciation of the natural world.
People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions:
1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink?
2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces?
One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!
> And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.
Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local support groups when times get tough.
Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our current social order which is tearing it apart.
Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards. I think technology has reduced the need for economic/political actors to organize via hyper-local blocks.
There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.
I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.
I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone" we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per day per capita global media consumption has something to do with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures.
I think something like only turning on the internet and TV for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just encouraging better engagement outside of those times, but also causing you to demand better of the hour you do get, avoiding mindless slop.
Have you ever taken a proper break from all media? Like tv, internet, phones, heck even books. You find yourself suddenly with amazing amounts of time. Some people describe being catastrophically bored but for me I just find that all those little tasks that rack up that seem like too much effort suddenly become approachable and you can check off like 6 and still have time for relaxing in some grass and just kinda chatting with passers by. I really think its that simple.
I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed.
What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore.
We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000.
MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.
Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which is about how the memetics of human connection and organization replicate (or not).
I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of organizational experience (power instead trickling top down from often far off far above offices), weakening organizational muscle & maturation of human agency. Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make & run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining opportunities to participate & organize.
More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the less people do organize which results in less opportunities still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero sum grow & developer human agency.
Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving product.
I would concur. It's my observation from 20 years of watching and participating - the volunteers are the retired, the wealthy, the underemployed, and the stay at home parent. "Normal" working people are not volunteering and handling the complexity of doing these things, they are at their work. I can only imagine that prior generations had the working parent participate through the free time freed up by the stay at home parent.
It suggests to me that there is a long running flaw. I believe Bowling Alone pegs the inflection point in the late 50s or early 60s, ('57?) and the substantative issues came about with the generation hitting the workforce in something like 1960. So the kids born in the 1935-1945 era had something in their culture materially different than prior eras that kept on spreading.
I'll add that there are some feedback loops making it worse. When these organizations aren't available kids are more dependent on their parents for something to do, which makes the already strained parents even less likely to take on volunteer work.
And then kids who grew up without mentors are less likely to try to be that for someone else.
Basically the orgs don't have enough volunteers to do important things, and the people don't volunteer because the org isn't important to them.
Whatever fills the void for people. ie: instead of bowling leagues, people watch TV or play video games. It's arguably a worse product because it doesn't fulfill the socialization or exercise needs of people, but it does fill the same block of time.
I guess it’s worse in the sense of providing health benefits, but it’s better in the sense that more people would freely choose it if given the choice.
It’s the same as junk food, people will freely choose it over healthier options.
Basically, products on the free market optimize for what people prefer to buy, and people’s preferences are shaped by evolution to a world in which physical rest and high-calorie foods were scarce. This makes us mismatched to the modern landscape.
I see all kinds of "small organizations" forming in Slack communities, subreddits, and other online spaces. Some might be described as influencer driven communities like substack. Or audiences of a specific podcast. And so on. It's almost never been easier to participate in one of these "organizations".
Even locally, where I live, the school board, city council, local advocacy groups, etc are heavily attended. We have a local group advocating for immigrant rights. Another YIMBY group. Another group that argues against the YIMBYs. PTA meetings. Another group that advocates for the homeless.
I'd say its true that many are in the "universe" of one political sphere (in my case left-leaning). But that does not mean they have been wholly subsumed by "The Left", they often disagree and fight against "Left" politicians. And often "The Left" is not a uniform thing in a city with differing interests and stakeholders.
I think this is what Tao is saying that large organizations are filling the niche that was previously served by smaller organizations. eg. Discord, Slack, and other online platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Fortnite, Roblox, etc., are being used instead of smaller forums and local communities.
But are these reflective of the communities themselves? Or the tools used to organize community? If slack disappeared tomorrow wouldn’t many just move to another tool?
I think the key difference is that online communities are "cheap"; they're easy to create and easy to destroy. Offline communities are difficult to form and as such more "sticky". A great example is ideological differences. Lefty political groups (no doubt Righty ones have this too but I'm not as familiar with them) constantly reorganize based on perceived ideological bounds. Leftist groups splinter from liberal groups, labor-forward leftist groups split from identity politic leftist groups, and on and on.
A PTA doesn't do that. The folks in the PTA all have the same shared interest in the school their kids attend. They can't just splinter off into another PTA over a perceived difference. This forces the folks on the PTA to work together and makes the organization sticky in a way an online group might not be.
If the activation energy to form and join a community needed it's also really easy to just churn from the community. Moreover when splitting is this easy it prompts the creation of hyper-specific communities which lead to things like radicalization and dehumanization of the other (look at the acrimony between leftist identity-politic progressives and center-left liberals on the internet right now for example.)
If you read between the lines of what Terence Tao is saying - which, by the way, the most charitable summary is, "Isn't Dunbar's number interesting?" - he is really saying, "It is hard to make friends as an adult." Extra so if your day to day is something esoteric like academic theoretical math (read between the lines: really boring to most people), and if you are right leaning or libertarian (read between the lines: unfriendly as a matter of policy).
He should look up Roald Coase - mid 20C who tried o answer the question of why have firms at all - big or small. The “market” ought to be able to supply services (secretary, welding etc) - but his “Theory of the firm” suggests that there are complex processes inside a firm that are pretty easy to employ someone and teach them, and pretty hard to write a contract for.
So there is a natural size of a firm that is a tug of war between savings of contracting out and the cost of contracting to the market
My still to be published magnum opus claims this is upended by software - that processes can be written and followed in software reducing the cost of hiring and changing the dynamics in favour of large companies.
But software literacy in all employees will enable smaller companies to outperform larger ones - we hope
Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to individuals and much more power to large organizations at the expense of small organizations. Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own? Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if I go into the desert or wilderness, somewhere where there are no individuals, small organizations, or large organizations as of yet; that means it is literally impossible for any of them to come in, develop it, and make it a center of power?
There's a much simpler explanation. Most entities most of the time (with such probabilities increasing with the size and age of the entity) seek to defend and expand their power. The American political tradition held that the blessings of liberty would be granted and prosperity would grow if the power of the largest such entities were kept in check; first and foremost the British Crown, second the newfound American governments (at different levels), and eventually the largest private entities as well. But America abandoned its commitment to that tradition in all but name. America is no longer committed to property rights, free markets, free expression, or free association, such protections exist today only on paper. So every entity makes locally optimal decisions, leading society into a slow collapse.
On one hand you’re saying property rights and free markets, on the other you’re saying private entities should be kept in check (by who? I assume the government). Isn’t that a contradiction?
Is it? Is it not Americas refusal to step in the reason why most of the web today is based on and designed around the things Google deems important? Doesn’t seem like a free market to me.
Who said a belief in property rights and free markets made you an anarchist? Strong governments are required to protect property rights and free markets; still, the government is supposed to have a system of checks and balances that helps to keep its power from being abused. There is a tension, but one that was supposed to be guided by the north star of protecting American values.
Sadly, in the modern American government, legislation is too slow, justice is sold, and the executive runs amok unchecked. None of them are able to effectively attack the zoning and permitting processes that prevent developers from exercising their property rights to develop additional housing; markets have been captured by oligarchs who actively undermine the competition necessary for a free market, again with complicit legislative, judicial, and executive branches.
Yes, that's exactly how power works. You can dilute power (in non-hierarchical organizations) or you can concentrate it (in rigidly hierarchical societies), but there's a finite amount of it and it's deeply coveted by all
I don't see any reference to the game being zero-sum in Tao's words.
> Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own?
I don't think Tao is saying the uncontrollable force of technological and economic advancement exhibits a genuine agency of its own. Just that our current technology and society and has expanded the role of the extremely large organization/power structures compared to other times in history. This is a bit of technological determinist argument, and of course there's many counter-arguments, but it at least has a broad base of support. And at the very least it's a little bit true; pre-agricultural the biggest human organizations were 50 person hunter-gatherer bands.
Honestly, I feel like you are filtering his words through your own worldview a bit, and his opinions might be less oppositional to your own than you might think.
Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community.
This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems .
For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore.
There's not a really good solution to this. I'm lucky enough to be in a game dev group, and I do have my bar that I go to every now and then, but aside from that I'm not really a part of any small organizations.
I haven't been to church in decades, but arguably that's why most people actually go. It's not because you imagine God is taking attendance, but it's the joy of being around other people. Historically most people stayed in the same town from cradle to grave, maybe you would move for work, or marriage, but for the most part you just stayed put.
There was an explosion of these little groups in the US after the 1st edition of Robert's Rules of Order was published, which incidentally was also heavily adopted by churches (and women's suffrage groups, who helped him with the Newly Revised.) I'd say this fulmination culminated in FDR and strong unions, aspects of both made illegal afterwards - term limits to limit democracy, striking made into a kabuki ritual by the NLRB, unions being forbidden from offering their members health insurance (they're the ones who started doing this), but employers offering insurance being subsidized. Elites were so terrified that they got close to pulling a coup and installing a dictator with the Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot).
They got everything tight again with WWII, McCarthy and the Cold War, though. Lucky, right?
I think there has been an intentional effort to isolate people from each other, and to destroy communities, and even make them look suspicious or evil in some way. Isolated, atomized people are more easily controlled. I think the encouragement of labor mobility and the trashing of small towns and small business in favor of the internet has also been an intentional effort in that regard. I also think there has been an intentional effort to consolidate media and merge it with government, which reached a frenzy during the Biden administration. Oracle's nepo baby is going to have Paramount, CBS, Tiktok, and who knows what else.
An evil antidemocratic streak has been encouraged among the "left," who now love benevolent dictators, credentialism, and decision by "consent" which immediately devolves into rule by the loudest and the whiniest cluster B personality or sociopath. Votes mean that you don't get your way a lot, but you get stuff done. If you don't get your way too much, you can just leave and join a group that works for you. Monopoly, and rule by anointment take that away from us, and that's what's happening.
It's been devastating for black Americans. Our media used to be vibrant and exciting, now it doesn't exist at all. This is the fate of all minorities under cultural consolidation. Alone, getting your directions from a screen, with the screen listening to any conversation you manage to have and reporting it to your rulers.
They'll eventually go after the churches, too, or consolidate them. I'm sorry, they'll go after the "christofascists."
This is the best thing I'll read today. Things I want to remember:
1. small organizations have been carved out by a move toward the individual and a move toward large organizations.
2. This provides some comfort in the form of cheap goods while contributing to a sense of meaninglessness or being undifferentiated.
3. Tao thinks we would benefit by seeking and participating in grassroots groups.
As a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.
Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks and cable tv.
It may be true that big organizations deliver these things, but big organizations delivered them before and it’s definitely more possible for small organizations to have big impacts now than it was before.
> Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators
Right, but you don't know these people. You're not in a community with them. Tao points to Dunbar's number as a rough boundary between small and large communities; how many of these "tiny" creators have fewer than 150 followers, and how many of them foster close social ties among those followers in ways that couldn't scale to a larger audience?
Before the era of ~2k subscriber youtube passion project channels, people were forced to find people in their area with shared interests and establish social clubs. This necessarily meant a smaller audience, but it also meant actually being friends with the people you were communicating with. Youtube is definitely a different kind of thing.
That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that the Discord- and groupchat-ification of the social media ecosystem is a backswing toward smaller groups.
I think by most objective measures the size and power of large organizations has increased since WWII. For example, the size and scope of Western governments, consolidation in many industries, the portion of the stock market that is representated by the n-biggest companies, increased income/wealth inequality. If you debating the "large organizations have grown in power relative to small ones" part of the thesis I would be interested in what exactly you think would capture that.
> I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.
There was a lot of stuff available that was advertised in magazines and stuff as well. To use one niche as an example: I'm thinking of the ads in computer magazines sometimes with hundreds of obscure items crammed into a page.
I think there’s a difference between tiny and small. There are a ton of tiny companies that essentially buy services from fortune 50s and lease from big real estate firms.
Businesses with 50-100 people are pretty rare compared to the past
Two decades ago department stores were not making products. They were and still are leasing shelf space. The only difference between them and modern amazon is that their shelves are finite, so some level of quality control was done to ensure the shelves would be stocked with things people are actually interested in and wouldn’t fall apart and jam up the returns department too badly.
There is nuance here. What you say is true but big organizations have grown as well.
I think in the big picture I would say overall it’s the big organizations that have grown dominant. The inductive reason is because it is the goal for small organizations to become big so that’s where things head logically speaking.
From an evidence based standpoint, in the end, look at YouTube and Amazon. In the end the big organizations are in control. YouTube for example can cut off their creator and it’s pretty much over for them no matter how popular they once were.
Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US.
* Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans.
* Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not contributing to growing the economy (but creating money out of thin air to flood the market with mortgages does increase housing prices...).
One way to solve this problem is to break up the big banks and incentivize small regional banks to lend to productive small businesses. Worse for the bankers but better for the economy. Incidentally, this is exactly China's strategy, but as long as big banks are paying politicians millions for luncheon talks, it's unlikely to happen here.
It’s almost certainly more profitable to make to make 1,000 $100k loans from a banks point of view as the single loan will be much riskier (effectively not benefiting from the law of large numbers). Not to say there are benefits of dealing large loans such as cross selling other financial products to the large business.
Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as a result of (broadly good) government policy. A bank wouldn’t mind making uncollateralised loans any more than a mortgage, although it might charge more interest for the risk. However the government penalises banks based on (approximately) the sum of their risk weighted assets [0]. Here mortgages, as collateralised loans, are greatly incentivised over uncollateralised loans to business.
It’s hard to say if the situation would be worse without it, it’s possible we might have more risky business loans leading to growth, but also more likely we could see a serious global financial crisis.
[0] I am simplifying here slightly but you can see how the US ranks major banks here, higher is worse from the banks point of view https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P261124.pdf
Yes, one $100M loan in isolation is risky (I was just giving an example), but my point was that a portfolio of a small number of large loans to big businesses is much more profitable than a portfolio of many more smaller loans to small businesses. Large companies are much less likely to go bankrupt and the overhead of making the loan relative to the profit from interest is much lower. 50% of small businesses go bankrupt in the first 5 years. It's simply less profitable to lend to them...
- most patterns in how civilization is arranged oscilate over time
- what's happening right now is most likely an artifact of right now (economics, power structure, culture, politics, etc).
- it seems that a shift back to smaller groups is likely in the future
- what I'm not sure about is whether the larger groups need to dissolve or stabilize in order for smaller groups to rebound
- I can't help but think that if our whole economic system reconfigures after reaching sufficient abundance, more of people's time will be spent on satisfying the soft needs met by smaller social groups, and less time will be spent on what feels meaningless
But not sure I'd pre-position small organizations as having some kind of "role" -- effect maybe?
I'm reminded of a term "the locus of relevant possibility" used to characterize where people spend their time and effort. This enables one to compare across activities (say, believers, merchants, workers, etc.), and also to propose that change happens where people put their efforts -- nowadays into larger organizations.
Small organizations became relatively less effective at producing any relevant possibilities for people due to loss of locality for people and gain of targeting by large organizations.
People now are participating fans in sports, politics, hardware, and of course work (most jobs come with a cultural context). If/when organizations get better at targeting people, they can scale.
"Local" is a function of time/space/effort cost. Often now it's hard to visit your parents, but easy to engineer complex PR with someone across the world. So physical locality is not a proxy for relevance or possibility any more.
(Too bad locality is still the basis for political representation.)
There's also a key difference in the small organization: it incentivizes people to take some responsibility for others, i.e., some organizing roles, to keep the organization afloat. A world with large effective organizations has fewer leaders -- fewer individuals effecting change.
Probably the main small organizations are personal work networks. That's what determines ability and possibility in an increasingly productive world. In many cases, it centers on a rainmaker effect: people who can find and/or make work are followed.
(I would love to see some clean way to distinguish the organizations with their own cultures vs. those that labor under rainmaker sub-cultures -- alignment vs competition, efficiency vs relevance...)
> Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer.
This premise ignores the existence of the Internet. Wherein small groups of distributed actors can combine their efforts through a nearly instantaneous communications mechanism to match that of the larger groups.
The federal government was conceived when horses were the only way to transmit large amounts of data over a great distance.
We built the replacement for large global groups but then kept the large global groups. The results were entirely predictable.
In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:
> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.
Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.
2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.
3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)
You’d get this from your local small business … and this created local small community groups.
But now between the internet and national distribution of goods/services - all those small local companies are gone (or has a much reduced role as Tao would say) … because CNN, Starbucks, Kroger, Discount Tire has replaced the need for those small local businesses.
I would argue that the role of small orgs has shrunk significantly from the perspective of the majority, but grown in importance and impact for groups outcast from that majority.
The example I like to trot out is the amalgamation of furry and queer persons into a larger unit when collaborating at scale, but otherwise fostering positive impacts in smaller groups. The response to their successes has been attacks by larger orgs who are unable to integrate or co-opt them for profit (corporations) or power motives (politicians), as well as cringe-y reputations by individuals not included in those groups (see the mocking of both subcultures and groups by eRandos). Yet despite these negative attacks, both groups continue to grow and create parallel economies, logistics networks, communities, and even limited forms of governance (cons, parades, and social forums).
So in that vein, I believe we’re simply in the midst of an era of transformation, from a broken system to something new. Smaller orgs often lead these changes until one or more balloon in size, at which point they become the larger and more dominant organizations in the new era that follows. What we’re seeing now is a classic fight between opposing political, social, and economic views, aided by technology on both sides of the battle and fundamentally reshaping how conflicts are waged.
I've found this to be a funny framing on the left because it always ignores what happens when the group stops being outcast. It's always a framing based around the current time and conveniently orients itself around the mores of the current era. Anime and otaku interest groups used to be like this in the '80s and '90s, generally ideologically aligned, creating parallel economies, in response to attack and scorn from the outside. Then it became mainstream. The stigma in liking anime went away. And with it the pressure to organize against the mainstream.
We need to think about durable small organizations, not ones that are based around the social mores of the moment. The magic of a neighborhood group is that as long as people live in an area together there will be neighbors.
FWIW opposition-based interest groups have a long history in pretty much every state we've ever had records of.
This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead.
I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).
Because we all sold out to the man. Culturally, we have chosen the lavish life promised under the man's umbrella, to doing the work of trying to go our own way. We now reap what we've sown.
> I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon
I do! Unironically: AI assisted software development – and please, we can call that anything else, we do not need to confuse it with Serious software development.
Just the amount of super simple software (Apps Script, Office Script) that baseline tech savy people can now/soon build to enhance what they think their business needs are, without the impossible constraint of having to pay a dev to find it out for/with them (because that is really not how you can find that out, while you find out everything else about your super small business) gives me a lot of hope here.
There is a chance that local models get good enough and efficient enough that we won't need the large companies, so much as a reasonable graphics card.
The centralization of power also means the leaders of those large organizations have disproportionate power. Everyone is looking for the singular strongman at the head of an organization with nation-level power to save them from current turmoil.
I recently moved away from as much big tech as possible. Canceled Spotify, won't order anything from Amazon, deleted Instagram, trying not to watch as much YouTube Videos etc. Sadly cant move away from WhatsApp and Google yet...
Instead, I am sitting here right now working on a blogging engine so I can create personal blogs to let my friends keep up to date with my shenanigans. Basically give them a chance to participate in my life without enabling them to doom scroll.
I really hope its not only me growing tired of all these addictive unhealthy apps and subscriptions that sneaked into most peoples everyday life. I can only recommend boycotting big tech with CEOs only caring about their own enrichment.
Its only the internet part of life, but this is where I spend most of my time. In real life I try to buy from the local stores as much as possible. However, I do not participate in many other smaller organizations...
I think too many people starting companies dream of getting bought rather than running a profitable business. They care far more about financial games rather than the complex details of say their products manufacturing that matter most (instead relying on a third party in china who arguably is the more important partner). I don’t know how saas relates to this problem.
This is HN though so my complaints are ironic for sure
The behavior wouldn't exist if the system didn't so heavily incentivize it. How many pizza place owners do you know with a net worth of $10,000,000 or higher, vs how many pizza place owners have ever tried?
Does this vary between political systems, and how would you test it.
I suppose analysis of existence of smaller NGOs in societies and how they are distributed, but not any real idea as to what the analysis should look like.
Both can and do exist at the same time. We don’t need to compare them using the same scales and we don’t need to sacrifice one for the other.
You can shop at Amazon but go to the local bar. Work at Google and attend church. Vote for The Party and start a garage band. Now more than ever we have the time and resources to do both.
I'm reading The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs right now. One of the main theses of the book is that small "inefficient" enterprises are actually the engines of economic grown. Large efficient organizations often lead to stagnation.
It's interesting how this intersects with Tao's point, about the social benefits.
Part of the appeal of software is that it's so low friction that you actually can be a small team and take on giants.
I love hardware but I have basically abandoned any hope of bringing products to market. Just to get compliance certifications can cost upwards of $250k for a basic product, nevermind needing to wrangle with supply lines, manufacturing, and physical distribution. Forget it. You all have seen the graveyard of Kickstarters.
At my day job though, these huge costs can be readily absorbed and amount to a small fraction of the total cost.
Pope Pius XI wrote about _subsidiarity_ as a guiding social principle:
"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them."
Tao is observing the consequences of a society that increasingly has abandoned subsidiarity as an operating principle. (I had hoped that crypto might be able to bring subsidiarity back, but so far the opposite has happened in practice.)
Certainly onto something but misses how much large organizations are actually controlled by small organizations operating in the “large complex system” environment. It is only individuals and small organizations that have agency at all. Large organizations and large complex systems are both emergent, one with hierarchical control, and one with distributed control. What has really changed is how unequal small organizations have become in their influence and power. The small cadres of people at the “top” (of organizations, media, government, tech, etc) control/influence more and more, not only at the expense of other small organizations (power is zero sum) but also at the expense of the decentralized mechanism, ie the large complex system becomes increasingly hierarchically/centrally controlled (vs distributed/decentralized control).
Monopolies are better for shareholder value. They destroy competition and the fair market, but shareholder value is all that counts nowadays. So here we are. And the worst offenders are probably in the IT industry and startup world.
>My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations
This is basically the thesis of Bertrand de Jouvenal's "On Power" (1945).
One thing I find annoying about that movie is that it doesn't mention Nisbet one of whose major ideas is that a panopoly of organizations of all shapes and sizes mediates the relationship of individuals with the state and other megaorganizations.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with the framing, despite agreeing with many of the points raised. I think it's relevant to recognize that large organizations often become large by consuming smaller organizations. And that they consume smaller organizations precisely because they offer something like purpose and meaning, and other emotional/spiritual needs. When there are no more smaller organizations to consume, the larger organizations fracture out of an absence of these necessities. The division of 'small' and 'large' organizations is maybe relevant in today's economic structure but it does not feel absolute or permanent. Anyway, this well highlights the importance of genuine connections and activities at the individual level.
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.
I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep. Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are interested in these topics, go read the scholarship!
EDIT: With a little more clarity, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts and I wish that Tao had used his visibility to point readers at these experts. You may find that it complicates things.
I don't think he was making claims in the context of a professional mathematician. I think he's a popular guy (because of his status) and he's discussing his own thoughts on modern nihilistic thinking while calling for 3rd spaces on his own social media. Seems...fine? For an individual to that, we don't have to ascribe some degree of reverence to his thoughts anymore than I would yours. That extra reverence is all user-added
I'm not saying he shouldn't share it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts.
I came here to say the same thing... he's eloquently stating something, and kinda makes sense, but I bet we have actual real data around this. It's a fun mental exercise but if you REALLY want to know, there should be good sources.
To add to this, I think a lot of people are reading this post to be some sort of reflection of economic organization when I (and others I suspect) think it's a post on social organization. There's always overlap but, as you say, it's a very dense field.
I do think there's a dearth of scholarship in the decline of social organizing in the US. There's studies that show the decline but other than Bowling Alone every subsequent book I've read or skimmed on the topic uses this decline to rail off against their boogeyman of choice, more set dressing than problem to consider.
Why is it a "bad idea" for him to post his take? I guess your concern must be that people will give it too much weight due to him being a mathematician.
This is currently #1 on HN. I suspect that a lot of people will read this and decide not to look into relevant scholarship because the text here is packaged nicely and it is presented by somebody that this community (rightly) respects very deeply.
In other contexts I've seen Tao cite scholarship outside of his field when engaging with it. I wish he'd done that here.
I don't think being an expert in one field means you need to constantly engage in an academic level of discourse. It's extremely normal for blog posts featuring vibes-based hot takes to hit #1 on HN. I think that's fine, if the take is good.
Citing scholarship would be good. Personally this has only piqued my curiosity and has probably only increased the chance I look into the relevant scholarship.
>His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.
oh man, your mind will be blown when you find out about essayists. or completely horrified, can go either way. A whole field, a respected field, completely devoted to vibes.
Empiricism is not the only right way to interrogate the universe y'know
but now it's on HN and people are discussing this idea that's been thrown out and some people agree and some don't and some bring up how it's similar to Bertrand de Jouvenal and others start thinking of de Tocqueville or Robert Putnam (I'm sure you could draw a connection to James C. Scott too) and before you know it you've got the beginnings of a bibliography right here in these threads
I do not think that it is unreasonable to say that a layperson providing a extremely high level analysis of a topic that spans entire academic fields is likely not terribly insightful.
The history of communications networks (just one of the many enormous topics he covers here) is a whole field with piles of academics publishing constantly.
It’s not “extremely high level analysis.” It’s a brief philosophical excursion, and he appropriately disclaims that his opinions aren’t rigorous or even all that informed.
The idea that Tao can’t be insightful while microblogging outside of his field of expertise is silly. We here at HN allow plenty of nonexperts a wide latitude to pretend like they know something of which they have no real knowledge. The result is, I’m sure you’ll agree, occasionally insightful.
like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources.
So this is 99% of the internet and a lot of what passes for journalism too. If you want official sources, you're limited to published papers. People typically don't have sources at hand when making opinions.
Sure, but the take is huge (it covers all dimensions of society) and is two takes in one: the claim that the role of small organizations is diminishing and the reason for this. I'd be stunned if such an effect could be meaningfully explained in so few paragraphs.
When the topics are entire subfields (the development of multinational corporations, the development of states, the development of communication networks) it makes sense to build takes off of actual research.
Although I totally agree with this analysis, I also feel optimistic that this moment in time provides the first real opportunity in over 40 years for smaller organizations to start to affect societal change again. The existing efficiencies due to reduced (human-to-human) communication and fast decision-making processes in small organizations combine very nicely with the reduction in the barrier to entry with the help of AI and the accelerated pace of change in society due to AI. I hope that once a main driver of scalability and societal change becomes access to computation, rather than human headcount, we will see a reversal of the ongoing trend.
Funny coincidence. I was just pondering last night how an extremely intelligent person would look at the problems in the world. (And whether it would be incredibly frustrating!) For those who aren't familiar, Terence Tao is considered one of the greatest living mathematicians, and arguably one of the world's most brilliant minds.
I've been thinking about this due to a renewed local interest in Bowling Alone[1].
Besides the main identified contributors of personalized media, suburbanization, real estate prices, and the increase of dual-income households, I've started to suspect that government-funding of organizations has also had a significant impact.
In the past, organizations had to raise funds from their communities. As government grants for organizations increased, the cost floor was raised on all organizations (i.e. fundraising, rents, salaries, etc.), and led to the professionalization of what was previously handled by volunteers.
In the same way that the 30-year mortgage and zero-interest-rate policy made it harder for individuals to raise the initial funds to buy a home (by enabling an increase in home prices, making it easier to buy a home if you already own one), I suspect access to government capital has made it harder for small organizations to remain small while they compete with more professional (read "larger") organizations for their members' time and money.
And this is a problem because as Terence Tao points out, "...[Small Groups] also fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have real influence on their direction."
So here we are on Mastodon. There are three columns. One is an ad for the site, one is an ad for Mastodon, and the one in the middle has some content. The article is part 1 of 5, because there's some severe limit on article length.
The rest of the article is comments in small type. There are no examples.
Is this LLM output?
And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above)
This is a real issue, but a poor posting. The classic on this is "Bowling Alone" (2000) [1] That book predates most social media. The author bemoans the decline of local organizations such as Rotary International, local Chambers of Commerce, Odd Fellows - all those organizations that have little signs on the outskirts of medium-sized towns. (In Silicon Valley, both Redwood City and Half Moon Bay have such signs.)
Here's a useful question for Americans: do you belong to any organization where the members can, by voting, fire the leadership? Small organizations used to have elected leaders. Today, they tend to be run by self-perpetuating boards. Being involved in such organizations is where people learned how to make democracy work.
When was the last time you went to a non-government meeting run by Roberts Rules of Order? Do you even know what that is, or, more important, why it is? The whole point of Roberts Rules of Order is that the group is in charge and the result is a decision to be acted upon. The Rules are intended to keep the loudest voice in the room from running over everyone else.
> My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges.
I call your attention to an earlier, 19th century German philosopher...
> The theoretical basis of alienation is that a worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of these actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour.
Families are still the most common small organization and I think they need to be considered as a distinct category rather than being grouped with other small organizations.
This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level shocks can explain an important
part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for aggregate shocks. Ex-
isting research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, argu-
ing that individual firm shocks average out in the aggregate. I show that this argument
breaks down if the distribution of firm sizes is fat-tailed, as documented empirically.
The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the United States appear to
explain about one-third of variations in output growth. This “granular” hypothesis sug-
gests new directions for macroeconomic research, in particular that macroeconomic
questions can be clarified by looking at the behavior of large firms. This paper’s ideas
and analytical results may also be useful for thinking about the fluctuations of other
economic aggregates, such as exports or the trade balance.
this seems to be oriented at a specific region of the world. my advice would be to encourage to provide information about what regions it affects would be included in the title to avoid people opening information irrelevant to them...
I don't understand mastodon or whatever the blogging software is. Why is it breaking the article into multiple pieces and showing the rest as comments, in smaller font? This is not Twitter, so why follow some archaic silly microblog format?
I stopped reading at 1/5, the text after is too small on my phone.
I run a cheap dedicated server for $25/mo and run a blog on it, and it just shows my fuxxing writings like a regular article. Surely TT can get someone to host a blog on his University's servers. Someone help this man!
glad to hear I'm not the only one, it's incredibly frustrating, especially when posts aren't big enough to fit on the screen and there is no keyboard-way to read the bottom half ◔̯◔
What happens when an expert wanders outside of their field and stumbles across insights that have been described voluminously in economic and political theory.
Could we perhaps remove "Terence Tao" from the title? It feels somewhat disingenuous to lean on their name to bolster the argument. While someone in this thread is criticized for an ad hominem attack, this risks being the opposite, a kind of pro hominem. The arguments should stand on their own merit without invoking authority in the title, no?
Here's the full article, copied, for your benefit. (I found it difficult to read because the mastodon UI forces the author to split the article into five tiny parts, so I copied it for my own benefit). I hope this is not against some HN guidelines, in which case, please feel free to downvote or delete this comment.
Terence Tao
Some loosely organized thoughts on the current Zeitgeist. They were inspired by the response to my recent meta-project mentioned in my previous post https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115254145226514817, where within 24 hours I became aware of a large number of ongoing small-scale collaborative math projects with their own modest but active community (now listed at https://mathoverflow.net/questions/500720/list-of-crowdsourc... ); but they are from the perspective of a human rather than a mathematician.
As a crude first approximation, one can think of human society as the interaction between entities at four different scales:
1. Individual humans
2. Small organized groups of humans (e.g., close or extended family; friends; local social or religious organizations; informal sports clubs; small businesses and non-profits; ad hoc collaborations on small projects; small online communities)
3. Large organized groups of humans (e.g., large companies; governments; global institutions; professional sports clubs; large political parties or movements; large social media sites)
4. Large complex systems (e.g., the global economy; the environment; the geopolitical climate; popular culture and "viral" topics; the collective state of science and technology).
An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray. Both small and large organized groups offer significant economies of scale and division of labor that provide most of the material conveniences that we take for granted in the modern world: abundant food, access to power, clean water, internet; cheap, safe and affordable long distance travel; and so forth. It is also only through such groups that one can meaningfully interact with (and even influence) the largest scale systems that humans are part of.
But the benefits and dynamics of small and large groups are quite different. Small organized groups offer some economy of scale, but - being essentially below Dunbar's number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number in size - also fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have real influence on their direction. Their dynamics can range anywhere from extremely healthy to extremely dysfunctional and toxic, or anything in between; but in the latter cases there is real possibility of individuals able to effect change in the organization (or at least to escape it and leave it to fail on its own).
Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer. They also have more significant impact on global systems than either average individuals or small organizations. But the social and emotional services they provide are significantly less satisfying and authentic. And unless an individual is extremely wealthy, well-connected, or popular, they are unlikely to have any influence on the direction of such a large organization, except possibly through small organizations acting as intermediaries. In particular, when a large organization becomes dysfunctional, it can be an extremely frustrating task to try to correct its course (and if it is extremely large, other options such as escaping it or leaving it to fail are also highly problematic).
My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an individual, a status comparable to a small or even large organization. And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).
Much of the current debate on societal issues is then framed as conflicts between large organizations (e.g., opposing political parties, or extremely powerful or wealthy individuals with a status comparable to such organizations), conflicts between large organizations and average individuals, or a yearning for a return to a more traditional era where legacy small organizations recovered their former role. While these are valid framings, I think one aspect we could highlight more is the valuable (though usually non-economic) roles played by emerging grassroots organizations, both in providing "softer" benefits to individuals (such as a sense of purpose, and belonging) and as a way to meaningfully connect with larger organizations and systems; and be more aware of what the tradeoffs are when converting such an organization to a larger one (or component of a larger organization).
Realistically, everyone online is constantly complaining about the lack of friends, the lack of community, and so on. Meanwhile, I live in a high rise in SF and have no shortage of any of these.
People borrow spoons of yogurt, tools, devices; share parenting, food, and home advice; and there's a bunch who play board games and the like.
My friends are nearby. We go to the gym together, play basketball together, go to the same kids' birthday parties.
This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.
> This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.
I don't know man, lots of big cities smell of shit so to speak. Had been in 3 big cities I had to move to a small "3rd world" beach town to stop smelling shit. Life (people) is great here.
Me I don't care about nice looking sidewalks slick looking buildings when everyone is either miserable or closed off or simply sizing you up and discarding you because they don't have nothing more to gain from you than "simply" friendship.
OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text.
It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.
You can add a ".rss" to mastodon profile account page to follow or read it through something that can process rss feeds for a "better" reading experience.
> if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode?
Yes. But note that if your account is on another instance, that wouldn’t immediately help you when you open the page; you’d still see the default theme for that instance. However, you could simply copy the link and paste it on the search box of your own instance to see the post with your chosen theme (including font and colour).
Social graphs used to be constrained by individual human capacity, roughly parametrized by Dunbar's Number.
Nowadays, a single commodity computer server can store information and relationships for every single living human.
You can have a direct economic relationship with a factory 5,000 miles away. This used to be utterly impossible, and required many degrees of primary human interaction through a chain of relatively small organizations.
> My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations [...]
The large organization are turning to rent seeking, which adversely affects the liberty of the average individual.
Claiming that it has "slightly empowered the individual" is a reflection of where you are in the current social structure. If you've fallen below the line, then you're certainly not empowered at all, and more like you're enslaved. And that line keeps on going up.
The corrosiveness of increasing housing costs and health care costs are examples of this. The fact that individual transportation is both necessary and is likely to turn into a subscription-model is likely to be another example.
Regulatory capture is also a part of this. Large organizations enjoy the complexity of government regulations (while at the same time screaming about it) because they have the resources to navigate it, and they enjoy near monopolies which allow them to pass the costs down to their customers. And we've entirely forgotten how to break up monopolies, like we did with AT&T.
Also, most organizations these days exist to capture profits for the people who lead them. And this can even be seen in left-leaning political organizations that are more concerned with fund-raising than solving the problems that they're supposedly addressing (the DNC being the most massive example of this).
All of this corrodes individual liberties of the average person. It just may not have caught up with you yet, or you may have lucked into the resources to avoid it.
This is why I'm a left-libertarian anti-capitalist. The problem that we have today is too much power in the hands of large organizations (the fact that organizations are led by individuals, however, is not a logical contradiction -- the problem to solve here isn't a simple rule to limit the ability of individuals to work together, but an optimization problem to increase or maximize individual liberty, which necessarily results in a push-pull tradeoff at the interaction between individuals and groups that they might participate in). All large organized groups (Religion, Government, Corporations, Unions) needs to be restrained in their ability to exploit individuals. What we have now is that Unions have been destroyed and Government and Religion largely do the bidding of Corporations and their billionaire owners.
(Billionaires being individuals is also not a logical contradiction -- they have so many resources they may as well just be massive organizations -- employing hundreds of people and owning all kinds of property)
What I find fascinating about these kinds of legitimate complaints and the comments here and elsewhere is nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism. What I've come to realize is Americans in particular can't define capitalism but will die on the hill of defending it. Another casualty of the Red Scare. Let me explain.
People often like farmers markets. People like locally grown produce. People like Mom and Pop stores over big chains. These things aren't strictly true but they're generally true.
Walmart is capitalism. A farmer's market is socialism. Your local Italian restaurant run by a family of immigrants is socialism. Olive Garden is capitalism.
What's the difference? Easy. The worker's relationship to the means of production. If you buy from a local grower at a farmer's market, that grower likely owns their farm and any production facilities. If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners). That money leaves your community.
This is rent-seeking behavior. And it's exactly what private equity is. What additionally makes private equity profitable are the legal enclosures PE firms create to increase profits at your expense. So they'll buy a medical practice, which was previously owned by the doctors most likely, and jack up the prices to pay off the LBO and their investors. They then use noncompetes to stop those medical practitioners in that local area or state (depdning on what they can get away with).
At this stage of capitalism, every aspect of your life is getting financialized. Housing, health care, education, vets, food, water, utilities and so on. In every one of them is rent-seeking behavior to use the legal system to create an enclosure for them to jack up prices at your expense.
Terence is a smart guy but the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once. Instead there's lip service to the notion of "economies of scale". This is in part propaganda. Why? Because if it were really true, why do all these large companies need legal protections of their business? Like states who ban municipal broadband?
Secondly, Terence notes essentially the destruction of community. This is an intentional goal of neoliberalism because any form of community or collectivism is dangerous to a neoliberal project. Also, people spending time on community is lost profit for some company who would rather you were creating shareholder value instead.
Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people. In the real world, we try to feed as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible. But sure, let's grow everything locally and let people starve, because farmers markets give us fuzzy warm feelings of a utopia that never existed. And capitalism bad.
This is why I used this example because you've just demonstrated that you don't know what socialism is. There is a myth that capitalism is "free markets". First, there's no such thing as a free market. All markets require regulation to function. Second, markets exist in every organization of the economy and existed long before capitalism existed. We have records of such from Sumeria from 4000+ years ago. In late feudalism, serfs would sell the food they grew to pay their fedual landlord, an early from of taxation.
> Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people.
Walmart is one of the most heavily subsidized businesses on Earth. Directly you have agricultural subsidies but another is food stamps paid to Walmart employees [1] as well as Medicaid. Why? Because Walmart pays below a living wage.
Also, Walmart is known for setting up in a town, selling their products at below cost to kill all local businesses and then jacking up the prices, if not leaving outright, creating a new food desert.
As for locally grown food being expensive, that's not really true once you look at the bigger picture. We've seen this pattern play out in every country the IMF and Wolrd Bank have gotten involved in. The IMF/WB place conditions such that local farmers can no longer produce crops to feed their populations. Those they have to buy from the West. Instead, farmers have to grow export crops to earn foreign currency to service debt.
In the short term this lowers food prices but forces all the farmers off their land. They then have to move to cities to seek work and/or become a drain on the state.
Inevitably, with and without manipulation, the local currency collapses and locals can no longer afford that foreign food. It's entirely predatory. A system was destroyed for foreign bankers. This is almost exactly what happened in Haiti and Somalia, to name just two examples.
Now if the community owned that supermarket, this predation just wouldn't happen. In other words, it's the worker's relationship to the means of production.
Oh boy you got me good! How could I have fallen for such a clever ruse.
This actually isn't complicated. Who owns the farm + stand? Again, maybe you meant farming collective, one last chance.
I don't really know who you think you're arguing against, but free markets can exist as a theoretical idealization, you know, like some other systems I'm guessing you're fond of.
Btw, if a farmers stand is socialism, then certainly I can say Walmart with subsidization via food stamps most definitely isn't capitalism.
Every actual fact you state I agree with. As for your theories and straw men, I'll leave to you.
Just as an exercise, try to run through the mental trajectory that got you to your rant on free markets and Sumeria and shit. What is going on there? You have some enemy in your head your imagining you're dunking on?
> nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism.
If you both believe capitalism is evil and that no one wants to talk about it (while you do), you should definitely rethink the circles you frequent. And we’re discussing a Mastodon post, of all platforms, just search for #capitalism and you’ll find no end of critiques.
In terms of collaboration and contributions, I think the contextual search offered by LLMs is significantly underrated.
Recall the second Highlander film that Connor MacLeod was given the gift of telepathic empathy. He is able to hear people's thoughts and feel what they feel. He uses that to help scientists collaborate.
We don't have telepathic empathy in reality, but image using the LLM's contextual search across research projects? We could potentially have some type of approximation.
This would then allow smaller groups to make a significant contribution to society. It would go against the idea in the Mythical Man Month of adding more people, what we see in larger orgs.
Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:
* The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.
* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.
* Banks were prohibited from entering riskier businesses, resulting in a compartmentalized system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... : Your bank did not try to sell you investments.
* Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_... .
The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.
Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.
The reason governments no longer fight huge corporations or even clear monopolies is also due to heavy globalization. If one government destroys a monopoly (a global mega-corporation) in its country, it may strengthen the monopoly (and the global mega-corporation) in another country. So the line of thinking is, "We don't like this nasty monopoly, but at least it's our monopoly."
I thought it was Super PAC that rigged American democracy. Now China is the more efficient economy since their companies are must obey the State.
China is efficient but largely because they don't actually have to obey the State. They are capitalist; they compete in the global market and follow market signals.
The CCP does put a heavy thumb on some scales, but so does every country. Perfect efficiency is not optimal when circumstances change, so states always enforce some redundancy.
There are many differences, of course, but just don't get the idea that China consists of monopolies in a command economy. They call it "capitalism with Chinese characteristics."
> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.
Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.
I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters
This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations, the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they want it to go.
I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of members of those organizations, but having a small state fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration - because for the state to be democratic and representative, it must be the most powerful organization in the area it covers, otherwise it’s just a tool for the more powerful to use.
In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
> In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations?
I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.
Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.
I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?
Like rock paper scissors, there are multiple dimensions to power and the state doesn’t always possess all of them. Media being the most obvious one (fourth estate). Federal bank another. As the split of government and parliament.
The state holds the guns, and if it doesn't hold the guns, it's not the thing I'm referring to as the state - fundamentally, the power of the state is the power of violence. Other actors may possess other types of power and other types of coercion, but those either leverage or are constrained by the state power of violence.
One could make an argument that the state does not hold a monopoly on violence. It holds a monopoly on the legitimization of violence. You're allowed to use deadly force to protect yourself from death or serious bodily harm in the majority of jurisdictions, provided it is not disproportionate. What matters is that the state declines to prosecute this, but does prosecute the person who hypothetically shoots someone on Fifth Avenue for no reason.
I am specifically not arguing the state has a monopoly on violence - as with the GP, people are imputing arguments I’m not making. It’s the fact that the state cannot have a monopoly on violence that forces the state to be powerful enough that its threat of violence outweighs others (and, bluntly, defines what the state IS, for all practical purposes: it is the entity whose threats of violence supersede all others.)
The media has died though, ‘no one’ watches the MSM under 30, everyone is online in their safe space.
I'm actually not advocating for a reduction in the size of government bodies and I'm a bit frustrated about it. I'm not advocating anything about the size of government bodies (though naturally I have my feelings.) I'm confused why people seem to be intuiting this. I'm in fact doubly frustrated because I feel that people seem to be injecting modern political points into something that I feel predates many of our modern problems.
My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that come from large organizations are a property of their size. They may differ in that they're volunteer based, profit oriented, non-profit in a capitalist system, democratically organized, or several hundred or thousand more distinctions. But I'm going to feel just as disconnected from my national government as I will from the workings of Google as a small shareholder as I will from the NBA as someone that plays pick-up on a basketball court. The experience of going to a minor league baseball game is much more personal than going to a major MLB game.
To me the important issue is: the US specifically and the Anglophone West more broadly is seeing a decrease in its small institutions. This decrease predates the modern internet and social media landscape (see Bowling Alone.) I have many, many questions around this. Why is this happening? What is its effect on society? How can we reverse this? Is this something we can reverse?
It's an important issue to me because this trajectory is very different outside of the Anglophone West. Japan for example is not seeing the same decline in its small organizations as the US is, despite population reduction. If anything Japanese life is dominated much more by huge conglomerates than US life.
Hmmm... I would argue the disengagement of citizens and the lack of participation is not strictly because of organizational size. It is the fact these organizations cannot care less about their customers, citizens, or the law. These rogue organizations are typically large.
The cause of disengagement is that organizations, large or small, are not responsive to customers needs or citizens needs. In many cases, they are actively working to the detriment of their own customers and the country at large.
This is due to regulatory capture. It is that simple.
That's fair. I think a lot of reactions, mine included, are because most of the time when someone discusses the downsides of a large state, they're advocating for a small one from a libertarian lens, so I think I imputed motives to your arguments.
You're right about this generally, though. I've got two different theories for why this is happening.
First, I think the US is "individually nomadic" in a way that many other countries and cultures are not - it is unusual, at least in the populous areas, for someone to spend their entire life in one area, and doubly so for an entire family or community to stay geographically colocated long enough to really build durable organizations. I think this changes a bit as people get older, but it's quite normal for someone to move every 5 years or so between the age of, say, 20 and 60. Arguably this is driven by economics - job availability, especially for professionals, is a big reason for these moves.
I think there's something self-reinforcing about the trend, as well - notably, as, say, the focus in politics concentrates on the federal government, it becomes harder for people to really see the benefit in local politics. The repeal of Roe v. Wade, for example, is a policy made at the national level with strong impacts locally; similarly the recent change in policy around both trans rights and immigration are hard for people to look past towards local politics (I think this is a mistake - large politics are built on small politics - but I think it's a factor).
I'd also suspect impatience plays a part - it's hard to build an organization, it's hard to negotiate status and relationships, it's hard to keep something viable, and we've got a lot of easier routes to dopamine than bothering to meet up with other people now.
> The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors
I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it is required narrowly, to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and resolve disputes.
How is an entity with a monopoly on violence not the most powerful actor in the room? And in what way is administering the peace not constraining other actors?
The state is not an entity except in a very abstract sense.
Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.
You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, business, forums, fraternities, and politics. There is hardly a part of our lives anymore that isn't intruded on by national narratives anymore. There is a very fundamental question of why that is, why it's allowed, and who benefits from it.
Federalism is having power divided, so we have gone away from federalism, not towards it. And I personally believe very strongly that it has been disastrous for our nation to do so.
Cities (and other types of local governments) never really had any legal rights on their own. They have always been creatures of the states.
I find both sides of this discourse have value: the federal loss of regulatory powers WRT corporations, and getting grassroots going again. I feel like my neighborhood streets are not places anymore, they're entirely liminal. Nothing happens in these spaces, no playing or working, except as strictly necessary.
I really like the direction this thread is going. I've wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power, the other fears government power. If you allow two assumptions:
(1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
(2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc).
... then someone who is skeptical of abuses of power should be wary of both government and corporate/wealthy power. But that seems like an untenable position — you can't check the one without muscling up the other.
Is there a way to maintain a small, decentralized, local-oriented government that can still check the power of corporate/wealthy/majoritarian impulses and provide a social safety net?
> (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
At least when applied to Government in the form of "Representative Democracies" I think this overly simplistic view is not useful to analyze what's happening in the real world.
The assumption behind electing representatives is precisely that they will advocate and advance agendas on behalf of the majority - no matter their social status. However, for this to work it requires a populace that is sufficiently informed, educated, and intelligent to understand what sensible solutions look like.
Unfortunately, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others were wrong and even after 300 years of putting young homo sapiens through 10 years of public education and teaching them rational thinking this assumption turns out to be false.
Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)
I think the roadmap to the anarchist view is simple enough in theory - break up large companies, redistribute large piles of wealth, establish laws enforcing size limits, and, following that, scale government back and delegate decision-making to the affected individuals wherever practical. Ignoring the practical questions of how one breaks up, say, Amazon, the state has the guns, so if the state says Bezos loses his yacht, it is so.
The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.
This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.
I also don't know much about anarchist philosophy; would love some insight here if anyone can speak to that.
But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.
UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)
Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason, and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a book about it.)
Oh, hey, the first text I picked from the Anarchist Library answers the question in my previous comment! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-stefanescu-rela...
> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.
I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.
I'd agree that too much concentration of power in any single organization, public or private, without any checks or balances, is a bad idea. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Historically, the executive branch of the US federal government has been kept more or less in check by (a) the legislative and judicial branches, and (b) voters.
> Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization
True, though (at least in principle) a democratic government is a very special organization because it (again, in principle) exists only because it's the people's will.
I think when we think about our social fabric and the empowerment that individuals feel, that this is more of a theoretical rather than practical argument. All of the disenfranchisement, the feeling that your individual participation doesn't matter, the inability to steer the goals of the organization around your individual opinions, these are all just as present in a large state.
Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people's will but not from your will, and that is the role of the small community organization.
- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b?
- Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?
- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?
There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades later. The same could be said for all the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few years.
Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part.
All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society.
We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.
> but who decides how those resources are deployed
The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects
And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have all money? Well because they are the best ones at allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at allocating resources? Because they have all the money.
Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field.
Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector.
In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
The current system rather heavily optimizes the ability to make resources into more resources for the shareholders. See e.g. Uber.
> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.
The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity.
> And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?
Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)
Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.
> Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent.
Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point
> Private companies are accountable to no one
clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).
Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.
It seems to me none of this is as clear cut as it seems. Government entities may hold shares in private companies, companies may act on voter's demands by accepting government grants. For some companies, government contracts are actually a main revenue stream - shareholders can jump up and down, if their supporters are voted out they will falter.
Corporations are still subject to law and ultimately under the control of the government. The current set of rules just gives them a fair amount of freedom to operate.
This only makes sense in a spherical-cow-in-vacuum world where government and business are somehow barred from communicating with one another. In reality, the "current set of rules" in many countries is a result of companies relentlessly trying to and succeeding in finding ways of influencing government. Political advertisements, campaign funding, lobbying, corruption, underhanded favoritism, countless other methods that are an amazing RoI for any business large enough to engage in it. Large enough corporations are resembling governments more and more in terms of value and power, and they use all of that power to endlessly try to bend the rest of society into serving their profit motive.
>For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.
Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the number of voters is very high.
Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards" can use their money to gain air time, etc.
Lizards must not obstructed in any way! Consume! Obey!
1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't have to be
2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote' is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person" and "your value and voting power is directly tied to your net worth" are in any way comparable. You and I have zero effective power over them, and always will.
> The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money.
It is not, eg. Zuck didn't control Facebook because he was a priori rich, he became rich because he controlled Facebook in a successful way. He gained those shares and that control with his skill and labor (and maybe one symbolic dollar or something).
No, a corp is only accountable to their board and the LARGEST shareholder. A single person can control an otherwise publicly traded company. Zuckerberg, for example. And not everyone can afford to spend their earnings owning companies. So what you get with a democracy is that power is spread out by default rather than concentrated in a single element. Default enfranchisement rather than the polar opposite. One at least nods politely at the idea of upward social mobility in passing while the other eschews all pretense as to the status of its party invitation.
The unit of power in stock corporations is dollars, while in democracies it is personhood. In the former, one person can acquire multiple units, while in the latter they cannot. There is an obvious difference.
> while in democracies it is personhood
Suffrage*. Not personhood.
Corporations only have any accountability in so far as the law of the nation-state they're incorporated in grants it.
Corporations only exist as a legal construct of other entities. Absent government, they wouldn't be corporations since there'd be no law to create them.
The problem is, when the majority is held by pension funds, ETFs and Blackrock... there isn't much governance in practice, particularly from the low-fee purely passive ETFs. And since government run pension schemes are on their way to the gutter in favor of stonk market private pensions, the share of such dumb passive capital will only grow.
If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used. Perhaps in the 21st century that has changed, but for me that falls under the "extraordinary claims" category with the corresponding evidence requirements.
The structure of giant corporations today is like those centralized societies that were so inefficient in your example. The mandates to put AI in everything are one example of out of touch leadership throwing money and effort blindly towards things of dubious value. The sycophantic managers, afraid that they will be eliminated for insufficient fervor for the board’s latest fascination, will seize upon anything to prove themselves loyal and useful to those above them.
By moving the locus of control, whether it be considered the ceo or shareholders, so far from the actual business and implementing mandates based on whatever the current fancy is and meaningless targets of growth on such a giant scale you get the same sort of excesses.
The current system is marked by irrationality and uninformed and ill considered decision making. With smaller organizations and actual business competition they would be held to account by their competitors or just by running out of money before something catastrophic for the greater economy happened.
This is an excellent point. Thank you for posting it.
Large monopolistic mega-corporations do tend to have the same issues that one would see in the old 20th century planned economies like the Soviet Union.
Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).
It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.
That is an incredibly broad claim. There are a ton of examples of failed/failing states that basically have no government control over anything.
> If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used.
In some metrics (such as GDP), yes. And in other metrics (such as wealth inequality and health care), the answer is less clear-cut.
The Soviet bloc did not have better healthcare than the West lol. Soviet life expectancy never crossed above 70 years.
The West encompasses a wide gradient of private vs. state control over resources, and there are states which aren't typically considered Soviet or Western (e.g. Nordic states.)
I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)
On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
> I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)
You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.
You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
> You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote.
You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.
> You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether you have citizenship or not.
> Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.
Historically, there did exist experiments that not each person has the same voting power (for example the Prussian "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" [three-class franchise]):
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreiklassenwahlrecht
Depending on the amount of taxes you paid, you were assigned to one of three classes. The sizes of each of these classes were chosen so that each class paid 1/3 of the whole tax volume. The votes in each class elected representants for this class.
The idea is obvious: those who pay a lot more taxes should have more influence.
Thus: each citizen has the same voting power is just the "currently fashionable" implementation of democracy.
Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.
You also have a "vote" as a consumer. The market could be much more responsive than a "democratic" system.
For instance, say you think pesticides are a bad thing. You can get 49% of the population to vote to the ban them and what do you accomplish? Nothing
No wonder people look at politics with despair.
If you can get 5% of the population to eat organic food on the other hand, you've reduced pesticide use by 5%. You create trade associations, the idea of organic food spreads more widely and maybe someday you get enough support that you can change the law.
That's hope.
If you have money. And the more you have the more vote matters both in practice and within the rules of the system.
I think California's system is a mess. It's been overrun with private interests bankrolling ballot initiatives and steamrolling them through. Add to that the Government itself sponsoring ballet initiatives that sale bonds to finance things that people don't understand really loans and it turns into a mess. I do like the ability to remove politicians from office via ballot though.
One idea that I think is reasonable is to use some kind of actual meetings.
Dividing people into groups of 50 or 100. Initiatives are voted on in these groups, if they are passed they go to the next level, 1000 people.
Sort of like that idea in the Yes, Minister episode about 'genuinely democratic local government'. The idea here is the tree structure is to prevent people to push initiatives other than as individuals.
Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan Project) had very significant private sector participants.
I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal).
The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.
Yes of course
"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society."
Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.
"We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc."
Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
> Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.
The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally.
> Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.
Shinkansen.
Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
> The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated
You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events.
Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries.
Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.
Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money.
In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project
You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding.
I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when NASA took us to the moon?
Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC eradicated malaria from the United States?
Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build our basic social safety nets?
Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large groups: business, government, and (organized) religion. Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch.
> Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when NASA took us to the moon?
The cold war. Putting a man on the moon was meant to demonstrate how easily we could put a nuke on Moscow.
Self driving cars are also clearly a demonstration of military might.
Autonomous ground vehicles were funded by the DARPA grand challenge, and the motivation was explicitly military[1]
[1] Rational subsection of the Background section (section I) in this pdf: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
The whole thing is worth a read too, it explains all the other military use tech that will arise from the self driving car ecosystem, further justifying the investment.
> war, moon
You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.
> Malaria
Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.
> Social safety nets
Not a science breakthrough
> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch
I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.
Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.
This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.
Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.
That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.
[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!
[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.
Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.
automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs.
the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of success appearing in 2005:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo
That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.
Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
> I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system
See how the DoD funds the development of the multitude of platforms on it depends on (land, air, sea or space), for decades at a time.
> for the greater good of all or advancement of society
I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-connected players.
When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent.
(NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)
It's not clear to me that anything of value would have been lost in this counterfactual world.
Great response. Yes, in some cases concentration may be desirable.
However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention:
* Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
* TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory?
* 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.
"Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?" Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger scale.
As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as a non-profit organization.
The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given names like "Moore's Law." People like Hans Moravec predicted way back in the 1980's that the cost of compute would continue to decline and become cheap enough for AGI by the 2020's or 2030's. That's half a century ago!
Fair point, the first few gens weren't that expensive. And like I said I'm certain the scaling would've been discovered soon with some time lag. But the transformer paper was 2017, right? Just from a benefit -to- society perspective, assuming LLMs are a net positive in terms of productivity, perhaps reducing time to drug approval or improving government efficiency (1).. Isn't getting there just one year earlier worth it, if the gains really are that big? We could be talking lives saved via faster approvals or more efficient spending. My point is that a private company made it happen faster, as evidenced by them doing it first. A good thing sooner is valuable.
(1) I'm convinced at the very least LLMs can feasibly speed up paperwork.
About TSMC, maybe not.
The reason the world is so dependent on a single company is because it costs country-breaking amounts of money to keep-up with the semiconductor manufacturing technology. You can only have cheap semiconductors if there are very few entites building them.
You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a profound good impact on the population at large and it's not clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is excited for next product is not a good reason for centraliZation.
Have you ridden in a Waymo? I'd sell my car if/when they become ubiquitous enough.
I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit.
The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.
Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.
Not a single one of those projects is preferable to a more equitable society. Maybe self driving, yes, but the impact of AI is highly dubious and uncertain at this point in time.
Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."
>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
Is it even possible en masse in a market where you are competing against double income no kids kind households?
What resources are we talking about competing against? What’s the measuring stick?
>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
That job market only existed in a handful of countries for a ~40 year period on all of human history.
Saying that should be the norm ignores that historically it wasn't and it may very well be that it isn't a sustainable basis for a society.
Following your argument we should just outright reject progress because, for the most part, humanity has been really really shitty. Also, how much thought did you put into it before writing that this type of society isn't sustainable? Can't the things that happened since (mostly, a massive wealth consolidation) be undone? Why?
Before WWII, middle-class married women were strongly discouraged from working for pay outside the home. If their husbands could provide, "respectable" women were expected to stay home as homemakers.
>middle-class
right here is the problem
One could argue the opposite: that the mass entry of women into the paid workforce expanded the labor supply, contributing to wage stagnation and, eventually, the erosion of the middle class. But that wasn’t the only cause. Globalization, declining unions, automation, and regressive taxes were also factors.
Good point.
Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.
And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.
Surely you're not suggesting...
> And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.
> Surely you're not suggesting...
Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is plausible to happen.
Reverting to the norm means most of us die as infants and toddlers or in childbirth, while a wealthy handful live lives of immense privilege.
I'll take the parent commenter's option, thanks.
They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)
I think most people are actually okay if everyone agrees to accept a lower standard of living.
What's not okay is that only they have to accept the short end of the stick and the others can profit from that.
Why would a household with two working parents ever accept a similar living standard as that with one working parent?
People want to have their cake and eat it, too. And that obviously doesn't work.
They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter
You'd be a useful guy to have around on my trad farm. A strawman for every field
They also don't value "women's work" at all even though the women were working hard while watching those kids.
A secure lifestyle and a good lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. We have the tech to enable something which at least somewhat approximates, and even if we didn’t, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the trillions of dollars spent on wasteful garbage like surveillance, ads, engagement-farming, etc were instead redirected towards research and development of technology which enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle.
Define secure and good.
What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house, I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice", but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both parents working a full time job to get more luxury.
I think the problem is that you are proposing a false dichotomy: that if they do not want one consequence of the current system, they should eschew the entire system.
But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.
Except this is impossible:
>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids
If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom.
Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.
No? An easy comparison would be a world where the both partners work 20hrs/wk each, for a total of 40hrs, with the rest devoted towards, eg, childcare.
That addresses the reason for working (eg, pursuit of interests outside family-raising), while also eschewing the need for full time childcare.
You're basically talking about the shift system. A works for 20hrs a week, B works for 20hrs a week. A spends more time with spouse(A), who does the same at their workplace, and B spends more time with spouse(B), who does the same at their workplace. Sounds great.
But, it falls apart to the same logic GP proposed, that the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones. Households where people both work 40hrs = 80hrs will be ahead of those that work only 40hrs total. So everyone will descend to working 80hrs too.
Of course, taking mine and GPs logic to it's conclusion is silly - people will have a point where they stop comparing with others and tradeoff less money for less hours. But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high! And it only happens at an already very high salary. A 40hrs/week SWE might not go to a high finance 70hrs/week job, because they're already comfortably paid. However these two are top 1% jobs in the world, and the quality of life is probably not too different. But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung, which entails a much better quality of life (as a % increase)
> But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high!
Is it? 40hrs is quite low by historical standards. 100 hours per week was the norm in the pre-industrial era, and 60+ hours per week was still typical during the Industrial Revolution.
Labour advocacy groups were promoting 40hrs, much like the four day workweek is today, for a long time, but 40hrs didn't actually became the norm until the Great Depression, where capping hours was a tool used to try and spread the work out amongst more workers to try and resolve the high unemployment problem.
> But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung
While that certainly happens, it seems most people in the lower rungs are quite content to work 40 hours per week, even though working more would put them in a much better position. I dare say you even alluded to that when you chose 40 hours in your example.
It is not like 40hrs is the perfect tradeoff or something. As mentioned before, labour advocacy groups have already decided that 32hrs is even better. I expect many people end up working 40 hours just because "that's what you do" and never give it another thought.
> the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones.
If we assume both participants work 40 hours per week then it is true that the same household would have less income if one party stopped accruing an income and all else remained equal. But that doesn't necessarily hold true once you start playing with other variables. A higher income party, for example, may enable the household to have a higher income if they work 60 hours per week while the other party takes care of other life responsibilities to enable those longer hours.
A dual income household isn't necessarily the most fruitful option. In fact, marriage — which, while declining, is still the case in most non-single households — assumes that a single income is the ideal option. It seems that "that's what you do" without any further thought is still the primary driving force.
Lower rungs are definitely not content working 40 hours a week. They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.
I support the labour laws limiting an employer to 40hrs a week of a man's labour. This is important for people who really just want some employment and don't want to die. But the vast majority of people work two such jobs and try to get into the higher rungs of the financial ladder. Heck, even SDE3s in software companies work off-hours to become IC's and such, and I'm sure it's similar once you go down the executive route.
> "That's what you do"
That is definitely true, a lot of social fabric erodes when providing labour is turned into a psychotic thing. I'm not entirely convinced the labour laws we have today are enough to prevent this. My opinion is that we need to also have policies on the other side of the coin - i.e encourage family/extended family/communal/what have you living. Not "one child policy" level forced policies, but instead in the form of a good complement to strong labour laws.
> They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.
It does happen, as recognized before, but what suggests this is any kind of norm?
1. The median worker in the USA doesn't even make it to 40 hours of work in a week, only 34. What you say certainly doesn't hold true when dividing the latter in half.
2. Only 21% of the workforce normally puts in more than 40 hours per week. That could represent the lowest rungs, I suppose, but...
3. The data also suggests that those working long hours are more likely to be highly educated, high-wage, salaried, and older men. Does that really fit the profile of someone in the lower runs? Stereotypically, that is who most of us imagine is in the highest rung.
4. The upward mobility of which you speak is not typical. Most people will either stay on the same rung or find themselves heading lower.
First of all, I don't know where this specific example is coming from or how it relates to what I said exactly.
Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning families" versus "single-earning families" look kind of inconsequential.
The whole thread is about people who want to have a single wage earner lifestyle. That is where this all comes from, and how it relates. You too can live a single wage earner lifestyle in the US, but it will mean significant compromises to your standard of living.
Thanks, I missed the second part of this sentence:
> Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
I stand by what I wrote above. I agree with you that it is possible today at a reduced QoL and I also would like to see society distribute wealth more equitably, which might also achieve the goal at a higher QoL.
It’s naive either in the way you put it or at the very least in your eyes. There is a lot to be said about the narcissism of innovators radically rethinking anything and everything traditional just because we think we can do better by our current metrics.
If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have lost capacity for independent critical thought? Is that really the world you want to create?
It’s not just a “ChatGPT will replace you”. Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.
Our humanity is at stake no matter how we evolve this tech, because the tech evolves our humanity. It's not a one-way street. Culture, not genetics, is the dominant human evolutionary force today:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article-abstract...
Exactly — hence the need to deliberately evolve it.
Have you never read any of the many Frankenstein myths? What makes you think we can "evolve" a superintelligence and then keep it bottled up?
> Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.
Username checks out.
Reading your first three bullet points I thought you were dreaming about how much better the world could have been.
But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs.
If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).
Sure, as long as they're not too big to fail. Those big banks should've gone bankrupt in 2008. They didn't because the taxpayer backstopped it.
That is precisely the moral hazard we're now living with. Become so big that you can't fail and can't be disciplined.
I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it meant my contributions to society were more meaningful. Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is what's causing the overall decline in health that we're seeing in developed nations.
For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.
That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant drawback.
Probably the best statement for "biggering up", at least in the case of Africa, was made in a recent editorial in The Economist
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/africa-h...
https://archive.ph/j5CJY
I'm really not sure the answer to any of these is "we would be worse off", let alone would someone be able to raise the funds.
Did we have more telecom innovation when Bell was huge or after that?
Bell labs also sat on a lot of tech that didn't align w/ their business
I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here.
It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.
It is also very hard to separate “socialist planning system” from “Russian Empire”. It isn’t like things were going swimmingly in Tsarist Russia and then they reentered a golden age in the 90s.
If anything this socialist system brought them to the height of their power and influence.
Then at worst progress on those would be slower.
At best we would have less monopolistic global powers trying to rent us everyone of our freedoms
> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?
TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer.
Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower.
Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?
All those things could still happen if private enterprises pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt less.
>- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?
Would anyone even be calling for those, if their core purpose wasn't to facilitate the concentration of capital?
I'm not convinced LLMs are a net positive. They've been compared to railroads. Show me the new commerce brought about by LLM trains.
All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority.
We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation.
Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.
> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.
They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can expect little support from the government (and surely no big subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many small business owners are extremely tough since larger stores were allowed to stay open while the small businesses were not.
What subsidies is Stargate project getting from US government?
I remembered incorrectly. They are getting "emergency declarations" support:
> Donald Trump called it "the largest AI infrastructure project in history", and he indicated that he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project's development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
So it might not be strictly a subsidy, but it surely is taxpayer-support.
This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.
Agreed, and that is why big countries should also be broken up. No more countries over 50m citizens. Many people in Europe don’t want the EU, but there’s really no alternative when competing with large countries like China and US.
> Many people in Europe don't want the EU
Those things Americans say about the rest of the world...
Nothing of what you quoted is incorrect.
> Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.
In what way is china "bullying" europe. It's more like the EU trying to bully china on the US's behalf and failing miserably.
> * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.
It's worth noting that Bell's size and reach allowed it to create Bell Labs, and the subsequent breakup led to their eventual demise.
It's the natural result of tech gaining value, and a lot of it staying closed source: Once you are scaling, scaling very high isn't that difficult once you have the best offering, and when you are big you can do optimizations that would be seen as wasteful at a small scale. streaming service that has wide reach isn't that different when it is dealing with 10 million or 100 million subscribers, but dedicating a guy for 3 months to save 2% of your costs through some arcane fiddling is much more profitable when you have 100 million, and then your costs per subscriber can be lower.
We also have plenty of problems that are natural monopolies. Take, for instance, credit card fraud detection. High level detection involves giving a risk score to a transaction. I sure can give a better fraud score if I see almost every transaction this card makes, and I have a very high percentage of visibility of all transactions in the world, than if I had to do the calculation by just knowing what, say, my boardgaming website has seen. The smaller contender has to be so much better algorithmically to be able to compete with a massive advantage in data quantity and quality.
And that's the real problem we have with monopolies right now: The bigger company often doesn't have a huge advantage because they are making extra shady deals, or they have to compete less, but because being bigger makes them more efficient in some ways that are completely above board.
This is the classic tradeoff. (it's similar to the bias variance tradeoff, or fox and hedgehog analogy)
Monolithic systems are scalable and efficient when well-governed, but brittle under errors or bad leadership (e.g. China closing its ports in the 14th century had centuries-long repercussions).
Distributed systems are less efficient but more resilient to errors and poor governance.
It’s not always one or the other though. American founding fathers found a right set of tradeoffs in designing checks and balances (like separation of powers) and federalism structures that harden the system against bad governance (though this is under strain today).
When you put it that way, the US constitution itself is about limiting the power of the federal government against the states (and individuals, in the bill of rights)
Nevertheless, state-level power, for a state government or business, is still far above the kind of sub-Dunbar number (~120 people) organisations that Tao is talking about, where everyone might know each other and the network can be organised by reputation and trust rather than through state-level laws or contracts (and the attendant forms of impersonal bureaucratic enforcement that come with those).
Edit: I don't mean to object to the general theme of your comment which is that power has become increasingly concentrated and unchecked, just to point out that even if those limitations that you mention had been retained it would still represent a society where the role of immediate trust-based relationships is diminished or eroded relative to the previous situation where these were the primary aspects of people's livelihoods and security
I would point out that, regardless of the US federal government's stance on monopolies, any legislation or civil action toward that end would be far less applicable today, because of globalization.
If your country prevents any domestic tech companies from becoming trillion-dollar behemoths, but such things are still permitted in at least one other country with a similarly-sized economy to yours, then that just means that all your smaller domestic tech companies are going to be outcompeted by the foreign trillion-dollar behemoth selling into your domestic market.
I dunno. It's not at all clear what "small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly" even means, over what time, and in what society. The post itself, as a piece of thinking, seems, charitably, a vague sentiment that might later turn into something that could be analyzed.
In general terms, in the US, in living memory, I'm not sure that large organizations occupy more space in people's day to day lives than smaller ones.
In the US, since say the 1990s, the percentage of people, say, working in small businesses are roughly the same. The number of local non-profits has exploded since over that time. The trend towards media consolidation that had occurred over the prior century would begin to be unwound, and tech consolidation would only partially reverse this. We have far more access to diverse points of view than most people did for most of the 20th century.
If there is there is shift, I suspect, it's not about where people work or interact, it seems mostly that businesses, small and large, feel free to dominate people, in a way that was considered in bad form prior to Reagan/Thatcher and the fall of communism as an alternative to the West that would be appealing to post-colonial societies.
But that's just a notion as vague as the original post.
Bell really really wanted this: It also proposed that it be freed from a 1956 antitrust consent decree, then administered by Judge Vincent P. Biunno in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, that barred it from participating in the general sale of computers
> The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network
For the record, this system where AT&T was broken up between long distance and regional local companies (called the Regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs) was a terrible solution to anticompetitive behavior and is one of many examples (some of which you also quote) about how the US is terrible at breaking up monopolies.
The problem is the RBOCs simply became regional monopolies and regional monopolies aren't really any better than national monopolies. By the 90s the RBOCs could become long distance providers by meeting certain criteria and of course the whole system was gamed.
What needed to happen is the exact same thing that needs to happen with national ISPs today: municipalities need to own, maintain and build last-mile infrastructure.
Notably all of these choices and policies didn’t fall from the trees, but were come to after seeing what happened in their absence.
Naive techies like this don’t realize crypto is even more centralized
Better yet, the 7-7-7 rule.
> The FCC's 7-7-7 rule was a 1953 regulation that limited a single entity from owning no more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations nationwide to promote broadcast diversity. This rule was a response to concerns about media consolidation and was eventually eased, then replaced by the 12-12-12 rule in 1984 and later abolished by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
If you're wondering how we got to the universe where every piece of mass media that's blasted at you is owned by <5 entities, look no further.
So much for diversity of speech or a marketplace of opinions. Speech is actively being funneled into a single box, and the box is owned and operated by a monoculture of media billionaires.
This forum in particular wails and gnashes its teeth anytime that big tech exercises control over publishing, while turning a blind eye to this rot in trad-media - which is a thousand times worse.
If I were made king for a day, the first thing I'd do would be to break up these conglomerates. You'd either be allowed to be a media conglomerate with the GDP of a small country and a reach of a hundred million people running an agnostic platform, or you're allowed to exercise editorial control. Pick one, I don't care which, but you have to pick one.
(That this isn't a popular position among people seeking to maximize speech and diversity of ideas is perhaps revealing of their real values - the promotion of the monoculture pushed by trad-media.)
This. I mean thats just one sector, but its spread across the whole: the whole of modern economic theory is one of competition that causes efficient markets. But when you look into the theory even a little bit, you realise it needs hundreds, even thousands of market players to reach an equilibrium thats worthwhile, and the existence of a large player even at like 10% market size can distort everything beyond usefulness. We're so far removed from that ideal in pretty much every dang sector that anyone preaching or believing in efficient markets is just foolish.
The Bell breakup was stupid. If you have some competing companies, but they meet up, and agree to divide the country into regions, and then choose to not compete with each other, that's not at all free market capitalism. Capitalism requires competition in the market in order for market forces to actually work! Cars is another example where, in the modern framing, the dealership model is bullshit and manufacturers should be able to sell direct to consumers. And it does make a certain amount of sense. But if the argument is for smaller organizations, the fact is that local dealerships are smaller than, say, Ford, and so if the argument is that the dealership model sucks because the car dealerships have too much power and are abusing it, taking power away from them and ceeding it to an even bigger organization doesn't make a lick of sense.
Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of themselves.
I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering and shrinking away.
Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations becoming dysfunctional, but not dying because they have sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their replacements become large organizations.
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born
Historically at least I think we can examples of the opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less around social activities and more around aiding business and society.
Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread the risk around and help out each other.
For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks home which is associated with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have been branches all across Canada.
After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after that when legalized again became much less relevant because its need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian dance.
> Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year
The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible. The more I get in contact with everything American, the more left I lean.
The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes.
The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession").
One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.
There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!
There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do you want to win, or do you want the game to continue? Because sometimes you can't have both."
I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the glory days of the 50s-70s, people wanted the game to continue - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then starting in the 80s, people gradually started sacrificing the game for the win, doing things that they knew would eventually lead to the collapse of everything so that they could come out on top. This is corrosive. Once it starts becoming apparent, everybody will start sacrificing the system as a whole for their own personal gain, because the system is dead anyway.
I think we're right on the brink of everyone realizing that the system is now dead, and bad things will likely come of it.
This is exactly the main lesson of Finite and Infinite Games. There are finite games, in which the goal is to win, and there are infinite games, in which the goal is to continue playing the game. Using this framing, one can account for quite a large amount of long-term, large-scale problems as breakdowns wherein some participants choose to play formerly infinite games as finite ones, thus crushing their competition but destroying the game itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
I like this framing. There is an analogy with industrialization and pollution, in that the side-effects of industrial production can be safely ignored, unless those effects are cumulative. Social norms function in the same way. There is little harm in a professor kindly giving a passing grade to one undeserving student; when this becomes common, the cumulative effect undermines the value of a college education itself.
Perhaps a more mathematical framing looks to game theory, a la John Nash. In the prisoner's dilemma two equilibrium exist, the "good one" where the prisoners cooperate, and the "bad one" where they both defect. Good and bad is determined by summing the outcome value for both prisoners. Social norms help stay in the "good" equilibrium despite the occasional defection. Once the defectors learn how personally profitable it is to defect, it becomes common practice, the norm changes, and the society as a whole has switched from one equilibrium to the other, and society is, overall, much worse off. The path from good to bad equilibrium is incremental, cumulative, just like pollution. It's less clear to me what the incremental, cumulative path is going the opposite direction.
Game theory is exactly it. A bunch of simulations have shown that in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat, sometimes adding forgiveness. The fact that you will play again incentivizes players to cooperate. But as soon as the game becomes finite (i.e. you can see the end in sight), the optimal strategy becomes "defect", because your opponent also has the same incentives and whoever defects first gets the payoff.
Incidentally this also points to the path from a bad to good equilibrium. You have to throw away the big system and start with a system small enough that the participants will interact repeatedly. This rebuilds trust. Then you have to defend that system from outside influences, or at least carefully control them so they play by the same rules as existing participants. The act of defending your local community also builds trust - arguably [1] post-WW2 U.S. social cohesion was actually generated by the experience of defeating the Axis powers and then getting enmeshed in the Cold War. Finally you can gradually expand the system through carefully controlled immigration and naturalization.
Unfortunately, this probably means that the Internet, globalization, and likely large states like the US/China/Russia are all toast. And as Terence Tao's post here points out, large organizations are usually more efficient than small organizations. That means that as large organizations have outcompeted small organizations, the transition as those large organizations themselves become dysfunctional and disintegrate is going to be wrenching. We're going to lose access to several material conveniences that we take for granted.
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/re.html
It's interesting to wonder about why norms degrade at scale. Intuition tells me it's because stink-eye doesn't scale. Defectors in a small org pay a price external to the game, aka "reputational damage". But members of large organizations rarely suffer this, because they are strangers, and because "they are just doing their job". A half-formed thought, but perhaps it's half-useful.
When you are the 900 pound gorilla, "reputational damage" is no longer an effective check against bad behavior. This is the exact motivation for the trust-busting movement in the early 20th century. Now the US has regressed and we are in another gilded age.
Were you born pre-industrial revolution?
> Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer... The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift...
I don't know, something something, Baumol's cost disease. You, like the other person who is vamping, aren't talking about stuff grounded in hard data.
But I'll meet you at your level:
(1) Do you think serving cheaper customers is easier or harder?
It's harder. Poorer people will break more things, ask for more stuff, require more intensive one-on-one service, as a matter of objective reality. I'm not saying this is good or bad, or that people don't deserve dignity and decency, but you are reaching for this complex, Americana cultural vibe, and you know, I can reach for a vibe too, "Man, it sucks to deal with people who are broke." Do you see?
(2) What would be the price of a life saving vaccine if people would "charge what it's worth"? What about "what they could get"?
Okay. So you got it 200% wrong. We charge what we could get for life saving vaccines, and for that matter most life saving generics, which is very close to $0, even though people would probably pay a ton of money for it.
Its this, "I wanna drag every grievance into every conversation" that is the problem, it's vibes that are the problem.
I associate the Hacker News forum with authentic, reasoned debate and sharing of personal experience and perspective. Your comment wants to engage in a kind of rhetorical pugilism that is very common in other forums, but is uncommon here. It is a style I personally dislike and find counter-productive for every topic, inflaming emotions and driving division rather than synthesizing a variety of perspectives into an interesting whole.
Speaking of vibe checks, the vibes in this post are worse than what you've replied to. "something something", "I'll meet you at your level", "Do you see?", "you got it 200% wrong.", are all very dismissive and hostile.
There are better ways to get your message across.
I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)
Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.
I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people.
Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area.
Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area.
YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it.
Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year.
I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.
The neat thing is that it it doesn't actually take much money to start up a new small organization if you want to. You can accomplish a remarkable amount with relatively little money.
Some friends and I just started a tool library in Central Oregon: https://cotool.org/
There some quite generous community donations of tools (not money) to get started. Startup costs were small, and now a couple weeks after opening we have dozens of members.
It scales nicely because we can just buy more or less new tools. It's very impactful to some people, and once started there's very little recurring expenses.
I guess the biggest one is "church". But to get into that requires accepting (or pretending to accept, I suppose) the horizontal memetic transfer of the specific denomination.
I go to church every Sunday despite having zero belief in Jesus or God as they describe him. The sermons are socially relevant and thought-provoking, the congregation is caring and fun with cool social events, and the good that they're doing in our community is inspiring.
I encourage HNers to try it! Just mentally replace "God" with "Nature" and "Jesus" with "Me" in every line and you have a good framework for self-reflection and appreciation of the natural world.
> Freemasons: what do they even do? ... Not obviously recruiting in my area.
I'm not a mason, but their motto is "to be one, ask one". You won't see them recruiting, you have to inquire.
People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces?
One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!
> And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.
Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local support groups when times get tough.
Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our current social order which is tearing it apart.
>> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good
By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good.
From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation in local community.
Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?
Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards. I think technology has reduced the need for economic/political actors to organize via hyper-local blocks.
There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.
I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.
I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone" we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per day per capita global media consumption has something to do with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures.
I think something like only turning on the internet and TV for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just encouraging better engagement outside of those times, but also causing you to demand better of the hour you do get, avoiding mindless slop.
Have you ever taken a proper break from all media? Like tv, internet, phones, heck even books. You find yourself suddenly with amazing amounts of time. Some people describe being catastrophically bored but for me I just find that all those little tasks that rack up that seem like too much effort suddenly become approachable and you can check off like 6 and still have time for relaxing in some grass and just kinda chatting with passers by. I really think its that simple.
I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed.
What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore.
We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000.
MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.
I mostly agree, but is it cyclical? There doesn't seem to be any force pushing back against this social atomization.
Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which is about how the memetics of human connection and organization replicate (or not).
I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of organizational experience (power instead trickling top down from often far off far above offices), weakening organizational muscle & maturation of human agency. Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make & run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining opportunities to participate & organize.
More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the less people do organize which results in less opportunities still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero sum grow & developer human agency.
Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving product.
I would concur. It's my observation from 20 years of watching and participating - the volunteers are the retired, the wealthy, the underemployed, and the stay at home parent. "Normal" working people are not volunteering and handling the complexity of doing these things, they are at their work. I can only imagine that prior generations had the working parent participate through the free time freed up by the stay at home parent.
It suggests to me that there is a long running flaw. I believe Bowling Alone pegs the inflection point in the late 50s or early 60s, ('57?) and the substantative issues came about with the generation hitting the workforce in something like 1960. So the kids born in the 1935-1945 era had something in their culture materially different than prior eras that kept on spreading.
I'll add that there are some feedback loops making it worse. When these organizations aren't available kids are more dependent on their parents for something to do, which makes the already strained parents even less likely to take on volunteer work.
And then kids who grew up without mentors are less likely to try to be that for someone else.
Basically the orgs don't have enough volunteers to do important things, and the people don't volunteer because the org isn't important to them.
Interesting take. What is the market-serving product you mentioned?
Whatever fills the void for people. ie: instead of bowling leagues, people watch TV or play video games. It's arguably a worse product because it doesn't fulfill the socialization or exercise needs of people, but it does fill the same block of time.
I guess it’s worse in the sense of providing health benefits, but it’s better in the sense that more people would freely choose it if given the choice.
It’s the same as junk food, people will freely choose it over healthier options.
Basically, products on the free market optimize for what people prefer to buy, and people’s preferences are shaped by evolution to a world in which physical rest and high-calorie foods were scarce. This makes us mismatched to the modern landscape.
In the early 1800's Alexis de Tocqueville attributed a lot of American success to its small organizations/associations:
"There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America....
In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one."
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/805328.html
Yeah, I remember he commented on every town having its own local newspaper too, which has obviously been replaced by commercialized mass media today.
Tocqueville is the first person I thought of reading this!
Is there data to back this up? I'm skeptical.
I see all kinds of "small organizations" forming in Slack communities, subreddits, and other online spaces. Some might be described as influencer driven communities like substack. Or audiences of a specific podcast. And so on. It's almost never been easier to participate in one of these "organizations".
Even locally, where I live, the school board, city council, local advocacy groups, etc are heavily attended. We have a local group advocating for immigrant rights. Another YIMBY group. Another group that argues against the YIMBYs. PTA meetings. Another group that advocates for the homeless.
I'd say its true that many are in the "universe" of one political sphere (in my case left-leaning). But that does not mean they have been wholly subsumed by "The Left", they often disagree and fight against "Left" politicians. And often "The Left" is not a uniform thing in a city with differing interests and stakeholders.
I think this is what Tao is saying that large organizations are filling the niche that was previously served by smaller organizations. eg. Discord, Slack, and other online platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Fortnite, Roblox, etc., are being used instead of smaller forums and local communities.
But are these reflective of the communities themselves? Or the tools used to organize community? If slack disappeared tomorrow wouldn’t many just move to another tool?
I think the key difference is that online communities are "cheap"; they're easy to create and easy to destroy. Offline communities are difficult to form and as such more "sticky". A great example is ideological differences. Lefty political groups (no doubt Righty ones have this too but I'm not as familiar with them) constantly reorganize based on perceived ideological bounds. Leftist groups splinter from liberal groups, labor-forward leftist groups split from identity politic leftist groups, and on and on.
A PTA doesn't do that. The folks in the PTA all have the same shared interest in the school their kids attend. They can't just splinter off into another PTA over a perceived difference. This forces the folks on the PTA to work together and makes the organization sticky in a way an online group might not be.
If the activation energy to form and join a community needed it's also really easy to just churn from the community. Moreover when splitting is this easy it prompts the creation of hyper-specific communities which lead to things like radicalization and dehumanization of the other (look at the acrimony between leftist identity-politic progressives and center-left liberals on the internet right now for example.)
If you read between the lines of what Terence Tao is saying - which, by the way, the most charitable summary is, "Isn't Dunbar's number interesting?" - he is really saying, "It is hard to make friends as an adult." Extra so if your day to day is something esoteric like academic theoretical math (read between the lines: really boring to most people), and if you are right leaning or libertarian (read between the lines: unfriendly as a matter of policy).
He should look up Roald Coase - mid 20C who tried o answer the question of why have firms at all - big or small. The “market” ought to be able to supply services (secretary, welding etc) - but his “Theory of the firm” suggests that there are complex processes inside a firm that are pretty easy to employ someone and teach them, and pretty hard to write a contract for.
So there is a natural size of a firm that is a tug of war between savings of contracting out and the cost of contracting to the market
My still to be published magnum opus claims this is upended by software - that processes can be written and followed in software reducing the cost of hiring and changing the dynamics in favour of large companies.
But software literacy in all employees will enable smaller companies to outperform larger ones - we hope
Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to individuals and much more power to large organizations at the expense of small organizations. Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own? Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if I go into the desert or wilderness, somewhere where there are no individuals, small organizations, or large organizations as of yet; that means it is literally impossible for any of them to come in, develop it, and make it a center of power?
There's a much simpler explanation. Most entities most of the time (with such probabilities increasing with the size and age of the entity) seek to defend and expand their power. The American political tradition held that the blessings of liberty would be granted and prosperity would grow if the power of the largest such entities were kept in check; first and foremost the British Crown, second the newfound American governments (at different levels), and eventually the largest private entities as well. But America abandoned its commitment to that tradition in all but name. America is no longer committed to property rights, free markets, free expression, or free association, such protections exist today only on paper. So every entity makes locally optimal decisions, leading society into a slow collapse.
On one hand you’re saying property rights and free markets, on the other you’re saying private entities should be kept in check (by who? I assume the government). Isn’t that a contradiction?
Is it? Is it not Americas refusal to step in the reason why most of the web today is based on and designed around the things Google deems important? Doesn’t seem like a free market to me.
Who said a belief in property rights and free markets made you an anarchist? Strong governments are required to protect property rights and free markets; still, the government is supposed to have a system of checks and balances that helps to keep its power from being abused. There is a tension, but one that was supposed to be guided by the north star of protecting American values.
Sadly, in the modern American government, legislation is too slow, justice is sold, and the executive runs amok unchecked. None of them are able to effectively attack the zoning and permitting processes that prevent developers from exercising their property rights to develop additional housing; markets have been captured by oligarchs who actively undermine the competition necessary for a free market, again with complicit legislative, judicial, and executive branches.
>Is there some zero-sum pie of power
Yes, that's exactly how power works. You can dilute power (in non-hierarchical organizations) or you can concentrate it (in rigidly hierarchical societies), but there's a finite amount of it and it's deeply coveted by all
> a zero-sum game
I don't see any reference to the game being zero-sum in Tao's words.
> Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own?
I don't think Tao is saying the uncontrollable force of technological and economic advancement exhibits a genuine agency of its own. Just that our current technology and society and has expanded the role of the extremely large organization/power structures compared to other times in history. This is a bit of technological determinist argument, and of course there's many counter-arguments, but it at least has a broad base of support. And at the very least it's a little bit true; pre-agricultural the biggest human organizations were 50 person hunter-gatherer bands.
Honestly, I feel like you are filtering his words through your own worldview a bit, and his opinions might be less oppositional to your own than you might think.
Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community.
This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems .
For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore.
There's not a really good solution to this. I'm lucky enough to be in a game dev group, and I do have my bar that I go to every now and then, but aside from that I'm not really a part of any small organizations.
I haven't been to church in decades, but arguably that's why most people actually go. It's not because you imagine God is taking attendance, but it's the joy of being around other people. Historically most people stayed in the same town from cradle to grave, maybe you would move for work, or marriage, but for the most part you just stayed put.
I've recently finished Tribe by Sebastian Junger. I highly recommend it as well.
I have the audiobook.
From start to finish it's fantastic. It's not a highly scientific work though, it's more of an observation mixed with some autobiographical touches.
There was an explosion of these little groups in the US after the 1st edition of Robert's Rules of Order was published, which incidentally was also heavily adopted by churches (and women's suffrage groups, who helped him with the Newly Revised.) I'd say this fulmination culminated in FDR and strong unions, aspects of both made illegal afterwards - term limits to limit democracy, striking made into a kabuki ritual by the NLRB, unions being forbidden from offering their members health insurance (they're the ones who started doing this), but employers offering insurance being subsidized. Elites were so terrified that they got close to pulling a coup and installing a dictator with the Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot).
They got everything tight again with WWII, McCarthy and the Cold War, though. Lucky, right?
I think there has been an intentional effort to isolate people from each other, and to destroy communities, and even make them look suspicious or evil in some way. Isolated, atomized people are more easily controlled. I think the encouragement of labor mobility and the trashing of small towns and small business in favor of the internet has also been an intentional effort in that regard. I also think there has been an intentional effort to consolidate media and merge it with government, which reached a frenzy during the Biden administration. Oracle's nepo baby is going to have Paramount, CBS, Tiktok, and who knows what else.
An evil antidemocratic streak has been encouraged among the "left," who now love benevolent dictators, credentialism, and decision by "consent" which immediately devolves into rule by the loudest and the whiniest cluster B personality or sociopath. Votes mean that you don't get your way a lot, but you get stuff done. If you don't get your way too much, you can just leave and join a group that works for you. Monopoly, and rule by anointment take that away from us, and that's what's happening.
It's been devastating for black Americans. Our media used to be vibrant and exciting, now it doesn't exist at all. This is the fate of all minorities under cultural consolidation. Alone, getting your directions from a screen, with the screen listening to any conversation you manage to have and reporting it to your rulers.
They'll eventually go after the churches, too, or consolidate them. I'm sorry, they'll go after the "christofascists."
This is the best thing I'll read today. Things I want to remember:
1. small organizations have been carved out by a move toward the individual and a move toward large organizations. 2. This provides some comfort in the form of cheap goods while contributing to a sense of meaninglessness or being undifferentiated. 3. Tao thinks we would benefit by seeking and participating in grassroots groups.
I’m not sure if that’s true.
As a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.
Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks and cable tv.
It may be true that big organizations deliver these things, but big organizations delivered them before and it’s definitely more possible for small organizations to have big impacts now than it was before.
> Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators
Right, but you don't know these people. You're not in a community with them. Tao points to Dunbar's number as a rough boundary between small and large communities; how many of these "tiny" creators have fewer than 150 followers, and how many of them foster close social ties among those followers in ways that couldn't scale to a larger audience?
Before the era of ~2k subscriber youtube passion project channels, people were forced to find people in their area with shared interests and establish social clubs. This necessarily meant a smaller audience, but it also meant actually being friends with the people you were communicating with. Youtube is definitely a different kind of thing.
That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that the Discord- and groupchat-ification of the social media ecosystem is a backswing toward smaller groups.
I think by most objective measures the size and power of large organizations has increased since WWII. For example, the size and scope of Western governments, consolidation in many industries, the portion of the stock market that is representated by the n-biggest companies, increased income/wealth inequality. If you debating the "large organizations have grown in power relative to small ones" part of the thesis I would be interested in what exactly you think would capture that.
Those tiny businesses are reasonably well-coordinated, so its not really the same type of "small organization" as what Tao is talking about.
Many big corps launch small brands to fake authenticity
> I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.
There was a lot of stuff available that was advertised in magazines and stuff as well. To use one niche as an example: I'm thinking of the ads in computer magazines sometimes with hundreds of obscure items crammed into a page.
I think there’s a difference between tiny and small. There are a ton of tiny companies that essentially buy services from fortune 50s and lease from big real estate firms.
Businesses with 50-100 people are pretty rare compared to the past
Two decades ago department stores were not making products. They were and still are leasing shelf space. The only difference between them and modern amazon is that their shelves are finite, so some level of quality control was done to ensure the shelves would be stocked with things people are actually interested in and wouldn’t fall apart and jam up the returns department too badly.
>things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas
I mean sure, that's one way to describe dropshipping from huge chinese manufactories
There is nuance here. What you say is true but big organizations have grown as well.
I think in the big picture I would say overall it’s the big organizations that have grown dominant. The inductive reason is because it is the goal for small organizations to become big so that’s where things head logically speaking.
From an evidence based standpoint, in the end, look at YouTube and Amazon. In the end the big organizations are in control. YouTube for example can cut off their creator and it’s pretty much over for them no matter how popular they once were.
I'm sorry, but you are very incorrect.
In Amazon... You'd be surprised to know how many brands sell 90% of the products availabile there.
The same applies to Youtube, you'd be surprised to know how many channels per country gets 90% of the views.
It's an illusion. We have billion of people...
I think your comment and claims would be much better if you at least gave some example spitball numbers.
Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US.
* Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans.
* Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not contributing to growing the economy (but creating money out of thin air to flood the market with mortgages does increase housing prices...).
One way to solve this problem is to break up the big banks and incentivize small regional banks to lend to productive small businesses. Worse for the bankers but better for the economy. Incidentally, this is exactly China's strategy, but as long as big banks are paying politicians millions for luncheon talks, it's unlikely to happen here.
It’s almost certainly more profitable to make to make 1,000 $100k loans from a banks point of view as the single loan will be much riskier (effectively not benefiting from the law of large numbers). Not to say there are benefits of dealing large loans such as cross selling other financial products to the large business.
Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as a result of (broadly good) government policy. A bank wouldn’t mind making uncollateralised loans any more than a mortgage, although it might charge more interest for the risk. However the government penalises banks based on (approximately) the sum of their risk weighted assets [0]. Here mortgages, as collateralised loans, are greatly incentivised over uncollateralised loans to business.
It’s hard to say if the situation would be worse without it, it’s possible we might have more risky business loans leading to growth, but also more likely we could see a serious global financial crisis.
[0] I am simplifying here slightly but you can see how the US ranks major banks here, higher is worse from the banks point of view https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P261124.pdf
Yes, one $100M loan in isolation is risky (I was just giving an example), but my point was that a portfolio of a small number of large loans to big businesses is much more profitable than a portfolio of many more smaller loans to small businesses. Large companies are much less likely to go bankrupt and the overhead of making the loan relative to the profit from interest is much lower. 50% of small businesses go bankrupt in the first 5 years. It's simply less profitable to lend to them...
It seems to me that:
- on average, complexity is increasing.
- most patterns in how civilization is arranged oscilate over time
- what's happening right now is most likely an artifact of right now (economics, power structure, culture, politics, etc).
- it seems that a shift back to smaller groups is likely in the future
- what I'm not sure about is whether the larger groups need to dissolve or stabilize in order for smaller groups to rebound
- I can't help but think that if our whole economic system reconfigures after reaching sufficient abundance, more of people's time will be spent on satisfying the soft needs met by smaller social groups, and less time will be spent on what feels meaningless
Great post.
But not sure I'd pre-position small organizations as having some kind of "role" -- effect maybe?
I'm reminded of a term "the locus of relevant possibility" used to characterize where people spend their time and effort. This enables one to compare across activities (say, believers, merchants, workers, etc.), and also to propose that change happens where people put their efforts -- nowadays into larger organizations.
Small organizations became relatively less effective at producing any relevant possibilities for people due to loss of locality for people and gain of targeting by large organizations.
People now are participating fans in sports, politics, hardware, and of course work (most jobs come with a cultural context). If/when organizations get better at targeting people, they can scale.
"Local" is a function of time/space/effort cost. Often now it's hard to visit your parents, but easy to engineer complex PR with someone across the world. So physical locality is not a proxy for relevance or possibility any more.
(Too bad locality is still the basis for political representation.)
There's also a key difference in the small organization: it incentivizes people to take some responsibility for others, i.e., some organizing roles, to keep the organization afloat. A world with large effective organizations has fewer leaders -- fewer individuals effecting change.
Probably the main small organizations are personal work networks. That's what determines ability and possibility in an increasingly productive world. In many cases, it centers on a rainmaker effect: people who can find and/or make work are followed.
(I would love to see some clean way to distinguish the organizations with their own cultures vs. those that labor under rainmaker sub-cultures -- alignment vs competition, efficiency vs relevance...)
> Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer.
This premise ignores the existence of the Internet. Wherein small groups of distributed actors can combine their efforts through a nearly instantaneous communications mechanism to match that of the larger groups.
The federal government was conceived when horses were the only way to transmit large amounts of data over a great distance.
We built the replacement for large global groups but then kept the large global groups. The results were entirely predictable.
In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:
> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.
Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.
2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.
3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)
Is this a surprise though?
50-years ago, if you wanted to:
- read the news (local paper),
- get coffee (local coffee shop)
- get groceries (local grocery)
- buy tires (local tire dealer)
You’d get this from your local small business … and this created local small community groups.
But now between the internet and national distribution of goods/services - all those small local companies are gone (or has a much reduced role as Tao would say) … because CNN, Starbucks, Kroger, Discount Tire has replaced the need for those small local businesses.
I would argue that the role of small orgs has shrunk significantly from the perspective of the majority, but grown in importance and impact for groups outcast from that majority.
The example I like to trot out is the amalgamation of furry and queer persons into a larger unit when collaborating at scale, but otherwise fostering positive impacts in smaller groups. The response to their successes has been attacks by larger orgs who are unable to integrate or co-opt them for profit (corporations) or power motives (politicians), as well as cringe-y reputations by individuals not included in those groups (see the mocking of both subcultures and groups by eRandos). Yet despite these negative attacks, both groups continue to grow and create parallel economies, logistics networks, communities, and even limited forms of governance (cons, parades, and social forums).
So in that vein, I believe we’re simply in the midst of an era of transformation, from a broken system to something new. Smaller orgs often lead these changes until one or more balloon in size, at which point they become the larger and more dominant organizations in the new era that follows. What we’re seeing now is a classic fight between opposing political, social, and economic views, aided by technology on both sides of the battle and fundamentally reshaping how conflicts are waged.
I've found this to be a funny framing on the left because it always ignores what happens when the group stops being outcast. It's always a framing based around the current time and conveniently orients itself around the mores of the current era. Anime and otaku interest groups used to be like this in the '80s and '90s, generally ideologically aligned, creating parallel economies, in response to attack and scorn from the outside. Then it became mainstream. The stigma in liking anime went away. And with it the pressure to organize against the mainstream.
We need to think about durable small organizations, not ones that are based around the social mores of the moment. The magic of a neighborhood group is that as long as people live in an area together there will be neighbors.
FWIW opposition-based interest groups have a long history in pretty much every state we've ever had records of.
This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead.
I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).
I'm reminded of the sixties idea of "the man" a lot recently. The man definitely won.
Because we all sold out to the man. Culturally, we have chosen the lavish life promised under the man's umbrella, to doing the work of trying to go our own way. We now reap what we've sown.
> I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon
I do! Unironically: AI assisted software development – and please, we can call that anything else, we do not need to confuse it with Serious software development.
Just the amount of super simple software (Apps Script, Office Script) that baseline tech savy people can now/soon build to enhance what they think their business needs are, without the impossible constraint of having to pay a dev to find it out for/with them (because that is really not how you can find that out, while you find out everything else about your super small business) gives me a lot of hope here.
> Unironically: AI assisted software development
Downstream reliance AI companies is not "smaller" in any sensible manner
There is a chance that local models get good enough and efficient enough that we won't need the large companies, so much as a reasonable graphics card.
The centralization of power also means the leaders of those large organizations have disproportionate power. Everyone is looking for the singular strongman at the head of an organization with nation-level power to save them from current turmoil.
I recently moved away from as much big tech as possible. Canceled Spotify, won't order anything from Amazon, deleted Instagram, trying not to watch as much YouTube Videos etc. Sadly cant move away from WhatsApp and Google yet...
Instead, I am sitting here right now working on a blogging engine so I can create personal blogs to let my friends keep up to date with my shenanigans. Basically give them a chance to participate in my life without enabling them to doom scroll.
I really hope its not only me growing tired of all these addictive unhealthy apps and subscriptions that sneaked into most peoples everyday life. I can only recommend boycotting big tech with CEOs only caring about their own enrichment.
Its only the internet part of life, but this is where I spend most of my time. In real life I try to buy from the local stores as much as possible. However, I do not participate in many other smaller organizations...
I think too many people starting companies dream of getting bought rather than running a profitable business. They care far more about financial games rather than the complex details of say their products manufacturing that matter most (instead relying on a third party in china who arguably is the more important partner). I don’t know how saas relates to this problem.
This is HN though so my complaints are ironic for sure
The behavior wouldn't exist if the system didn't so heavily incentivize it. How many pizza place owners do you know with a net worth of $10,000,000 or higher, vs how many pizza place owners have ever tried?
Does this vary between political systems, and how would you test it.
I suppose analysis of existence of smaller NGOs in societies and how they are distributed, but not any real idea as to what the analysis should look like.
Large organizations provide economical value.
Small organizations provide a sense of belonging.
Both can and do exist at the same time. We don’t need to compare them using the same scales and we don’t need to sacrifice one for the other.
You can shop at Amazon but go to the local bar. Work at Google and attend church. Vote for The Party and start a garage band. Now more than ever we have the time and resources to do both.
Although I agree this is easy to forget.
I'm reading The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs right now. One of the main theses of the book is that small "inefficient" enterprises are actually the engines of economic grown. Large efficient organizations often lead to stagnation.
It's interesting how this intersects with Tao's point, about the social benefits.
Part of the appeal of software is that it's so low friction that you actually can be a small team and take on giants.
I love hardware but I have basically abandoned any hope of bringing products to market. Just to get compliance certifications can cost upwards of $250k for a basic product, nevermind needing to wrangle with supply lines, manufacturing, and physical distribution. Forget it. You all have seen the graveyard of Kickstarters.
At my day job though, these huge costs can be readily absorbed and amount to a small fraction of the total cost.
Pope Pius XI wrote about _subsidiarity_ as a guiding social principle:
"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them."
Tao is observing the consequences of a society that increasingly has abandoned subsidiarity as an operating principle. (I had hoped that crypto might be able to bring subsidiarity back, but so far the opposite has happened in practice.)
Tanner Greer has a good piece on how the American tradition of bottom-up self-organization has been supplanted by top-down bureaucracy: https://palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and...
Certainly onto something but misses how much large organizations are actually controlled by small organizations operating in the “large complex system” environment. It is only individuals and small organizations that have agency at all. Large organizations and large complex systems are both emergent, one with hierarchical control, and one with distributed control. What has really changed is how unequal small organizations have become in their influence and power. The small cadres of people at the “top” (of organizations, media, government, tech, etc) control/influence more and more, not only at the expense of other small organizations (power is zero sum) but also at the expense of the decentralized mechanism, ie the large complex system becomes increasingly hierarchically/centrally controlled (vs distributed/decentralized control).
Small organizations are part of civil society. We have the numbers to know if their role is changing. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/civil-society-participati...
It's the television and the Internet. It's that simple.
Monopolies are better for shareholder value. They destroy competition and the fair market, but shareholder value is all that counts nowadays. So here we are. And the worst offenders are probably in the IT industry and startup world.
>My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations
This is basically the thesis of Bertrand de Jouvenal's "On Power" (1945).
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet
and
https://joinordiefilm.com/
One thing I find annoying about that movie is that it doesn't mention Nisbet one of whose major ideas is that a panopoly of organizations of all shapes and sizes mediates the relationship of individuals with the state and other megaorganizations.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with the framing, despite agreeing with many of the points raised. I think it's relevant to recognize that large organizations often become large by consuming smaller organizations. And that they consume smaller organizations precisely because they offer something like purpose and meaning, and other emotional/spiritual needs. When there are no more smaller organizations to consume, the larger organizations fracture out of an absence of these necessities. The division of 'small' and 'large' organizations is maybe relevant in today's economic structure but it does not feel absolute or permanent. Anyway, this well highlights the importance of genuine connections and activities at the individual level.
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.
I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep. Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are interested in these topics, go read the scholarship!
EDIT: With a little more clarity, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts and I wish that Tao had used his visibility to point readers at these experts. You may find that it complicates things.
I don't think he was making claims in the context of a professional mathematician. I think he's a popular guy (because of his status) and he's discussing his own thoughts on modern nihilistic thinking while calling for 3rd spaces on his own social media. Seems...fine? For an individual to that, we don't have to ascribe some degree of reverence to his thoughts anymore than I would yours. That extra reverence is all user-added
I'm not saying he shouldn't share it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts.
I came here to say the same thing... he's eloquently stating something, and kinda makes sense, but I bet we have actual real data around this. It's a fun mental exercise but if you REALLY want to know, there should be good sources.
Heck, ChatGPT should be able to answer that.
To add to this, I think a lot of people are reading this post to be some sort of reflection of economic organization when I (and others I suspect) think it's a post on social organization. There's always overlap but, as you say, it's a very dense field.
I do think there's a dearth of scholarship in the decline of social organizing in the US. There's studies that show the decline but other than Bowling Alone every subsequent book I've read or skimmed on the topic uses this decline to rail off against their boogeyman of choice, more set dressing than problem to consider.
Why is it a "bad idea" for him to post his take? I guess your concern must be that people will give it too much weight due to him being a mathematician.
This is currently #1 on HN. I suspect that a lot of people will read this and decide not to look into relevant scholarship because the text here is packaged nicely and it is presented by somebody that this community (rightly) respects very deeply.
In other contexts I've seen Tao cite scholarship outside of his field when engaging with it. I wish he'd done that here.
I don't think being an expert in one field means you need to constantly engage in an academic level of discourse. It's extremely normal for blog posts featuring vibes-based hot takes to hit #1 on HN. I think that's fine, if the take is good.
Citing scholarship would be good. Personally this has only piqued my curiosity and has probably only increased the chance I look into the relevant scholarship.
Do you have any links?
>His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.
oh man, your mind will be blown when you find out about essayists. or completely horrified, can go either way. A whole field, a respected field, completely devoted to vibes.
Empiricism is not the only right way to interrogate the universe y'know
but now it's on HN and people are discussing this idea that's been thrown out and some people agree and some don't and some bring up how it's similar to Bertrand de Jouvenal and others start thinking of de Tocqueville or Robert Putnam (I'm sure you could draw a connection to James C. Scott too) and before you know it you've got the beginnings of a bibliography right here in these threads
Sure but why start this discussion from first principles when you can read a text that covers the same ground in 10 pages?
This is ad hominem. He presents meaningful ideas and we would all benefit from you responding to the ideas.
I do not think that it is unreasonable to say that a layperson providing a extremely high level analysis of a topic that spans entire academic fields is likely not terribly insightful.
The history of communications networks (just one of the many enormous topics he covers here) is a whole field with piles of academics publishing constantly.
Do you have any interesting info to share from these enormous piles of academic publishing?
It’s not “extremely high level analysis.” It’s a brief philosophical excursion, and he appropriately disclaims that his opinions aren’t rigorous or even all that informed.
The idea that Tao can’t be insightful while microblogging outside of his field of expertise is silly. We here at HN allow plenty of nonexperts a wide latitude to pretend like they know something of which they have no real knowledge. The result is, I’m sure you’ll agree, occasionally insightful.
The so called Halo effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
If it didn't already have a name I'd call it the Noam Chomsky effect. No offense to Tao, it's just the first person that comes to mind
He sort of counters his own argument by having so much influence as an individual :)
like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources.
So this is 99% of the internet and a lot of what passes for journalism too. If you want official sources, you're limited to published papers. People typically don't have sources at hand when making opinions.
Yeah but this doesn’t invalidate his take. You’re just saying his take is as good as anyone’s which can still be 1000% correct.
Sure, but the take is huge (it covers all dimensions of society) and is two takes in one: the claim that the role of small organizations is diminishing and the reason for this. I'd be stunned if such an effect could be meaningfully explained in so few paragraphs.
When the topics are entire subfields (the development of multinational corporations, the development of states, the development of communication networks) it makes sense to build takes off of actual research.
Although I totally agree with this analysis, I also feel optimistic that this moment in time provides the first real opportunity in over 40 years for smaller organizations to start to affect societal change again. The existing efficiencies due to reduced (human-to-human) communication and fast decision-making processes in small organizations combine very nicely with the reduction in the barrier to entry with the help of AI and the accelerated pace of change in society due to AI. I hope that once a main driver of scalability and societal change becomes access to computation, rather than human headcount, we will see a reversal of the ongoing trend.
Funny coincidence. I was just pondering last night how an extremely intelligent person would look at the problems in the world. (And whether it would be incredibly frustrating!) For those who aren't familiar, Terence Tao is considered one of the greatest living mathematicians, and arguably one of the world's most brilliant minds.
Nadia wrote recently published the book "antimemetics" about this exact finding: https://nayafia.substack.com/p/introducing-antimemetics-my-n...
Her takeaway is that the value of small, antimemetic, high-trust groups has risen -- exactly because there are less than before
Side tangent, but I absolutely love how Tao uses mastodon
I've been thinking about this due to a renewed local interest in Bowling Alone[1].
Besides the main identified contributors of personalized media, suburbanization, real estate prices, and the increase of dual-income households, I've started to suspect that government-funding of organizations has also had a significant impact.
In the past, organizations had to raise funds from their communities. As government grants for organizations increased, the cost floor was raised on all organizations (i.e. fundraising, rents, salaries, etc.), and led to the professionalization of what was previously handled by volunteers.
In the same way that the 30-year mortgage and zero-interest-rate policy made it harder for individuals to raise the initial funds to buy a home (by enabling an increase in home prices, making it easier to buy a home if you already own one), I suspect access to government capital has made it harder for small organizations to remain small while they compete with more professional (read "larger") organizations for their members' time and money.
And this is a problem because as Terence Tao points out, "...[Small Groups] also fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have real influence on their direction."
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
So here we are on Mastodon. There are three columns. One is an ad for the site, one is an ad for Mastodon, and the one in the middle has some content. The article is part 1 of 5, because there's some severe limit on article length. The rest of the article is comments in small type. There are no examples.
Is this LLM output?
And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above)
This is a real issue, but a poor posting. The classic on this is "Bowling Alone" (2000) [1] That book predates most social media. The author bemoans the decline of local organizations such as Rotary International, local Chambers of Commerce, Odd Fellows - all those organizations that have little signs on the outskirts of medium-sized towns. (In Silicon Valley, both Redwood City and Half Moon Bay have such signs.)
Here's a useful question for Americans: do you belong to any organization where the members can, by voting, fire the leadership? Small organizations used to have elected leaders. Today, they tend to be run by self-perpetuating boards. Being involved in such organizations is where people learned how to make democracy work.
When was the last time you went to a non-government meeting run by Roberts Rules of Order? Do you even know what that is, or, more important, why it is? The whole point of Roberts Rules of Order is that the group is in charge and the result is a decision to be acted upon. The Rules are intended to keep the loudest voice in the room from running over everyone else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
I know something is worth reading when I see a wall of people being defensive of whatever the author presented.
Using the feudal system as an analogy. Smaller aristocracies cannot fight larger ones without the support of king.
Does the king support smaller aristocracies nowadays? No. The king works with the larger aristocracies to eat everyone else.
> My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges.
I call your attention to an earlier, 19th century German philosopher...
> The theoretical basis of alienation is that a worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of these actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour.
Reminds be of cyberpunk dystopia. Several corporations like Arasaka and Militech defacto ruling the world.
Families are still the most common small organization and I think they need to be considered as a distinct category rather than being grouped with other small organizations.
See also [0]
[0] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/granular.pdfthis seems to be oriented at a specific region of the world. my advice would be to encourage to provide information about what regions it affects would be included in the title to avoid people opening information irrelevant to them...
I don't understand mastodon or whatever the blogging software is. Why is it breaking the article into multiple pieces and showing the rest as comments, in smaller font? This is not Twitter, so why follow some archaic silly microblog format?
I stopped reading at 1/5, the text after is too small on my phone.
I run a cheap dedicated server for $25/mo and run a blog on it, and it just shows my fuxxing writings like a regular article. Surely TT can get someone to host a blog on his University's servers. Someone help this man!
>This is not Twitter
only just. Mastodon is basically a twitter clone.
offtopic, but does anyone know how to disable per-post scrolling on mastodon?
I press down arrow to slowly read the rest of the text - and instead it jumps me all the way down
glad to hear I'm not the only one, it's incredibly frustrating, especially when posts aren't big enough to fit on the screen and there is no keyboard-way to read the bottom half ◔̯◔
Hasn't this been an ongoing process for hundreds of years?
All roads lead to great centralization.
I've joked that mathstodon is effectively Terence's Tao's personal blog, with some occasional guest bloggers
What happens when an expert wanders outside of their field and stumbles across insights that have been described voluminously in economic and political theory.
Could we perhaps remove "Terence Tao" from the title? It feels somewhat disingenuous to lean on their name to bolster the argument. While someone in this thread is criticized for an ad hominem attack, this risks being the opposite, a kind of pro hominem. The arguments should stand on their own merit without invoking authority in the title, no?
argument from authority, I think
Here's the full article, copied, for your benefit. (I found it difficult to read because the mastodon UI forces the author to split the article into five tiny parts, so I copied it for my own benefit). I hope this is not against some HN guidelines, in which case, please feel free to downvote or delete this comment.
Terence Tao
Some loosely organized thoughts on the current Zeitgeist. They were inspired by the response to my recent meta-project mentioned in my previous post https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115254145226514817, where within 24 hours I became aware of a large number of ongoing small-scale collaborative math projects with their own modest but active community (now listed at https://mathoverflow.net/questions/500720/list-of-crowdsourc... ); but they are from the perspective of a human rather than a mathematician.
As a crude first approximation, one can think of human society as the interaction between entities at four different scales:
1. Individual humans
2. Small organized groups of humans (e.g., close or extended family; friends; local social or religious organizations; informal sports clubs; small businesses and non-profits; ad hoc collaborations on small projects; small online communities)
3. Large organized groups of humans (e.g., large companies; governments; global institutions; professional sports clubs; large political parties or movements; large social media sites)
4. Large complex systems (e.g., the global economy; the environment; the geopolitical climate; popular culture and "viral" topics; the collective state of science and technology).
An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray. Both small and large organized groups offer significant economies of scale and division of labor that provide most of the material conveniences that we take for granted in the modern world: abundant food, access to power, clean water, internet; cheap, safe and affordable long distance travel; and so forth. It is also only through such groups that one can meaningfully interact with (and even influence) the largest scale systems that humans are part of.
But the benefits and dynamics of small and large groups are quite different. Small organized groups offer some economy of scale, but - being essentially below Dunbar's number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number in size - also fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have real influence on their direction. Their dynamics can range anywhere from extremely healthy to extremely dysfunctional and toxic, or anything in between; but in the latter cases there is real possibility of individuals able to effect change in the organization (or at least to escape it and leave it to fail on its own).
Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer. They also have more significant impact on global systems than either average individuals or small organizations. But the social and emotional services they provide are significantly less satisfying and authentic. And unless an individual is extremely wealthy, well-connected, or popular, they are unlikely to have any influence on the direction of such a large organization, except possibly through small organizations acting as intermediaries. In particular, when a large organization becomes dysfunctional, it can be an extremely frustrating task to try to correct its course (and if it is extremely large, other options such as escaping it or leaving it to fail are also highly problematic).
My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an individual, a status comparable to a small or even large organization. And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).
Much of the current debate on societal issues is then framed as conflicts between large organizations (e.g., opposing political parties, or extremely powerful or wealthy individuals with a status comparable to such organizations), conflicts between large organizations and average individuals, or a yearning for a return to a more traditional era where legacy small organizations recovered their former role. While these are valid framings, I think one aspect we could highlight more is the valuable (though usually non-economic) roles played by emerging grassroots organizations, both in providing "softer" benefits to individuals (such as a sense of purpose, and belonging) and as a way to meaningfully connect with larger organizations and systems; and be more aware of what the tradeoffs are when converting such an organization to a larger one (or component of a larger organization).
This is just what Lenin said about monopolistic capitalism. Free competition reduces profit rates which can’t happen in capitalism.
It's called consolidation. Strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. Through taxes it can be done imperceptibly over time.
Realistically, everyone online is constantly complaining about the lack of friends, the lack of community, and so on. Meanwhile, I live in a high rise in SF and have no shortage of any of these.
People borrow spoons of yogurt, tools, devices; share parenting, food, and home advice; and there's a bunch who play board games and the like.
My friends are nearby. We go to the gym together, play basketball together, go to the same kids' birthday parties.
This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.
> This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.
I don't know man, lots of big cities smell of shit so to speak. Had been in 3 big cities I had to move to a small "3rd world" beach town to stop smelling shit. Life (people) is great here.
Me I don't care about nice looking sidewalks slick looking buildings when everyone is either miserable or closed off or simply sizing you up and discarding you because they don't have nothing more to gain from you than "simply" friendship.
Maybe SF is an exception, never been.
OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text.
It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.
You can add a ".rss" to mastodon profile account page to follow or read it through something that can process rss feeds for a "better" reading experience.
E.g. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao.rss
> if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode?
Yes. But note that if your account is on another instance, that wouldn’t immediately help you when you open the page; you’d still see the default theme for that instance. However, you could simply copy the link and paste it on the search box of your own instance to see the post with your chosen theme (including font and colour).
how about reader mode in your browser?
No good in Firefox, unfortunately. Yes, I can use hacks to force reader mode, add CSS to the page, and so forth, but I would prefer a simple checkbox.
Social graphs used to be constrained by individual human capacity, roughly parametrized by Dunbar's Number.
Nowadays, a single commodity computer server can store information and relationships for every single living human.
You can have a direct economic relationship with a factory 5,000 miles away. This used to be utterly impossible, and required many degrees of primary human interaction through a chain of relatively small organizations.
> My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations [...]
The large organization are turning to rent seeking, which adversely affects the liberty of the average individual.
Claiming that it has "slightly empowered the individual" is a reflection of where you are in the current social structure. If you've fallen below the line, then you're certainly not empowered at all, and more like you're enslaved. And that line keeps on going up.
The corrosiveness of increasing housing costs and health care costs are examples of this. The fact that individual transportation is both necessary and is likely to turn into a subscription-model is likely to be another example.
Regulatory capture is also a part of this. Large organizations enjoy the complexity of government regulations (while at the same time screaming about it) because they have the resources to navigate it, and they enjoy near monopolies which allow them to pass the costs down to their customers. And we've entirely forgotten how to break up monopolies, like we did with AT&T.
Also, most organizations these days exist to capture profits for the people who lead them. And this can even be seen in left-leaning political organizations that are more concerned with fund-raising than solving the problems that they're supposedly addressing (the DNC being the most massive example of this).
All of this corrodes individual liberties of the average person. It just may not have caught up with you yet, or you may have lucked into the resources to avoid it.
This is why I'm a left-libertarian anti-capitalist. The problem that we have today is too much power in the hands of large organizations (the fact that organizations are led by individuals, however, is not a logical contradiction -- the problem to solve here isn't a simple rule to limit the ability of individuals to work together, but an optimization problem to increase or maximize individual liberty, which necessarily results in a push-pull tradeoff at the interaction between individuals and groups that they might participate in). All large organized groups (Religion, Government, Corporations, Unions) needs to be restrained in their ability to exploit individuals. What we have now is that Unions have been destroyed and Government and Religion largely do the bidding of Corporations and their billionaire owners.
(Billionaires being individuals is also not a logical contradiction -- they have so many resources they may as well just be massive organizations -- employing hundreds of people and owning all kinds of property)
Dude has discovered the atomization of workers under capitalism!
What I find fascinating about these kinds of legitimate complaints and the comments here and elsewhere is nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism. What I've come to realize is Americans in particular can't define capitalism but will die on the hill of defending it. Another casualty of the Red Scare. Let me explain.
People often like farmers markets. People like locally grown produce. People like Mom and Pop stores over big chains. These things aren't strictly true but they're generally true.
Walmart is capitalism. A farmer's market is socialism. Your local Italian restaurant run by a family of immigrants is socialism. Olive Garden is capitalism.
What's the difference? Easy. The worker's relationship to the means of production. If you buy from a local grower at a farmer's market, that grower likely owns their farm and any production facilities. If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners). That money leaves your community.
This is rent-seeking behavior. And it's exactly what private equity is. What additionally makes private equity profitable are the legal enclosures PE firms create to increase profits at your expense. So they'll buy a medical practice, which was previously owned by the doctors most likely, and jack up the prices to pay off the LBO and their investors. They then use noncompetes to stop those medical practitioners in that local area or state (depdning on what they can get away with).
At this stage of capitalism, every aspect of your life is getting financialized. Housing, health care, education, vets, food, water, utilities and so on. In every one of them is rent-seeking behavior to use the legal system to create an enclosure for them to jack up prices at your expense.
Terence is a smart guy but the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once. Instead there's lip service to the notion of "economies of scale". This is in part propaganda. Why? Because if it were really true, why do all these large companies need legal protections of their business? Like states who ban municipal broadband?
Secondly, Terence notes essentially the destruction of community. This is an intentional goal of neoliberalism because any form of community or collectivism is dangerous to a neoliberal project. Also, people spending time on community is lost profit for some company who would rather you were creating shareholder value instead.
"A farmer's market is socialism."
Lolwut? Here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism.
Are you thinking of farming collectives?
Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people. In the real world, we try to feed as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible. But sure, let's grow everything locally and let people starve, because farmers markets give us fuzzy warm feelings of a utopia that never existed. And capitalism bad.
> Lolwut?
This is why I used this example because you've just demonstrated that you don't know what socialism is. There is a myth that capitalism is "free markets". First, there's no such thing as a free market. All markets require regulation to function. Second, markets exist in every organization of the economy and existed long before capitalism existed. We have records of such from Sumeria from 4000+ years ago. In late feudalism, serfs would sell the food they grew to pay their fedual landlord, an early from of taxation.
> Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people.
Walmart is one of the most heavily subsidized businesses on Earth. Directly you have agricultural subsidies but another is food stamps paid to Walmart employees [1] as well as Medicaid. Why? Because Walmart pays below a living wage.
Also, Walmart is known for setting up in a town, selling their products at below cost to kill all local businesses and then jacking up the prices, if not leaving outright, creating a new food desert.
As for locally grown food being expensive, that's not really true once you look at the bigger picture. We've seen this pattern play out in every country the IMF and Wolrd Bank have gotten involved in. The IMF/WB place conditions such that local farmers can no longer produce crops to feed their populations. Those they have to buy from the West. Instead, farmers have to grow export crops to earn foreign currency to service debt.
In the short term this lowers food prices but forces all the farmers off their land. They then have to move to cities to seek work and/or become a drain on the state.
Inevitably, with and without manipulation, the local currency collapses and locals can no longer afford that foreign food. It's entirely predatory. A system was destroyed for foreign bankers. This is almost exactly what happened in Haiti and Somalia, to name just two examples.
Now if the community owned that supermarket, this predation just wouldn't happen. In other words, it's the worker's relationship to the means of production.
[1]: https://www.worldhunger.org/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxp...
Oh boy you got me good! How could I have fallen for such a clever ruse. This actually isn't complicated. Who owns the farm + stand? Again, maybe you meant farming collective, one last chance.
I don't really know who you think you're arguing against, but free markets can exist as a theoretical idealization, you know, like some other systems I'm guessing you're fond of.
Btw, if a farmers stand is socialism, then certainly I can say Walmart with subsidization via food stamps most definitely isn't capitalism.
Every actual fact you state I agree with. As for your theories and straw men, I'll leave to you.
Just as an exercise, try to run through the mental trajectory that got you to your rant on free markets and Sumeria and shit. What is going on there? You have some enemy in your head your imagining you're dunking on?
> nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism.
If you both believe capitalism is evil and that no one wants to talk about it (while you do), you should definitely rethink the circles you frequent. And we’re discussing a Mastodon post, of all platforms, just search for #capitalism and you’ll find no end of critiques.
See also Wikipedia if you want more sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-capitalism
In terms of collaboration and contributions, I think the contextual search offered by LLMs is significantly underrated.
Recall the second Highlander film that Connor MacLeod was given the gift of telepathic empathy. He is able to hear people's thoughts and feel what they feel. He uses that to help scientists collaborate.
We don't have telepathic empathy in reality, but image using the LLM's contextual search across research projects? We could potentially have some type of approximation.
This would then allow smaller groups to make a significant contribution to society. It would go against the idea in the Mythical Man Month of adding more people, what we see in larger orgs.