Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Nice post, I would like to ad a super-category/type: companies of various kind that think to be independent companies in a "free market" while are only slave that works for few bigger one.

To explain this mega-pattern I start to the bottom: in the past we have had blacksmiths that build their own tools regularly, it was common in chemistry industry produce in-house any "glass made lab equipment", it was common between carpenters to build most of their tools, these were mostly made of wood and blades are made by the nearby blacksmith that also buy wood stuff from the carpenter and I can keep going for long. Now without tools essentially designed and made by very few subjects (yep, there are tons of electric/pneumatic/... tools producers but they do not really produce them, only design few aspects around pre-made components) nobody can work anymore.

In IT it's no different: in the past we have had many different architectures, software etc, now anything is built essentially around ARM or x86 and mostly around very few key software components.

Long story short: most type of companies you identify are not free player of a free market but only lego player that depend on lego brick suppliers that are more and more few, more and more powerful.

This is brilliant and is true across so many industries outside of software. I don't think there's anything "wrong" with it, but it seems like we get fewer choices every year and that doesn't feel like progress.

Who knows how things will end up because of the state of things. It'll be interesting to look back ten or twenty years from now and see where our current trajectory took us.

Thanks, Well... IMO Being interdependent is not much a wrong thing until such interdependency became too unbalanced between too many that depend on a subject and to few subjects but to evolve we need few things: diversity is one of them, without diversity interaction goes down and without interaction good ideas hardly came up and spread.

Another problem is actual kind of private polarization, I mean if we end up after an "evolution cycle" with few universities that essentially hold, build and spread knowledge is not much a problem as long as universities are public/open it's only a matter of how distance we have to travel to study well. But when knowledge start to be concentrated in private hands things change for worse.

Imaging few scenarios: what if we all communicate trough $bigEnterprise services and $bigEnterprise have extensive data mining knowledge? How easy for them became knowing anything that going to happen between anyone else and so direct their investments for their own good possibly against anyone else interest? What if our communications relay on "aggregators" from such big subject so that it can spread certain news and reduce diffusion of other news?

An ancient proverb say that power corrupt, when we get "corrupted" as a society it's dangerous but It's a thing we can handle between us all, when we get "natural dictatorship" because of centralization well... It's easy to understand that's not good for us.

> diversity is one of them, without diversity interaction goes down and without interaction good ideas hardly came up and spread

Diversity will sacrifice efficiency and that's unlikely in current capitalistic scenario where pinching every ounce of performance from tools and employees is the norm.

True but we are humans, not machines, we work to live not live to work.

"But artisans are complete only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to make 'workers' of them."

-- A Thousand Plateaus

That really hasn't been true for a long time

I was trying to think of a pattern that matches my company (an implementer/consultancy/development house for large SAAS tools), and this fits perfectly. No matter how well my company gels, we are all dependent on a few logos on our main page and our senior management is at the mercy of a higher power.

I think this idea is explored in Srncinek's book "Platform Capitalism"

https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Capitalism-Theory-Redux-Srni...

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