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Our industry is the same. Example: "Individual authentication systems are often insecure, so lets pool all our permission management under the umbrella of two o
by api 3y ago
Our industry is the same. Example: "Individual authentication systems are often insecure, so lets pool all our permission management under the umbrella of two or three huge companies that manage all authentication for everything in the entire world via mechanisms like OIDC."
We apparently like to trade noticeably frequent (but still fairly infrequent) small failures for rare catastrophic failures. The key here is that these rare catastrophic failures are rare enough that we can pretend they won't happen. Enough time goes by between incidents that we have time to forget and claim ignorance.
Eventually humanity will pool all risk in one basket so big that when it breaks we will go extinct. The end.
- nologic01 3y agoGigantism has many "features" going for it: Like you say, it pushes risks to the tail (lower probability). Low probability - high impact events are easily mis-priced and thus this becomes a rent extraction channel. Removing competition by acquisitions means the market can be distorted more easily. Another source of non-earned profit. But there are also subtler benefits: Gigantism creates de-facto regulatory capture (how could a lowly government bureaucrat go against the "giant"?). Such leverage versus rule-makers can be tweaked to optimize... wait for it, further risk-less profit. Finally, "giants" can offer excess compensation and prestige to attract key talented individuals, essentially a scorched earth strategy to suppress any other actors. All-in-all a horrible pattern that doesn't really offer any benefit (besides to the few insiders in the top of the pyramid). Delivering innovative products or services requires a certain scale but that is typically an order of magnitude smaller than observed sectoral concentrations. Why is it happening if it is so toxic? Well, society is stupid. More stupid in fact than many (if not most) of its individuals. The hope is that there is a sufficient number of independently evolving societies so that low-IQ societies imbibing on toxic stuff go extinct (not physically, as a cultural pattern).