I think you misunderstand me because I don't disagree with anything you're really saying here. In fact you observe that success at scale results in the accumula

I think you misunderstand me because I don't disagree with anything you're really saying here. In fact you observe that success at scale results in the accumulation of power over other people, and that's exactly my point; If you succeed at scale, frequently you do it by exploiting the well exposed attack surface of the, and excuse me for using this term but I need to be blunt to get the severity across, "useless NPC". Useless NPC demands X, provider provides X, provider observes useless NPC's consumption of X and models the behaviour of useless NPC to a very high degree of accuracy allowing them to exploit the attack surfaces of useless NPC by providing and charging for the exact things which those attack surfaces guarantee useless NPC will demand, and in so doing accrues power at scale. All of this has a genesis in the attack surface of the useless NPC. You can't model and manipulate independent, self-reliant people who understand the nature of the world well enough to provide for themselves what you would otherwise be providing for them in an exploitative way, and the harder you try the more clear it is to those parties that what you're doing is exploitative, whilst the exact opposite is true when the exact same behaviour is modeled against the useless NPC. And unfortunately it seems that the majority of the world is constituted by useless NPCs, the very fact that these exploitative agents prosper again and again when their strategies are tailored to be most effective on those useless NPCs and are repellent to the small minority of civilisation not constituted as such very clearly demonstrates that. Maybe you'd say this is victim blaming, maybe that's fair, but it is as far as I can see over the entirety of my life watching very closely an accurate description of the way that civilisation tends to evolve. And we don't expect that attack surfaces won't be exploited in technology, instead we harden those attack surfaces, minimise them as much as possible, fix the afflicted targets rather than just expecting that they won't be exploited. I don't see how the same logic should not be more broadly applied.