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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#21
Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:

* The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.

* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.

* Banks were prohibited from entering riskier businesses, resulting in a compartmentalized system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... : Your bank did not try to sell you investments.

* Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_... .

The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.

Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#22

I’m not sure if that’s true. As a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us. Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks and cable t…

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#23

OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text. It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.

how about reader mode in your browser?

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#24
post #11

This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead. I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).

I'm reminded of the sixties idea of "the man" a lot recently. The man definitely won.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#25

I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…

I don't think he was making claims in the context of a professional mathematician. I think he's a popular guy (because of his status) and he's discussing his own thoughts on modern nihilistic thinking while calling for 3rd spaces on his own social media. Seems...fine? For an individual to that, we don't have to ascribe some degree of reverence to his thoughts anymore than I would yours. That extra reverence is all us…

I'm not saying he shouldn't share it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#26
>My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations

This is basically the thesis of Bertrand de Jouvenal's "On Power" (1945).

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#27
post #23

OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text. It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.

how about reader mode in your browser?

No good in Firefox, unfortunately. Yes, I can use hacks to force reader mode, add CSS to the page, and so forth, but I would prefer a simple checkbox.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#28
Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of themselves.

I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering and shrinking away.

Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations becoming dysfunctional, but not dying because they have sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their replacements become large organizations.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#30
post #11

This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead. I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).

I recently moved away from as much big tech as possible. Canceled Spotify, won't order anything from Amazon, deleted Instagram, trying not to watch as much YouTube Videos etc. Sadly cant move away from WhatsApp and Google yet...

Instead, I am sitting here right now working on a blogging engine so I can create personal blogs to let my friends keep up to date with my shenanigans. Basically give them a chance to participate in my life without enabling them to doom scroll.

I really hope its not only me growing tired of all these addictive unhealthy apps and subscriptions that sneaked into most peoples everyday life. I can only recommend boycotting big tech with CEOs only caring about their own enrichment.

Its only the internet part of life, but this is where I spend most of my time. In real life I try to buy from the local stores as much as possible. However, I do not participate in many other smaller organizations...

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