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Comment by gozo | Hacker News Reader

I think his "objection" is similar to mine in that technology supposedly promises that everyone can be a producer, but instead we are getting even more centralization. We see the same thing in technology, were instead of open standards we get e.g. Facebook. Or in startups were the prospects of actually competing with one of the larger players is almost theoretical at this point.

A lot of people are fine with living for the moment hoping they can make it rich before opportunities shift. Others think more about what future they want to see.

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Why does anyone think technology is something other than a force enabling centralization and consolidation? In a free market, more efficient organizations will win out over less efficient ones. Bigger organizations leverage economies of scale and win out over smaller ones. Organizations this keep getting bigger until diseconomies of scale balance economies of scale. Technology reduces diseconomies of scale, enabling organizations to keep getting more efficient at large sizes.

Hence, Amazon versus the mom and pop shop, Uber versus an independent cab company, Sprig versus the local Chinese delivery, etc. The future is megacorps and technology will enable them.

We do get some verity as a consequence of the long tail. Even though it's not totally independent, people do make a living on e.g. YouTube. While we can say that people have been naive and that fears over things like Microsoft's monopoly in hindsight seem fairly "cute", there's also a long history of dystopian science fiction predicting less romantic futures. Often including megacorporations.

I guess one of the benefits for VCs funding young people straight out of school is how quickly they can make them accept the new normal. It's not even (only) Amazon versus mom and pop shop, it's Amazon vs eBay. It almost seems like the idea of the (unbiased) platform will be a footnote in history at this point.

I don't know if the enabling of greater economies of scale in itself is bad. Instead it's the extreme potential for anti-competitive behavior. I have no idea how to realistically stop the first one from leading to the later one though.

Why does anyone think technology is something other than a force enabling centralization and consolidation?

Because decentralization and democratization were central to the vision we saw in the 1990s when we discovered the public Internet that universities had been building. The early days were all about independence and progress.

I find that ironic because communication technology plainly facilitates centralization. Society was less centralized and grass roots democracy was much more important when people had to ride a horse all day to vote and you didn't have national media markets. The Internet in comparison is going to be what enables World Government.

It's definitely ironic. Speaking for my childhood self, I projected my own naive optimism for the future and Star Trek-fueled faith in humanity onto my visions of the Internet's potential.

Needless to say, I overestimated human nature and underestimated the inertia of trillion dollar institutions. I still want that original vision of a decentralized digital utopia, I just don't think much of it is achievable at a population-wide scale.

> Speaking for my childhood self, I projected my own naive optimism for the future and Star Trek-fueled faith in humanity onto my visions of the Internet's potential.

Hey, I did the same thing and that's why I agree with 'rayiner. Star Trek's utopian future is United Federation of Planets, which is a central world(s) government.

A foreshadow of that was Stafford Beer's Project Cybersyn, implemented for the government of Salvador Allende, which was essentially an attempt to use technology to replace the need for markets, without the rigid soviet bureaucracy.

That said, I don't think the balance is quite that one-sided. Technology centralizes in a geographical sense, since it reduces that barrier, but it also allow for the decentralization by allowing small players to access big markets - for example, tech-aware small farmers around here are actually making a decent income by producing for niches, while before only large players could make anything above subsistence income. At the same time, some of the new behemoths are not quite so - they may operate in many markets, but they're often only a small slice of the transaction, and the barrier to entry is not that great. Uber might be large now, but the scale is more from the cash being dumped into it than from the economies of scale, in my opinion. We'll see how that plays out in a few years.

I agree that there is something off putting about these companies in that, as a cynic, I think they are simply putting a nice whitelabel wrapper on someone else's work. That being said, it is hard to make the case that this is centralization and I have concluded that I believe these businesses are good because:

* Everyone is a private contractor, they are free to make their own choices and work (or not work) for a company.

* They can be flexible service providers and they can create their own reputation.

* Companies like airbnb/uber/sprig simply provide a platform . It is likely that many platforms will arise as for some of these businesses the barriers to entry are pretty low. The workers and producers can be on all platforms or go completely independent but Uber without driver's isn't a 50b company.

* If your options are make some money in the "sharing economy" or make no money in the "real economy" I think you would choose to hop in.

i see this as the new websearch model. Companies provide the best results and ratings, while offering ancillary support to users and charge them instead of showing adverts. the problem is if one gets really good, really powerful and effectively controls a lions share of virtually all of the search results routing all queries and related services through a single provider. lets hope that if that were to happen that not only would they not be evil but that they would good.

> Everyone is a private contractor, they are free to make their own choices and work (or not work) for a company.

I don't know if Sprig hires cooks as contractors but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the same freedom contractors usually have. See the lawsuits that brought Honejoy down, and the class action one against Uber.

I actually think this is the biggest argument in favor of Josephine, that the author didn't bring up. Sprig needs to standardize user experience, so has to walk the line between enforcing policies on their cooks and still treating them as contractors. Josephine is literally a marketplace, where your interaction is directly with that contractor. Much better, from a legal risk question.

I do wonder how Josephine gets around food safety laws.

I've not used them, but I would at least hope people working for them are required to have food safety certs.

You generally can't do that and cook in a home.

Technology never promises anything. People may have presumptions, projections, etc. But technology itself never makes promises. Some individuals may make some claims, but you can get all kids of claims from all kinds of people.

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