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Comment by noad | Hacker News Reader

It's starting to feel like we just built the Borg from Star Trek. Everything bigger, everything more centralized, everything more efficient and streamlined and outsource everything you're not good at. Economies of scale so massive you can argue they are just monopolies. Every new venture needs to scale to billions or it's not worthwhile. Some competition and innovation, but mostly just growth throw acquisition and assimilation.

Wasn't the Borg devastated by a virus?

TNG was such a good show.

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I agree. Somehow we should discourage large companies and create a system that favors more smaller companies. I really don't see the value in having huge companies like Apple or Amazon that need to absorb more and more businesses to keep growing. They hinder innovation, trample over smaller companies but have the power to shape countries' policies to their advantage.

In the past there was a size limit to managing a company but unfortunately technology allows for more and more central control so the trend to ever bigger companies will probably continue.

Cyberpunk called this back in the 70's, 80's - Corporations come to rule the world and states become less and less relevant.

I sometimes feel like we live in that world already just without the cool neon/fashions.

Drones, militarisation of the police, massive corporations that are basically immune to governments on a basic level.

I think a fair amount of cyberpunk also had an eye to the past, with the East India company and others like it serving as reference points to the mega corps of the “future”

The East India company is gone, the railroads and US steel aren’t what they once were. And this age shall pass too.

Just like how the breakup of bell liberated us from oppressive telecoms monopolizing our neighborhoods, and fostered competitive innovation in this field, right? It doesn't matter how many companies there are in an industry if the functional consequences on your life by that industry as a whole are the exact same if they were a single monolith. If it quacks like a duck...

You say the railroads are a bygone era, just drive through San Marino to see what railroad money has bought and continues to buy to this very day. This wealth did not evaporate, it has only grown.

> just without the cool neon/fashions.

We have EL wire and plenty of awesome cyberpunk fashion is available on places like Etsy. I fully support making cyberpunk fashion a thing. If I have to live in a dystopia, I at least want to look good doing it.

All that, but no Smartwheel skateboards yet.

There are electric skateboards and that crazy onewheel thing. I've seen a very cyberpunk ebike rider in my neighborhood. No shirt, full gas mask, rides straight up the steepest hills and will stare you down until you look away first.

>I sometimes feel like we live in that world already just without the cool neon/fashions.

I honestly think we'll see a cyberpunk renaissance (in terms of aesthetic) starting later this year and definitely in 2021. Not just because a game like Cyberpunk 2077 is coming out, but because of things like the Cybertruck (https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck) - it looks outlandish now, but I believe the designers knew what they were doing and understand trends and aesthetics better than most non-professionals.

Then there are upcoming massive Hollywood releases like the Matrix 4 coming in 2021, as well as a reboot of Videodrome and Akira, plus games like Watchdogs: Legion etc.

More mainstream culture is also embracing cyberpunk at the moment. Take the rapper Lil Nas X - https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/45887/1/lil-nas-x... or the musician Grimes - https://www.pcgamer.com/grimes-reveals-how-her-cyberpunk-207...

Hell, this is a bag from Louis Vuitton that just screams "cyberpunk": https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617427/louis-vuitton-ro...

To be fair, Apple generally buys small companies and adds their capabilities to their toolbelt, rather than growing its size through acquisition and Amazon is similar.

Now if you mean LINES of business, then yes, they both regularly expand into new lines of business and then dominate them, either in skimming the profit (ala Apple) or just altogether (Amazon.)

> Somehow we should discourage large companies and create a system that favors more smaller companies

Regulation is strongly, negatively correlated to competition within any industry.

There are many ways governments already encourage or discourage certain behaviors, be it taxes, IP laws or other regulation. Right now they are written for the winners (big companies) but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Let's really dig into this. Monopolies are bad, but I wouldn't clamp down on the size of companies per se. There is a much more clever thing to do:

Managers wanting to seem self-important, and speculation-prone owners, are too obsessed with growth and seek to maximize revenue. Even maximizing profit is still meh, because that still creates some incentive for growth. What we really want companies to maximize is profit / revenue, or profit / employee. In other words, productivity for productivity's sake.

BTW, co-ops are generally great, and already have the incentive to maximize profit / employee. Perfect!

But how do we get non-employee owned companies to do the same? Tax them based off of revenue rather than profit. Then they will only grow if they don't need to burn productivity in the process. Yes, capital expenditures no longer have the nice side benefit of reducing profit, but the incentive for productivity makes up for it.

Also, it's fair because stupid things like income tax are effective taxing revenue rather than profit, and finally it's also way simpler to levy / harder to evade.

I am all for increased productivity but there are two big issues there even putting aside fallacies about efficency and growth being bad.

One is that it promotes a skewed specialization on the high margin while neglecting the lower margins which may be important and essentially by definition are in high demand if they got big enough for that economy or scale in the first place. It is largely inequitable as it discourages the low end from showing up at all.

Two is that it inherently misvalues resources based upon what it sees as revenue vs not. It echoes the Soviet mistakes in thinking of their workers as serfs with free labor and new tools as expensive because they cost revenue. Said revenue would continue down the chain as one's gains are another's losses that need to rise virally down every logistical step leading to needless repetition to "start from scratch" with vertical intergration.

> Somehow we should discourage large companies and create a system that favors more smaller companies.

At risk of a very low-information me-too comment...

Yes, this. I'm finding it very hard to place myself on the "political spectrum" to even label what my beliefs are or find allies to join forces with.

If you could sum up my (economic at least) political thoughts on the matter it would be "whatever system results in lots of small merchants competing in a market that does not allow for huge monopolies to exist". I want thousands of 100 person companies competing, not one giant Google. How realistic that is, is of course a very open-ended question - and certainly some problems exist with the theory when you need to get "scale" projects done that require large organizations of people.

I still have no idea what political or economic system that is, but I believe that's the balance where we optimize both for economic security as well as the human need for agency.

For now, I simply try to vote anti-monopoly as much as I can, but in recent decades that doesn't mean much as no one is even talking about breaking up these giant telecoms/media companies/etc.

This will probably be very unpopular but I think progressive taxation of companies would work. This would be disruptive for a while but I think over time smaller companies would thrive in such an environment.

Herd immunity is a questionable strategy, so I guess you could say... resistance is futile.

To be fair, the Borg got beat by a unified, centralized and streamlined society.

>To be fair, the Borg got beat by a unified, centralized and streamlined society.

Hardly. The Federation is, well, a federation. A loosely collectivized body of disparate groups, each with their own goals but united through a common cause. This was one of the central tenets of TNG; that diversity is strength.

I'd say that Starfleet is pretty unified though. Individual diversity was absolutely strength, but Starfleet was unified, and when it was divided that was major plot points.

Did Starfleet ever build two ships to the same design?

Yup. Just thinking off the top of my head in TNG for the Galaxy Class alone there was the the USS Galaxy, USS Enterprise and USS Yamato. There were also a ton more visible during the Dominion War.

As an example:

https://youtu.be/CUQ2nmKNH3Y?t=79

Plenty of Galaxies, Excelsiors, and Mirandas (or maybe variants like Soyuz) flying around.

I think GP was referring to Hugh, which was the idea of one person and not actually a virus (they decided against that plan before the end of the episode as well). But also there were various events during Voyager - at least twice the Borg were stopped by an infectious agent. Icheb's people for example were reduced to a bunch of farmers with genetic engineering skill, before they created their pathogen. Then in the finale, it was Admiral Janeway going rogue, not with the backing of any society.

The borg were beaten by a show that was desperately running out of steam and enthusiasm, falling back to mediocre writing to wrap up plots and endings.

The Borg were defeated by a rogue, time traveling captain who had no qualms with violating her unified society's rules to kill the Borg.

Introduction of the individual eventually get them. Episode is "I, Borg", season 5 - Geordie names him Hugh.

I'm not a nerd who remembers all this Star Trek stuff - I just watched the episode a few days ago (because I have TNG on repeat)

Unironically huge fan of this phrasing: "It's not like I'm obsessed, I just watch it 24/7"

Yeah it has an interesting nuanced apathy to it.

Not a high level of enthusiasm but considered the current best option. I know in High School I often went with identical breakfast despite being sick of it because I found others would leave me feeling fatigued before the late lunch hour block I was scheduled to have.

Good, we wouldn't want any nerds at this site.

I mean, all those economies of scale either result in lower prices (say meat packing and feed lots), or allow extra R&D to make the product better (say, image recognition in Google Photos).

Decentralization, redundancy, shock absorption is something you have to explicitly value and pay for (with lower quality and/or higher prices) and I don't think this is more than a niche preoccupation. Maybe this pandemic will change things, but do you really wanna bet against lower prices?

I'm not going to bet against lower prices, but I am going to bet on low-overhead validation and fault-tolerance going forward.

Who's "we"? Uber?

Society, I imagine

We as in the audience here, I think. The tech industry.

We humans and our economies, I'd imagine. Because the problem isn't just Uber. It isn't even just tech. The fear of meat shortages is because we've condensed to very few, very large meat distributors, and a couple of them had outbreaks. I know less about this first-hand, but previous comments on HN have detailed how optimized the toilet paper supply chain is such that it can't absorb people working from home all of a sudden. Bigger, more standardized, more efficient, ruthlessly so, and then can't handle a virus. Borg-like.

The Borg was heavily implied to be a caricature of Western Capitalism. The similarity is not accidental.

You will adapt to service us. You're going to become a drone. Resistance is futile.

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