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Big tech is big because we are globalising - because an app / website written in one country can be used in dozens of others, 192 if your i18n-fu is good enough

Big tech is big because we are globalising - because an app / website written in one country can be used in dozens of others, 192 if your i18n-fu is good enough. Scale is something we have not really taken on board as we head to 10 billion humans. And when we look critically at the Big in big tech now, they are really bit-players with leverage. News aggregators, search engines, publishing platforms. The traditional "media" have had outside influence and this new globalised generation has that, but compared to what's likely to come it's nothing. Global pharma, energy, transportation, new manufacturing, supply chain observability, consumer friendly finance. These things and more will have huge impacts - and all will have software at their hearts. If that (software) is what we mean by Tech, then yeah, Google is a minnow to come. But there is hope. Software (and observability) are incredibly amenable to democracy and independent monitoring, to smart regulation and smart outcomes. It's a political challenge to manage the wealth to come - but look at how the USA handled the robber barons. It took massive system wide political change if it happened. Don't give up. But Vote Harder.

cryptica 5y ago
Globalization overshot. It was mostly artificially propped up with the global fiat monetary system. Now that the fiat monetary system is running out of steam and heading into high inflation territory, we will revert back to a more localized world which most people will be happier in. Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.
- opportune 5y ago
  This doesn’t make any sense. Parent is talking about how you can make a single product with a TAM of ~all of earths population. What does that have to do with money printing/fiat, besides perhaps causing an overvaluation? Even if those companies were overvalued, it doesn’t change the fact that technology and free trade enable hyper-scaling businesses.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  People have been moving into cities since time immemorial. Small farmers would move to Roman cities in search of higher paying jobs, or the dole. The Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated urbanization. All of that predates fiat currency.
  - spc476 5y ago
    You don't need fiat currency---the Romans debased their currency just as much as we do today.
  - cryptica 5y ago
    Currency debasement always caused people to want to move to cities where the currency was being issued. Without currency debasement, people may have been incentivized in the past to move to cities for certain industries where knowledge was highly specialized (the company needed to be in a big city with many people in order to tap into a larger talent pool). Today, where most intellectual work can be done remotely, it doesn't make sense to move people geographically to specific geographic areas.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Globalizing democracy means that increasingly , half of the population of the earth will be oppressed by the other half. At least the division of nations leaves people with the option to leave one democracy and go live in another that fits them better. We can't leave earth for something else yet. Global democracy controlled by global media is a bad outcome.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  If I understand you, you are saying that in a democracy the majority "oppress" the minority(ies). It maybe a "no true scotsman" argument but a society that legally oppresses a minority is hard to call a democracy- it is quite possible to argue that America was not a democracy until 1965. And it is highly unlikely we will all become some homogeneous voting lump - there are enough modern democracies that are so distinct in just their voting processes, let alone choices in fiscal policy, culture and so on to keep diversity alive.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    IIRC during the trump era people said the same thing. And intuitively, it is a sort of oppression , but it lasts only 4 years. I 'm not saying we should abandon democracy, but we should be looking into ways to expand people's freedom of action, and uniting everyone under one government is not the way.
  - dandellion 5y ago
    There's that quote, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." I see democracy as a system that makes it harder for a minority to oppress a majority, which is what pretty much "all the others" forms of government involve. On the other hand, rather than say that a society that legally oppresses a minority is not a democracy, I'd rather call it a flawed democracy or a bad democracy. Be aware that democracy by itself doesn't provide protections to prevent a majority from oppressing a minority, instead of refusing to calling it a democracy. That way we don't end like the true communists. Whenever someone discusses any of the problems with communism a true communist always says: "no you see, that happened because it wasn't real communism", and they kind of miss the point of whatever constructive discussion you were trying to have with them.

cryptica 5y ago

Globalization overshot. It was mostly artificially propped up with the global fiat monetary system. Now that the fiat monetary system is running out of steam and heading into high inflation territory, we will revert back to a more localized world which most people will be happier in. Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.

opportune 5y ago
This doesn’t make any sense. Parent is talking about how you can make a single product with a TAM of ~all of earths population. What does that have to do with money printing/fiat, besides perhaps causing an overvaluation? Even if those companies were overvalued, it doesn’t change the fact that technology and free trade enable hyper-scaling businesses.
Apocryphon 5y ago
People have been moving into cities since time immemorial. Small farmers would move to Roman cities in search of higher paying jobs, or the dole. The Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated urbanization. All of that predates fiat currency.
- spc476 5y ago
  You don't need fiat currency---the Romans debased their currency just as much as we do today.
- cryptica 5y ago
  Currency debasement always caused people to want to move to cities where the currency was being issued. Without currency debasement, people may have been incentivized in the past to move to cities for certain industries where knowledge was highly specialized (the company needed to be in a big city with many people in order to tap into a larger talent pool). Today, where most intellectual work can be done remotely, it doesn't make sense to move people geographically to specific geographic areas.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Globalizing democracy means that increasingly , half of the population of the earth will be oppressed by the other half. At least the division of nations leaves people with the option to leave one democracy and go live in another that fits them better. We can't leave earth for something else yet. Global democracy controlled by global media is a bad outcome.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
If I understand you, you are saying that in a democracy the majority "oppress" the minority(ies). It maybe a "no true scotsman" argument but a society that legally oppresses a minority is hard to call a democracy- it is quite possible to argue that America was not a democracy until 1965. And it is highly unlikely we will all become some homogeneous voting lump - there are enough modern democracies that are so distinct in just their voting processes, let alone choices in fiscal policy, culture and so on to keep diversity alive.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  IIRC during the trump era people said the same thing. And intuitively, it is a sort of oppression , but it lasts only 4 years. I 'm not saying we should abandon democracy, but we should be looking into ways to expand people's freedom of action, and uniting everyone under one government is not the way.
- dandellion 5y ago
  There's that quote, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." I see democracy as a system that makes it harder for a minority to oppress a majority, which is what pretty much "all the others" forms of government involve. On the other hand, rather than say that a society that legally oppresses a minority is not a democracy, I'd rather call it a flawed democracy or a bad democracy. Be aware that democracy by itself doesn't provide protections to prevent a majority from oppressing a minority, instead of refusing to calling it a democracy. That way we don't end like the true communists. Whenever someone discusses any of the problems with communism a true communist always says: "no you see, that happened because it wasn't real communism", and they kind of miss the point of whatever constructive discussion you were trying to have with them.