Too big to fail? Tech's decade of scale and impunity

guest · Dec 26, 2019

Too big to fail? Tech's decade of scale and impunity
Big tech behaves as though power absolves them of responsibility.
December 26, 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...ig-to-fail-techs-decade-of-scale-and-impunity

Scale. If there is one word that encapsulates the past decade in the tech industry, it is scale. Scale is the holy grail of the venture capital-backed tech startup, the state in which exponential growth in users – and revenues – can be achieved by linear increases in infrastructure – and costs.

Facebook scaled. Uber scaled. YouTube scaled. Airbnb scaled. Amazon scaled.
In achieving this state, it helped to have a business with minimal physical infrastructure (Facebook, YouTube and other software companies) – or to offload the cost of owning and maintaining that infrastructure to contractors (Uber, Airbnb). Amazon managed to scale despite requiring significant physical infrastructure.

[...] multitude of areas where Facebook and other large platforms have refused to take responsibility for their own companies, with scale used as a shield for blame.
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Tech companies tend to operate on the assumption that if you feed meals to 10,000 children, and only poison 10 of them, that’s an acceptable rate considering the scale.

On the threshold of a new decade, few things seem clear except that we will be dealing with the ramifications of a handful of tech companies’ unmanageable scale for years to come. Because the beauty of scaled platforms is that, while the profits accrue just to the companies, the negative consequences accumulate for all of us.
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Too big to fail? Tech's decade of scale and impunity

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