I mean, the entanglement between technology and politics is difficult to unsee, once one sees it. And the analogy between solar power and grid power, maps cleanly onto 3d printing and manufacturing (trad-printing?). Politics is _most frequently_ about money and the economic surplus, and only rarely about justice or ideology. The funny thing is, that the adjective that is most frequently use to describe markets is "efficient". Yet, whenever technologies that threaten to erode someone's business model appear, the market starts abusing the political infrastructure to introduce inefficiencies and frictions into the adoption of the technologies.

Even though lobbying is not _technically_ illegal, we should probably learn to treat companies that engage in it (to the detriment of society) as if it were. Avoid their products if you can, and get your friend-group to do it as well. Build off-ramps. Maintain and share lists of executives who work at these companies (to put pressure on their reputations -- after all, what is wealth worth, if ordinary people refuse to take your money, or to give you any of their attention?). The market's distinctive feature is that it makes things fungible: currency, goods, and even people. Eliminate or reduce fungibility, and you get a very different kind of dynamic, one that has the potential to reverse the trend of rising inequality (and rent-seeking behavior, and unfair one-sided arrangements, etc) over night.

In fact, the strategy of any company is to find a way to make an entire class of companies/merchants (not competitors) fungible, while making themselves non-fungible. Most moats are built out of the pieces or remnants of someone else's moat.

Maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too hung over to tell.

https://matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/winner-art...

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf