I dispute your notion that anything has fundamentally changed about the nature of central planning vs market economies, or the scale of firms. Firstly, your ex

I dispute your notion that anything has fundamentally changed about the nature of central planning vs market economies, or the scale of firms. Firstly, your examples are self-contradictory. WalMart doesn't compete on price? Really? Amazon doesn't compete on price? Come on now. GM (~225,000 employees) had to split itself up to be manageable, but you claim just decades later the much smaller Google (~88,000 employees), Amazon etc have "conquered scale". Yet Google has been forced to split itself up: what do you think Alphabet is, if not Larry and Sergey accepting/admitting that Google had become a place where innovation could no longer happen due to its size and low energy levels? Most of Google's most interesting projects now hang under Alphabet as separate companies e.g. Waymo, or in semi-autonomous subsidiaries like DeepMind. Google proper is still able to do a few interesting things with AI research but when was the last time they launched a truly interesting or new product that became essential in our lives? The Google of 2006 was in many ways far more effective and innovative than the Google of 2018, despite/because of its much smaller size. Facebook has a similar problem. Facebook's growth has been coming from acquisitions like Instagram and WhatsApp that continue to operate rather autonomously. The core company has grown hugely but what do they do all day? Apple hasn't actually changed in size much over time when you eliminate their retail employees (i.e. focus on the parts where risks are taken and new things are made). That's why they can pack most of the company into a giant doughnut in a single city. All of these companies seem to be poster-children for the problems that come with size and success. Googlers seem to spend most of their energy fighting social justice wars or rewriting things from one language to another. Facebook has to buy up successful companies to stay ahead of the curve. Microsoft stagnated for years under Ballmer and only now is it being turned (slowly) around - largely by letting go of the tight central control and adherence to a unified product strategy that previously typified the company (e.g. everything must integrated with Windows). The basic underlying insights about human nature that separate right wing capitalist thought from left wing socialist thought aren't so trivial that they fundamentally change when you make communication faster. Knowledge is still scattered, power still corrupts, reality is still too large for any one person or group to comprehend, the way forward is often unclear and "picking winners" is therefore a strategy doomed to fail.