> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.

Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.

I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b?

- Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?

- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?

There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades later. The same could be said for all the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few years.

The reason governments no longer fight huge corporations or even clear monopolies is also due to heavy globalization. If one government destroys a monopoly (a global mega-corporation) in its country, it may strengthen the monopoly (and the global mega-corporation) in another country. So the line of thinking is, "We don't like this nasty monopoly, but at least it's our monopoly."

> The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network

For the record, this system where AT&T was broken up between long distance and regional local companies (called the Regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs) was a terrible solution to anticompetitive behavior and is one of many examples (some of which you also quote) about how the US is terrible at breaking up monopolies.

The problem is the RBOCs simply became regional monopolies and regional monopolies aren't really any better than national monopolies. By the 90s the RBOCs could become long distance providers by meeting certain criteria and of course the whole system was gamed.

What needed to happen is the exact same thing that needs to happen with national ISPs today: municipalities need to own, maintain and build last-mile infrastructure.

> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.

They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can expect little support from the government (and surely no big subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many small business owners are extremely tough since larger stores were allowed to stay open while the small businesses were not.

It's the natural result of tech gaining value, and a lot of it staying closed source: Once you are scaling, scaling very high isn't that difficult once you have the best offering, and when you are big you can do optimizations that would be seen as wasteful at a small scale. streaming service that has wide reach isn't that different when it is dealing with 10 million or 100 million subscribers, but dedicating a guy for 3 months to save 2% of your costs through some arcane fiddling is much more profitable when you have 100 million, and then your costs per subscriber can be lower.

We also have plenty of problems that are natural monopolies. Take, for instance, credit card fraud detection. High level detection involves giving a risk score to a transaction. I sure can give a better fraud score if I see almost every transaction this card makes, and I have a very high percentage of visibility of all transactions in the world, than if I had to do the calculation by just knowing what, say, my boardgaming website has seen. The smaller contender has to be so much better algorithmically to be able to compete with a massive advantage in data quantity and quality.

And that's the real problem we have with monopolies right now: The bigger company often doesn't have a huge advantage because they are making extra shady deals, or they have to compete less, but because being bigger makes them more efficient in some ways that are completely above board.

This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.

> * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.

It's worth noting that Bell's size and reach allowed it to create Bell Labs, and the subsequent breakup led to their eventual demise.

This is the classic tradeoff. (it's similar to the bias variance tradeoff, or fox and hedgehog analogy)

Monolithic systems are scalable and efficient when well-governed, but brittle under errors or bad leadership (e.g. China closing its ports in the 14th century had centuries-long repercussions).

Distributed systems are less efficient but more resilient to errors and poor governance.

It’s not always one or the other though. American founding fathers found a right set of tradeoffs in designing checks and balances (like separation of powers) and federalism structures that harden the system against bad governance (though this is under strain today).

Antitrust and competition law certainly play an important role, but the examples you cite have not impacted the ability of what we have since the 1970s called "startups" to enter the market in competition with monopolies. The more recent attempts to block "predatory acquisitions" might be an example of antitrust/competition policy that is aimed at achieving the balance between small and large that Terry has in mind here, but I believe it's worth asking: Was the ability for groups to form startups to compete with the incumbents ever really harmed by these so-called "predatory acquisitions"?

Personally, I see the economic efficiency argument for having a relatively small number (say 2 or 3) large organizations that maintain key "distribution platforms". We don't need twenty different social media websites. Antitrust/competition law can play an important role in ensuring that everybody gets access to these platforms on the same basic terms — no favoritism. But I don't know that we need to prevent acquisitions of new apps that can then be bundled into services offered by one or more of those platforms -- at least not to achieve the balance between "small" and "large" that Terry seems to have in mind here.

Rather, I think what we need to aggressively protect is the incentive that small groups have to form and fund startups. In general, I think we're doing fine on the economic side right now. An exception might be the recent acquisitions of founders independent of their coworkers — this presents a profound threat to the startup ecosystem. But by and large the system seems to be working fine.

But is that true of political "startups" — i.e., new interest groups that form to pursue specific policy agendas, which might then be able to syndicate eventually even into new political parties? Of that I'm less certain. It sure seems like the last year or two have been trending toward less political freedom.

Better yet, the 7-7-7 rule.

> The FCC's 7-7-7 rule was a 1953 regulation that limited a single entity from owning no more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations nationwide to promote broadcast diversity. This rule was a response to concerns about media consolidation and was eventually eased, then replaced by the 12-12-12 rule in 1984 and later abolished by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

If you're wondering how we got to the universe where every piece of mass media that's blasted at you is owned by <5 entities, look no further.

So much for diversity of speech or a marketplace of opinions. Speech is actively being funneled into a single box, and the box is owned and operated by a monoculture of media billionaires.

This forum in particular wails and gnashes its teeth anytime that big tech exercises control over publishing, while turning a blind eye to this rot in trad-media - which is a thousand times worse.

If I were made king for a day, the first thing I'd do would be to break up these conglomerates. You'd either be allowed to be a media conglomerate with the GDP of a small country and a reach of a hundred million people running an agnostic platform, or you're allowed to exercise editorial control. Pick one, I don't care which, but you have to pick one.

(That this isn't a popular position among people seeking to maximize speech and diversity of ideas is perhaps revealing of their real values - the promotion of the monoculture pushed by trad-media.)

I would point out that, regardless of the US federal government's stance on monopolies, any legislation or civil action toward that end would be far less applicable today, because of globalization.

If your country prevents any domestic tech companies from becoming trillion-dollar behemoths, but such things are still permitted in at least one other country with a similarly-sized economy to yours, then that just means that all your smaller domestic tech companies are going to be outcompeted by the foreign trillion-dollar behemoth selling into your domestic market.

I dunno. It's not at all clear what "small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly" even means, over what time, and in what society. The post itself, as a piece of thinking, seems, charitably, a vague sentiment that might later turn into something that could be analyzed.

In general terms, in the US, in living memory, I'm not sure that large organizations occupy more space in people's day to day lives than smaller ones.

In the US, since say the 1990s, the percentage of people, say, working in small businesses are roughly the same. The number of local non-profits has exploded since over that time. The trend towards media consolidation that had occurred over the prior century would begin to be unwound, and tech consolidation would only partially reverse this. We have far more access to diverse points of view than most people did for most of the 20th century.

If there is there is shift, I suspect, it's not about where people work or interact, it seems mostly that businesses, small and large, feel free to dominate people, in a way that was considered in bad form prior to Reagan/Thatcher and the fall of communism as an alternative to the West that would be appealing to post-colonial societies.

But that's just a notion as vague as the original post.

And the reasons for this are increasingly clear. In a globalized world, you need large-scale organizations to compete. Smaller nations are increasingly forced to become highly specialized in a few specific industries, often where companies are sold to major firms from allied countries (large parts of europe or israel, singapore), or you end up with individual companies constituting a significant portion of the national GDP (korea).

The way in which the US is able to weld such power on the world stage, especially with the rise of China is we don't constantly break up every rising business.

These actions were a direct consequence of the situation at the end of the 19th century. People here often forget that the Sherman act was a regulation against trusts, large integrated companies, and not monopolies.

We knew from the start that large companies were bad for democracy and the civil society. The issue is just that the elite decided in the 80s that their economic interests trumped the public interested and the democrat kept doing what Reagan started.

When you put it that way, the US constitution itself is about limiting the power of the federal government against the states (and individuals, in the bill of rights)

Nevertheless, state-level power, for a state government or business, is still far above the kind of sub-Dunbar number (~120 people) organisations that Tao is talking about, where everyone might know each other and the network can be organised by reputation and trust rather than through state-level laws or contracts (and the attendant forms of impersonal bureaucratic enforcement that come with those).

Edit: I don't mean to object to the general theme of your comment which is that power has become increasingly concentrated and unchecked, just to point out that even if those limitations that you mention had been retained it would still represent a society where the role of immediate trust-based relationships is diminished or eroded relative to the previous situation where these were the primary aspects of people's livelihoods and security

Recently I realized that US are very close to a centrally planned economy. Meta wasted 50B on metaverse, which like how much Texas spends on healthcare. Now the "AI" investments seems dubious. You could fund 1000+ projects with this kinds of money. This is not an effective capital allocation.

Bell really really wanted this: It also proposed that it be freed from a 1956 antitrust consent decree, then administered by Judge Vincent P. Biunno in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, that barred it from participating in the general sale of computers

I was so used to my American bank not actively selling me snake oil that I stupidly bought a very expensive snake-oil subscription from my German bank when I was living there. Ended up with a warehouse full of snake oil (metaphorically speaking) and a sunk-cost fallacy before I finally figured out they just had a strategic partnership with Snake Oil GmbH so my account representative got a commission on my stupidity.

Banks being only local was utterly horrible for the economy. You had many small banks completely depended on one region and a local supply shock would kill all the local banks as well.

This regulation didn't happen to prevent monopolies, it was done to create monopolies. Banks didn't want other banks from other regions to compete against their costumers.

Canada had larger branch banks that were much more stable.

> * Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries:

Yes and often what was defined as a monopoly and what an oligopoly and what was defined as 'to large' was determined by what industry had a competitor that they couldn't defeat and also had friends in high places.

The original state level anti-trust actually came out of butchers that wanted protection from centralized butchers that could use special railcars to transport frozen meat, instead of doing localized butchering.

So a lot of the history that many idolize is just a different form of companies using state power against each other.

Thanks, this is an amazing historical note! Will learn in detail. My intuition advises that efficient antimonopoly is the battle we are losing..

Notably all of these choices and policies didn’t fall from the trees, but were come to after seeing what happened in their absence.

Naive techies like this don’t realize crypto is even more centralized

The Bell breakup was stupid. If you have some competing companies, but they meet up, and agree to divide the country into regions, and then choose to not compete with each other, that's not at all free market capitalism. Capitalism requires competition in the market in order for market forces to actually work! Cars is another example where, in the modern framing, the dealership model is bullshit and manufacturers should be able to sell direct to consumers. And it does make a certain amount of sense. But if the argument is for smaller organizations, the fact is that local dealerships are smaller than, say, Ford, and so if the argument is that the dealership model sucks because the car dealerships have too much power and are abusing it, taking power away from them and ceeding it to an even bigger organization doesn't make a lick of sense.

That doesn't mean those regulations or structures were intended to be a permanent fixture. Similarly, Bretton Woods was not intended to maintain gold at $35 per ounce.

The world is a place where some development requires large amounts of capitalization. That is also a competitive advantage. No-one cares about any of those previous bullet points if they are generally happy in their lives.

When the SEC brought their first large scale financial fraud indictment, no-one cared. (Investors Overseas Service (IOS), $224 million and International Controls Corporation (ICC)). It was pursued because someone stole money from the wealthy. However, many years later, one of the two fraudsters was revealed to be a notorious Russian agent that worked for the Office of Strategic Services in London during WW2. He would walk files of Ukrainian sources out of the OSS office (obtained from MI6!) and down the street to the Russian embassy. Those Ukrainian sources later disappeared.

The world is a sketchy/dodgy/evil place. Partitioning it into chunks may provide some temporary benefit, but the real world does not evolve that way. Look at Carlos Slim, Mexican Cartels, Russian oligarchs, META is on track for $80 billion net profit this year ...

Oh also, two of the Bretton Woods principal architects, also Russian agents. One had their US passport revoked and US citizenship revoked in 1954. He was the chief economic advisor to Franklin Roosevelt. No-one cared about him either, and he essentially envisioned the world of monetary policies that we have today. He lived out the remainder of his life very well off, advising Colombia on their monetary policy. In 1995, he was revealed to be a prolific Russian agent from KGB archives researchers and authors.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/21/internationalc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Controls_Corpora...

https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591496adadd7b049345e5c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauchlin_Currie

I feel point 1 is a more specific example of point 4. Point 3 makes sense because banks are handling peoples money, I don't know enough about point 2.

However point 1 & 4 is more about market power than anything else, point 3 is more about ensuring confidence in basic financial services aren't undermined by risk taking which feels like a separate point.

Sometimes for reasons other than foul play or a poorly design regulatory system, there's value in an organisation being large as it has increasing returns to scale, it can produce more output with the same input compared to smaller organisations. It's also unfortunately one way how monopolies form, easiest example being utility companies because there's also a case not to break them up as well as they can provide the service at a cheaper cost, but will they? Which makes the problem harder to solve then just breaking these firms up.

In NSW Australia (New South Wales the state Sydney is based in), the problem was approached by creating an institution called IPART which basically determines prices/rates for both public and private monopolies. In Sydney there are private motor ways and tunnels, IPART determines the rates, and the water company (Sydney Water) largely has its rates also decided by IPART, same goes for council rates (tax on land/properties, etc). IPART is far from perfect, it answers to the Premier (the Governor) so there's a risk of it becoming an instrument of popularism, but this means Sydney water is chronically underfunded (and water rates aren't even that high), this has second order effects like Sydney Water dragging its feet on committing to providing infrastructure. There are massive fixed costs with starting a water utility firm so it impacts stuff like residential construction reducing overall house supply, which is a problem in Sydney when housing is so expensive.

Sometimes these larger entities form as a result of government created entry barriers, in America it's easier to get small business funding than it is in Australia. Also in Australia we have laws about prohibiting pharmacies opening too close to each other, which is incredibly dumb. There's a very strong Pharmacy lobby, not big pharma but instead drug stores which might be a uniquely Australian phenomena. But it means there's no drug store near my local train station in an area that was recently redeveloped, or a single Pharmacy in areas like Sydney Olympic Park, but 10 in a smaller older area such Granville.

In Australia we have 2-3 large grocery stores (Coles, Woolworths and to a lesser extent IGA), a 4th exists to an even lesser extent but has struggled to grow and has been struggling in part due to the land planning regulatory framework. Most cities in the US have something similar, but in NSW it's in overdrive plays a big part in why housing is so unaffordable as it largely determines how much floor space is allowed on each lot and how tall buildings can be. But back to groceries, it's very difficult for ALDI to get permission to build as many grocery stores to compete due to energy barriers imposed by the planning system. If you own the land, you need to first get a planning proposal in to rezoned and planning controls updated, then you need to make a seperate development applicaition which can easily take 5 years.

I believe parking minimums in the USA can have a similar effect, as many cities require different levels of free parking for different land use.

Sometimes over regulating things can result in a lack competition, and it's not always a result of a lack of government intervention. And sometimes there's value in allowing organisations to be large. And when it is a problem sometimes the solution isn't always break them up.

The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes.

The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession").

One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.

I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)

I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people.

Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it.

Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year.

I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.

People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces?

One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!

> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born

Historically at least I think we can find many examples of the opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less around social activities and more around aiding business and society.

Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread the risk around and help out each other.

For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks home which is associated with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have been branches all across Canada.

After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after that when legalized again became much less relevant because its need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian dance.

> And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.

Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local support groups when times get tough.

Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our current social order which is tearing it apart.

I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed.

What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore.

We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000.

MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.

Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards. I think technology has reduced the need for economic/political actors to organize via hyper-local blocks.

> Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year

The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible. The more I get in contact with everything American, the more left I lean.

>> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good

By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good.

From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation in local community.

Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?

There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.

> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.

I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.

I would concur. It's my observation from 20 years of watching and participating - the volunteers are the retired, the wealthy, the underemployed, and the stay at home parent. "Normal" working people are not volunteering and handling the complexity of doing these things, they are at their work. I can only imagine that prior generations had the working parent participate through the free time freed up by the stay at home parent.

It suggests to me that there is a long running flaw. I believe Bowling Alone pegs the inflection point in the late 50s or early 60s, ('57?) and the substantative issues came about with the generation hitting the workforce in something like 1960. So the kids born in the 1935-1945 era had something in their culture materially different than prior eras that kept on spreading.

Interesting take. What is the market-serving product you mentioned?

This is certainly true in Silicon Valley. It provides an interesting tentative answer to the question that has been posed by some AI optimists about what people are going to do with all their leisure time after the AI is able to do their jobs for them.

Francis Fukuyama mentions this in one his books -- The Origins of Political Order or Political Order and Political Decay, I can't remember which -- and argues that this is an important part of how American democracy was workable (and British democracy too, by the way).

Other thinkers with related ideas are mentioned by other commenters:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45364562

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45365419

As far as I can remember, Fukuyama's idea was that small organizations gave people a way come together as members of a certain community of practice or interest -- a trade, religion, a hobby -- and to gain first hand experience with self-governance. The organizations also provided a way give the shared concerns of their members a public voice. It's not feasible for a political candidate to visit every tradesman of every stripe in his shop, but when the horseshoers have a regular meeting at their hall, a candidate can often arrange to visit the hall for an hour or two. The same is true for ladies' charitable societies, religious groups, libraries, map collectors and many other groups that represent certain interests or powers in the society. These organizations were often (though not always) chapters in larger organizations, which provided a way to really focus people's voice at higher levels of government.

I believe the absence of these social organizations is more or less the cause of the imbalance in US democracy today. It simply is not workable for the individual to face off, toe-to-toe and unmediated, with the state.

Great connection to draw. Ben Franklin too spent much time creating and cultivating the strength of small grassroots organizations.

It would be remiss to overlook the role of the church in 19th century American society. There was something of a religious revival. And the nature of a single congregation is that it never grew past the limits of a small, personable organization. While there was a flourishing of denominations, there was nothing akin to outright sectarian conflict or violence. So there was this small, personable network of congregations in intimate contact with each other that spread throughout the entire country, with small nodes every few miles or so at least.

Tocqueville is the first person I thought of reading this!

Yeah, I remember he commented on every town having its own local newspaper too, which has obviously been replaced by commercialized mass media today.

see also

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723851

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25386501

I've recently finished Tribe by Sebastian Junger. I highly recommend it as well.

There was an explosion of these little groups in the US after the 1st edition of Robert's Rules of Order was published, which incidentally was also heavily adopted by churches (and women's suffrage groups, who helped him with the Newly Revised.) I'd say this fulmination culminated in FDR and strong unions, aspects of both made illegal afterwards - term limits to limit democracy, striking made into a kabuki ritual by the NLRB, unions being forbidden from offering their members health insurance (they're the ones who started doing this), but employers offering insurance being subsidized. Elites were so terrified that they got close to pulling a coup and installing a dictator with the Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot).

They got everything tight again with WWII, McCarthy and the Cold War, though. Lucky, right?

I think there has been an intentional effort to isolate people from each other, and to destroy communities, and even make them look suspicious or evil in some way. Isolated, atomized people are more easily controlled. I think the encouragement of labor mobility and the trashing of small towns and small business in favor of the internet has also been an intentional effort in that regard. I also think there has been an intentional effort to consolidate media and merge it with government, which reached a frenzy during the Biden administration. Oracle's nepo baby is going to have Paramount, CBS, Tiktok, and who knows what else.

An evil antidemocratic streak has been encouraged among the "left," who now love benevolent dictators, credentialism, and decision by "consent" which immediately devolves into rule by the loudest and the whiniest cluster B personality or sociopath. Votes mean that you don't get your way a lot, but you get stuff done. If you don't get your way too much, you can just leave and join a group that works for you. Monopoly, and rule by anointment take that away from us, and that's what's happening.

It's been devastating for black Americans. Our media used to be vibrant and exciting, now it doesn't exist at all. This is the fate of all minorities under cultural consolidation. Alone, getting your directions from a screen, with the screen listening to any conversation you manage to have and reporting it to your rulers.

They'll eventually go after the churches, too, or consolidate them. I'm sorry, they'll go after the "christofascists."

I think the key difference is that online communities are "cheap"; they're easy to create and easy to destroy. Offline communities are difficult to form and as such more "sticky". A great example is ideological differences. Lefty political groups (no doubt Righty ones have this too but I'm not as familiar with them) constantly reorganize based on perceived ideological bounds. Leftist groups splinter from liberal groups, labor-forward leftist groups split from identity politic leftist groups, and on and on.

A PTA doesn't do that. The folks in the PTA all have the same shared interest in the school their kids attend. They can't just splinter off into another PTA over a perceived difference. This forces the folks on the PTA to work together and makes the organization sticky in a way an online group might not be.

If the activation energy to form and join a community needed it's also really easy to just churn from the community. Moreover when splitting is this easy it prompts the creation of hyper-specific communities which lead to things like radicalization and dehumanization of the other (look at the acrimony between leftist identity-politic progressives and center-left liberals on the internet right now for example.)

Subreddits and Slack "communities" do not form communities. Bonds created in such groups are as ephemeral as the nature of communication enabling them.

In the same way bunch of individuals do not exhaust the meaning of the concepts of society and nation.

I think this is what Tao is saying that large organizations are filling the niche that was previously served by smaller organizations. eg. Discord, Slack, and other online platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Fortnite, Roblox, etc., are being used instead of smaller forums and local communities.

I agree with you, I live in Sydney Australia and there are plenty of small orgs and communities to participate in.

I wonder whether this post is just a reflection of Terry living in California, which from where I sit looks like an end-stage capitalist hellscape.

If you read between the lines of what Terence Tao is saying - which, by the way, the most charitable summary is, "Isn't Dunbar's number interesting?" - he is really saying, "It is hard to make friends as an adult." Extra so if your day to day is something esoteric like academic theoretical math (read between the lines: really boring to most people), and if you are right leaning or libertarian (read between the lines: unfriendly as a matter of policy).

It’s almost certainly more profitable to make to make 1,000 $100k loans from a banks point of view as the single loan will be much riskier (effectively not benefiting from the law of large numbers). Not to say there are benefits of dealing large loans such as cross selling other financial products to the large business.

Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as a result of (broadly good) government policy. A bank wouldn’t mind making uncollateralised loans any more than a mortgage, although it might charge more interest for the risk. However the government penalises banks based on (approximately) the sum of their risk weighted assets [0]. Here mortgages, as collateralised loans, are greatly incentivised over uncollateralised loans to business.

It’s hard to say if the situation would be worse without it, it’s possible we might have more risky business loans leading to growth, but also more likely we could see a serious global financial crisis.

[0] I am simplifying here slightly but you can see how the US ranks major banks here, higher is worse from the banks point of view https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P261124.pdf

Surely the interest rates on 1000 100k loans are going to cumulatively exceed the interest on a single 100M loan by a significant amount.

Those 1000 loans are going to result in millions more interest per year than a single 100M prime loan.

Isn't this part of why crypto has been so successful — at least outside the U.S. where the fiat currency isn't as stable?

Have you read Richard Werner?

>Is there some zero-sum pie of power

Yes, that's exactly how power works. You can dilute power (in non-hierarchical organizations) or you can concentrate it (in rigidly hierarchical societies), but there's a finite amount of it and it's deeply coveted by all

On one hand you’re saying property rights and free markets, on the other you’re saying private entities should be kept in check (by who? I assume the government). Isn’t that a contradiction?

> a zero-sum game

I don't see any reference to the game being zero-sum in Tao's words.

> Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own?

I don't think Tao is saying the uncontrollable force of technological and economic advancement exhibits a genuine agency of its own. Just that our current technology and society and has expanded the role of the extremely large organization/power structures compared to other times in history. This is a bit of technological determinist argument, and of course there's many counter-arguments, but it at least has a broad base of support. And at the very least it's a little bit true; pre-agricultural the biggest human organizations were 50 person hunter-gatherer bands.

Honestly, I feel like you are filtering his words through your own worldview a bit, and his opinions might be less oppositional to your own than you might think.

Your example of firms setting up in the desert or wilderness assumes there is some desert or wilderness left to expand into. This is Marx's concepts of the expansion of capital. Marx argues that with nowhere to expand it begins to eat itself.

You posit that the situation has a political cause, but I think this is just what happens when a system requiring exponential growth reaches the limits of its bounding box.