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“Tech exceptionalism” is the sin of considering that the traditional guidelines don’t apply to expertise.
The thought which you could lose cash on each transaction however make it up with scale (taking a look at you, Uber)? Pure tech exceptionalism. The thought which you could take an unjust system like racist policing practices and repair it with expertise? Exceptionalism. The concept tech itself can’t be racist as a result of computer systems are simply doing math, and math can’t be racist? Utter exceptionalism.
Tech critics are often good at mentioning tech exceptionalism after they see it, however there’s one tech exceptionalist blind spot. There’s one place the place tech boosters and critics come collectively to sing the identical music.
Each tech’s greatest boosters and its most savage critics agree that tech leaders—the Zuckerbergs, Jobses, Bezoses, Musks, Gateses, Brins, and Pages—are sensible. Now, the boosters will let you know that these males are good geniuses whose singular imaginative and prescient and management have remodeled the world, whereas the critics will let you know that these are evil geniuses whose singular imaginative and prescient and management have remodeled the world … for the more severe.
However one factor all of them agree on: These guys are geniuses.
I get it. The empires our tech bro overlords constructed are a few of the most precious, influential corporations in human historical past. They’ve larger budgets than many countries. Their customers outnumber the populations of any nation on Earth.
What’s extra, it wasn’t at all times thus. Previous to the mid-2000s, tech was a dynamic, chaotic roil of recent startups that rose to prominence and have become family names in a number of brief years, solely to be vanquished simply as they have been peaking, when a brand new firm entered the market and toppled them.
In some way, these new giants—the businesses which have, within the phrases of New Zealand software program developer Tom Eastman, remodeled the web into “a gaggle of 5 web sites, every consisting of screenshots of textual content from the opposite 4”—interrupted that cycle of “disruption.” They didn’t simply get large, they stayed large, after which they bought larger.
How did these tech corporations reach sustaining the dominance that so lots of their predecessors failed to realize? Was it their imaginative and prescient? Was it their management?
Nope.
If tech have been led by distinctive geniuses whose singular imaginative and prescient made it unimaginable to unseat them, then you definately’d anticipate that the construction of the tech trade itself can be distinctive. That’s, you’d anticipate that tech’s mass-extinction occasion, which turned the wild and wooly net into a number of big web sites, was distinctive to tech, pushed by these storied geniuses.
However that’s not the case in any respect. Practically each trade on the planet appears to be like just like the tech trade: dominated by a handful of big corporations that emerged out of a cataclysmic, 40-year die-off of smaller corporations which both failed or have been folded into the surviving giants.
Right here’s a partial record of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries the place between one and 5 corporations account for the overwhelming majority of enterprise: prescribed drugs, well being insurers, home equipment, athletic footwear, protection contractors, e-book publishing, booze, drug shops, workplace provides, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, automobile elements, bottle caps, airways, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots, and sweet.
If tech’s consolidation is all the way down to the distinctive genius of its leaders, then they’re a part of a bumper crop of outstanding geniuses who all managed to rise to prominence of their respective corporations after which steer them into positions the place they crushed, purchased, or sidelined all their rivals over the previous 40 years or so.
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