Everything in this world is struggle for scalability, if something scales it can grant powers and riches. Every marketer knows that discovery is easy, scalability is hard.
Oil scales when one core can power thousands of cars driving to the corners of the world. Control of this scalable resource grants concentrated power and riches.
Religion scales and even when it conquers half of the world it still seeks messianic world domination.
Sports scale providing escape and tribal identity in the process.
Internet scales. A search algorithm by Google compels millions of people to create content that drives power and riches to a chosen few. A company in Seattle powers 80%(?) of all business tabulations in the world.
The flip side is that there is always a tension between have and have nots or people who control scalable resources and ideas and people who are being scaled. Communist revolutions sought a disruption in the inequality between people who controlled scalable resources, the scalability process accelerated by the industrial revolution and the scaled peasants and proletariat. Instead the ones who have been working for the feudal lords and factory owners have been slaughtered and firmly enslaved to the absolute power of the dictatorships.
During the same decade when the utopian revolutionary Thomas Friedman was proclaiming the flatness of the earth, power and unlimited credit flowed to the oligarchy, creating a financial inequality not seen in history.
Will the internet follow the same path? Is the talk about self empowerment, the speed and freedom of publishing is just a smoke screen for the drivers of the scalable platforms cruising the power of the collected creative energy?
Isn’t it strange that the same two guys who coded Blogger before it was sold to Google are now controlling the next scalable distribution platform Twitter? Is the Internet the most undemocratic tool the humanity ever known? Will it enslave people not only physically but intellectually?
[And now this - BoingBoing: Google Book Search settlement gives Google a virtual monopoly over literature]
Further Reading: