alt Hacker NewsI get the sentiment, but this is the reason we have airplanes, MRI machines, and computers that fit in our pockets. Advanced technology simply isn't possible in an economy of only ~100 person organizations. And I say this as someone with a deep sense of unease with modernity and all of the diseases of civilization. We somehow have managed to create systems that support literally billions of humans and allow many of them to have a quality of life undreamed of even a few hundred years ago. I dislike big orgs as much as they next guy but we need to understand why they exist if we want to criticize and reform them.
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Ironically, those same systems that enabled high QoL are also the ones involved in killing us, whether that's carcinogens everywhere, climate change, resistant bacteria, or even just plain old nukes (or soon drone swarms).
I wouldn't be alive if not for advanced medicine, but if the structures that saved my life are the same ones that constitute our own Great Filter, my life was most definitely not worth the trade. There are too many other people I love to think that.
Big organizations don't enable greater technological progress, which is why companies do 98% of their innovation before they get huge, and get bad at innovating once they are.
Big organizations enable scaling and associated economies of scale, so it's possible for Apple to sell millions of iPhones cheaper than if they were a smaller company. I don't think that tradeoff is worth it for any individual consumer (pay a little less to be much more abused by the company), and I don't think it's worth it for society.
Most of the big corporations in America aren't providing things as useful as MRI machines, they're providing net negative garbage like social media and advertising. Big corporations like United Healthcare Group are inflating the cost of medical care rather than providing economies of scale and reduced cost for their clients.
The US desperately needs to bring back antitrust and start breaking these massive companies into much smaller pieces.