All of which would improve almost immediately with competition.
I have posted here for maybe five years. But I felt a twinge of nostalgia, so I decided to check out the latest headlines.
So I see this headline and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed about the world during my absence.
So then I see your comment and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed in the discourse, either.
The competition-porn security blanket was a cute idea back in the early 1980s. I was there when the Apple II, the TRS-80, and Commodore Pet were busy trying to set the world on fire. And I've watched the evolution of this space very carefully ever since. As a blue-blood digital native it's the main story of my life and times. My fascination with digital electronics began in the early 1970s. My attitude when the original home-computing toys arrived wasn't: Where did this come from? No, it was: Where have you been all these long, painful, pining year?
This was all supposed to set the world free. That's the story we always tell entering into a new age.
What do I see around me now? Five or so trillion dollar corporations dictating nearly every damn thing about this technology is developed, how it is delivered, and how it is consumed.
This is the house that competition built.
What were these companies competing for all these long years? What was the final brass ring? I'll tell you, and it should be obvious: To gain the monolithic scale to collect monopoly rent not just from their products, but also from the very context in which those products are rendered relevant to our psyches.
Sure, competition is a magic growth hormone, considered narrowly. But surely there's enough water under the bridge at this point that "considered narrowly" ought to be consider harmful. No?
So let's step back and not consider competition narrowly. What are the systemic realities of naive faith in competition?
The systemic reality is that competition injected at the bottom (a good thing) merely kicks the can down the road. The corporations then compete to rise above the discipline of competition. Maybe we double down and inject competition again, this time bigger, purer, bolder than before. Then the cycle repeats again. This time with even bigger corporations competing to rise above competition as titans, behemoths, and leviathans.
Is the government succeeding at taming these giants? Do Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook practice all that much legitimate competition? Here's a skill-testing question. Which of those five corporations is not known for commanding a primary vertical? Google has search and YouTube and the gated Android store. Scratch one. Amazon has AWS and the gated Kindle store. Scratch two. Apple has the iPhone and the gated iOS app store. Scratch three. Microsoft has government workflow integration and the PC gaming community. Scratch four. Facebook has social. Scratch five.
Even to define these verticals as duopolies requires athletic feats of imagination. I happen to use YouTube as my main social platform, and I've never had an account on Facebook. Do I strike you as a typical consumer? Or the 1% of the 1%?
I'm not just speaking here in cliche. I'm extremely well versed on free market principles, free market principles, and the theory of systems, including economic systems and human discourse systems. I spent over 500 hours consuming neoliberal podcasts featuring every possible flavour of neoliberal guest.
On a parallel track, over the past year I traced pretty much the entire evolution of postmodern thought from Hegel and Marx forward to the present times. There's actually quite a lot of neoliberal theory I'm sympathetic toward. I wish I could say the same for postmodernism, but that's another can of worms.
I like much of neoliberalism, but I'm not stupid. I can see the world plainly as it exists plainly before my eyes. We injected competition, it was wonder and vigorous for many decades, but finally and we got was monopoly on a larger scale than we've ever seen before.
What do you suppose the host talks about after conducting over 500 hours of interviews with hundreds of different guests, on mostly the same small set of topics?
Here's an eternal theme: If only we did it right, this time.
You see, every attempt to reform the world that lead to the world remaining the same as ever, only more so, shared the same universal flaw: We didn't go big enough to make $purity cure $horse. This is the one true universal excuse. It was used for socialism. It was used for market capitalism. It was used for every darn thing in between.
So the silver lining in creating worse monopolies than we've ever had before is that we forced them to make us a lot of nice toys in getting there. So I guess we have actually reformed monopoly to some degree. Once upon a time, monopolies came into existence without hardly making anyone a new toy worth having.
Okay, so what's another topic that burns eternal when you discuss the same small set of neoliberal principles for 500 hours?
Education reform. Sound familiar? It surely must. You see to be an expert, with an expert diagnosis, which in your unique genius you've managed to distill down to one word. Competition. Quite the magic trick there, I must say.
Here's a small thing. Charter schools, as normally implemented, are yet another government program. It's a government program with an extra degree of freedom inside compared to the normal landscape. But it's still a government program.
How do Charter schools mainly compete? For the quality of the parents. They often say that they are neutral. But then the application process is so arduous, that only the most truly devoted 1% of parents make it all the way through. So many meeting you have to attend with the school admissions people. What kind of family can organize that? Either a family with means, or a family with fervent devotion to the educational cause.
The vast majority of superior Charter school outcomes comes from this factor alone. Education concerns human capital. Nothing improves human capital like a sorting hat that selects only the right people, for whatever metric you wish to optimize.
Actual value-add in education has mostly proven to be a long unicorn hunt. You can figure out who your best students are easily. No matter how you teach, your best students will remain your best students. For the rest of your students, things are far more hit and miss. One teaching method might connect with one student, whereas a different method might connect with a different student. Neither of these were A students to begin with. And rarely do they become A students at the end. (There are of course some spectacular exceptions if you pray at the alter of N=1.)
Because building a school with better human capital is so much easier than improved the human capital you're stuck with, almost all the best charter schools have mostly done the former. Mostly. There are marginal gains to be had by getting the rest right. Marginal.
So what happens? The schools get good at lying about the reality that they are competing for human capital, and make a big story about how they've improved the capital of their students during their time at the school.
I think it's Finland that has gone furthest in education reform. This was also a competition for human capital, but they moved this into the teaching ranks, rather than the student ranks.
Education is very nearly the hardest degree program in Finland to get into. It would be maybe a small step down from medical school. Dullard teachers in Finland are rare birds. The students have far less class time, are given far less formal homework, but they work hard anyway, and consistently score highly in the world tables.
South Korea does everything exactly the other way. Stories are written about high school students in Korea jumping out of windows. After you sleep through most of the official school day, off you go to the second, private sector school day. And all they ever graduate are narrow technocrats. It's a disaster on wheels.
Blowing smoke up the ass of competition sure beats having to know something about the real world. Makes you sound smart, without typing your fingers off, like I've just done.
Which is why I finally moved on from Slashdot to greener pastures.
