Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is the industrial revolution. Manufacturing.
As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading.
It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy.
Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower. Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.
It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.
The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge revenue, even huger your profits.
It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that describes who gains what.
Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot. Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.
What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT? These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.
Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where competition between firms is most intense over something that isn't correlated to external value.
Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking. Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their brand.
Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point where the main driver of success, is lawyers.
A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly relevant to external value. The digital industries often start here or reach this point quickly.
Or the European Pirate Party or similar. They have a handful of elected MEPs at any given time.
That is the problem though. That's not very serious politics. If it's a coalition of tech companies, law enforcement and whatnot vs pirates and anarchists... guess who wins?
A normative, liberal movement/coalition that is for digital freedom is not far fetched. It just doesn't exist. That's why we're losing.
Also, MEPs are often elected differently allowing otherwise unlikely or fringe candidates to succeed.
And, parties/people just don't treap. EP seriously. Everyone knows it's a clownshow. Treat it that way. EP can't have more power because clownshow. Cycle.
It's a perfect 19th century steryotype of upper house (Council) and lower house (EP). One is a club. The other is a square. Public square, atm, are a hard place to do anything but show off and fight.
Yes, corruption at national (and subnational) levels is much greater.
EC institutions don't control enough programs, funds or building permits to rival states on this front.
I do think there is "soft" corruption (as OP alludes) in the "EU as a regulatory powerhouse" complex. Lobby-adjacent corruption, like in the US. A lot of that is very dirty money, with foreigns states or industries literally buying a seat at the table. The cleaner end is Google & Apple getting a seat at the table via ireland (and others) who simply have a national interest in giving it to them. The dirtier is Qatar, China or whatnot getting proxied in for political donations, payola, funding of specific nonprofits/etc.
Anyway... that exists. It is (IMO) almost entirely contained at the top level, and it mostly bleeds in from national politics.OTOH, competence and professionalism also exists in the EC. That means the can actually deliver on the job, if they're tasked with a good job.
The EU has very little advocacy or awareness of digital freedom. Foreign ministry staff don't understand it at all. We're just a stream of weirdo complaints that appears whenever they try to do anything digital related. I know it's hard to grok, but they do not have any idea what we are talking about... and that's kind of our fault. Democracy has some essential bottom up components.
On the positive side... a sound, rational and tactical movement can (IMO) really succeed and get stuff. The good thing about eurocrats, is that once they're mission is the right mission... they get it done better than most. EU consumer protection, for example, is quite excellent relative to any examples I know. EU infrastructure and transport projects were executed way better than national equivalents (see Ireland again for examples).
There is no serious political/factional/ideological barrier to EC adopting digital freedom goals. Just ignorance. There's hope.
The EC pushes through controversial decisions, that are not controversial between states... the bar is generally something high in this regard.
National Governments get a buffer between them and discontented citizens, because "it's the EU." There is also a lot of pressure to conform to EC "consensus," parties/individuals that want to be seen as government material.
EC totally discounts digital privacy especially privacy from state actors and there is corruption, carve out a and such. I disagree with a lot of their agreements. I agree that they make far too many laws and are way too bureaucratic but....
EP is a shitshow on another level. It's literally the star wars senate. Endless factions, recreational politics. No about to act in a way that might result in anything but show. It's trump, but boring.
National governments also don't lack in corruption. Politics sucks.
IMO, what is badly missing is an active electorate. Civil society. There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. ATM, EC is taking advice from tech industry,dirty insiders and spooks. No one speaks for "The Cause" because, to paraphrase americans... "When I need to speak to Europe's digital freedom people, who do I call?"
OK... this is the kind of thing I am talking about.
"It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour."
That's one of the reasons, and it's not a bad reason at all. In fact, I would say that wikipedia couldn't buy what it gets for free at any price. It's also for other reasons. Wikipedia serves lightweight websites. It has a lightweight management structure. It has a lightweight content moderation function.
None of these are incidental. They are what efficiency is made of.
In any case, what is your comment demonstrating other that everything can be criticised. By what standard, is wikimedia worthy of your scorn?
I don't disagree with anything you said. I also think that wikipedia should adopt a much less cringey fundraising style.
However...
I feel like wikipedia tends to attract a highly disproportionate amount of criticism, especially about fundraising, budget inflation and editing/deletionism. In one sense, this is a good thing. Criticism and scrutiny keep organisations honest.
In another sense, there's a nihilism to it. Wikipedia is perhaps 100X more resource efficient than a Facebook. It's far more respectful of its users than any bigtech. It embodies otherwise naive ideals of the early web. It has performed way better than commercial peers in the face of the decade's misinformation and political fact wars... including journalistic ones. It keeps its nose much cleaner than big nonprofits like the Red Cross. All freely available to everyone, highly accessible, supported by optional donations. Wikimedia is a beacon.
FOSS has been tamed. The rivers of the WWW have been dammed. "Don't be evil" got fired. It feels like Wikipedia is subjected to a bigotry of higher expectations specifically because it doesn't suck. There's a crabs-in-a-bucket feel to it that disturbs me.
Sure, Dunbar has a lot of influence in shallow realms: MBA textbooks, managerial self help books, military slideshows and such.
Re: umwinding... I think most of what Wengrow unwinds is a strawman.
The steelman version of Dunbar is pretty small and unimportant. The strawman is pretty much made up by Wengrow. It all amounts to cheesy discourse, IMO.
It has a "what the media don't want you to know" quality to it.
Wengrow has it out for Dunbar's number for fairly esoteric philosophical reasons.
Dunbar is often taken as meaning that above a certain group size, direct, intuitive or emergent democratic organisation isn't possible. You need kings, presidents, parliaments , courts and whatnot. He's mad at Yuval Noah Harari for similar reasons.
It's somewhat of a straw man, imo.
As for Dunbar, what do all these Dunbar's number studies amount to? I mean sure, they confirm something about how many relationships we can maintain, and such. What does any of that imply though.
Dunbar's number studies haven't really proposed, tested or studied any consequences to their theories. What happens when group sizes increase beyond the number? That makes it pretty empty theory, imo.
I agree that there are elements like this that make intuitive sense.
What I am saying is: After at these years on military/boardroom slides... what does Dunbar's tell us? How has it influenced how we do anything?
What should or shouldn't be organized in smaller/larger groups? How?
It just feels like a lot of popular social science tidbits give us a great introduction with no follow through. What was the point of all those slides?
I think Dunbar's number exemplifies a failing in our social science culture, or maybe our epistemological tendencies. .. or maybe it just shows what happens when MBA texbooks adopt something.
We don't really know what to do with a piece of insight or knowledge like Dunbar's number. When is it "true?" When is it relevant? What does it say about how we should organize? What does it say about how organisations of different sizes function? What kind of successes or failures does Dunbar's nunber suggest we encounter.
I'm not saying that Dunbar's number is wrong. I'm suggesting that for it to be profound in a scientific sense, it needs to have consequences. Prediction, prescription, insight about existing structures, something.
We intuitively agree that working at an 80 person company is different from an 800 person could company. I don't see Dunbar's theories adding much beyond that, no predictions or insights about how such organisations work.
Mostly it's a piece of theory that can be thrown onto slides, in support or objection to something as needed.
This kind of reminds me of auto manufacturing. It's almost unintuitive how difficult, expensive & error prone paneling is. Also painting. Stamping out panels, painting and installing them is a very hard job to do with robotics. Most of the space, treasure and expertise invested into an auto factory is panel related. The "possible, but perpetually difficult" space can be a deep valley for robotics, it seems.
...And bricklaying, while conspicuous and important, is still just one job in construction.
Also consider that quite a lot of people work within Amazon's greater sphere, with degrees of dependence ranging from significant to absolute. Eg all the people employed in parts of the ecommerce industry where amazon wields most of the power. AWSland. Etc.
Since everyone is using government works as the comparison, government employees + government contractors, and those in the government contracting sphere.
so, yeah... they're big. At the very least, amazon jobs are now a standard of sorts. What they do and/or don't do as an employer is what's normal.
A lot of things work like this. Call it "the lucky chancer game." The winner is likely to be a fortunate risk taker, with a side effect of survivorship bias... the "wrong lesson."
Two thoughts...
First, it's not necessarily the wrong lesson. It teaches a real reality, and results could be interesting... especially if real money was involved. I can see why an accelerated game of "play the market" isn't what a schoolteacher wants to teach. But... if you did want to teach it, I would make the game high repetition. High risk-reward strategies and games are a real thing in the world. I don't think it's bad to learn how to play them.
From the POV of playing such strategies/games, it's a short path to internalizing that "secret sauce" is generally an ingredient in a sequence, and therefore not really one thing.
Second thought... One relevant way to teach kids about compound interest & saving is via "subsidized" interest rates. You might start with 10% per week with very young kids and recalibrate before financial meltdowns happen. This might be the way of getting your teacher friend's "right lesson" across.
Anyway... That "just showing up" is surprisingly often the missing ingredient is also often true, and worth remembering. It just often isn't the ingredient for regular work/school life. We do "show up" for our school and work careers. That's the baseline. The reason, IMO, "just show up" is effective, where it is effective, is that most people don't show up. Everyone is showing up for work, for class. We do have something to show for it, it's not something that's an outlier.
It's hard to put your finger on the true "main point." Energy, especially nuclear energy has always been fraught, politically and technically.
Your point is definitely poignant currently. Renewables are looking like a good bet atm.
A fundamental point is that nuclear energy has a lot of potential, ultimately. The debate will always be about investing in nuclear now. Long term, it's hard to imagine nuclear energy doesn't have a place.
In fact, it's surprising that nuclear energy hasn't been a bigger gamechanger. That's my last point. Nuclear energy has been, historically, somewhere between "eh" and disappointing. Applicable where natural gas is inconvenient.
The fact that most nuclear plants them are nuclear powered steam engines... something not right. Generally, nuclear is promising. Particularly, the options available to a region that needs power just aren't that attractive.
As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading.
It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy.
Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower. Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.
It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.
The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge revenue, even huger your profits.
It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that describes who gains what.
Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot. Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.
What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT? These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.
Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where competition between firms is most intense over something that isn't correlated to external value.
Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking. Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their brand.
Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point where the main driver of success, is lawyers.
A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly relevant to external value. The digital industries often start here or reach this point quickly.
Is manufacturing actually the exception?