Talk:Before the internet

But as we note in our article about disintermediation, the mere possibility of disintermediation, made possible by the network effect will soon be drowned out by the scale effect. Because while you could set up your own independent secondhand bookstore and sell directly to the world, there is still a tonne of structural faff you need to set up — a website, a payment system, marketing and so on — and you still need to compete with Amazon, and as it turns out Amazon has the scale to build out all that infrastructural faff for you. Therefore the free, counter-cultural, anarcho-syndicalist state of a nascent network is is not a stable state. Quickly monopolists will move in. They will dominate Thomas monetise karma squeeze out we can gazelles, and curiously channel behaviours so that there is less common not more diversity of product. The same is true of the multiverse, the crypto universe and any other libertarian Randian utopia that threatens whatever hegemony happens to prevail. It will settle into the same rent-seeking system of grift as proceeded it, usually, only worse. The unregulated universe is a democracy where votes equate to dollars accrued, and therefore skews through time to ever greater monopoly. The only natural bound concentration of so extreme has to be meaningless: if the proportion of individuals holding all the wealth becomes too small, wealth ceases to mean anything and the nasty, brutal and short Hobbesian rules of life take over, as Tsar Nicholas might, had he not been shot, tell you.

The artificial constraint here is parliamentary democracy based as it is always to one person one vote.