The Tyranny of Scale
Jack and the Beanstalk is a well-known English fairy tale that first appeared in print in 1734. Researchers believe the story may have originated at least 5000 years ago, around 3000 BC. This was well after the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago) that transformed humankind’s hunter-gatherer existence into one based on agriculture and settlement.
Hunter-gatherer clans had little need for giant settlements or giant bureaucracies or giant armies. Their only fear was the occasional giant creature. By 3000 BC truly massive civilizations were developing all around the world. Thus began our encounters with true giants, encounters that continue to this day.
Today’s giants are really big and they’re all around us. We have giant governments, giant political parties, giant corporations, and giant armies … just to name a few.
Our modern giants do not necessarily have evil intentions. Many operate out of perfectly good intentions. Giant governments provide important protections and benefits. Giant political parties allow us to seek political change collectively and peacefully. Giant corporations provide goods and services and employment that we’re pleased to enjoy. Giant armies provide security from external threats.
In spite of their gifts, we also know to be wary of giants. When our desires and intentions run contrary to those of giants, we all too often find ourselves powerless and neglected, sometimes even abused. That’s the nature of giants.
Our daily lives, on the other hand, are filled with a multitude of interactions with other individuals and small organizations. These entities far more often listen to and respect us. Sure, we don’t always get our way. But we don’t feel powerless, especially if we’re willing to compromise and work to reconcile differences. And if necessary, we can choose to cease interactions with undeserving entities. Giants are far less inclined to be as respectful. That’s not how giants operate.
So, what was Jack’s experience with his giant?
Jack’s idyllic, though poor, life was interrupted when he is duped into trading the family cow for magic beans, beans that created a beanstalk highway to the giant’s world, an otherwise inaccessible place.
After climbing the beanstalk, Jack encounters an ugly ogre who eats humans. But this giant has magical treasures unavailable to humanity — bags of gold, a goose that endlessly lays golden eggs, and a golden harp that sings on its own.
Sounds pretty much like the giants we deal with. How often have we felt “eaten”? And what self-respecting giant doesn’t carefully guard their treasure? None of these actions should surprise us. Every organism and organization, not matter how large or small, will always work to ensure its own survival.
Back to our story.
Jack manages to escape the fate of other humans by getting help from the ogre’s wife, a woman of kind heart. She eventually betrays him, though, when it becomes clear that Jack intends to steal everything of value that her husband owns. Employing the help of an alternative giant turned out to be a poor strategy.
Our friend Jack, however, is a crafty one. He senses the danger from his protector and employs trickery and guile to steal the remainder of the giant’s treasure before fleeing down the beanstalk back to the everyday world. By destroying the beanstalk access to the giant’s world, Jack manages to kill the giant, retain his stolen riches, and live happily ever after.
Jack’s story, along with others from our ancestral repertoire (e.g., David and Goliath) suggest that giants can be defeated, or at least have their treasure absconded through patience and guile. Malcom Gladwell’s David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is a must read for those interested in battling our modern giants.
Throwing off their tyrannical giant, our nation’s founders understood the giant problem. They were initially tempted to form a nation without a strong central government. When that failed, they settled upon a constitution that included significant safeguards against tyranny:
- A tripartite government with three distinct and competing power centers.
- A federal system that left much governing to dispersed state governments.
- A bill of rights that guaranteed inviolable individual freedoms.
- One legislative branch (the Senate) and an electoral college designed, at least in part, to mitigate against tyranny of the majority.
These safeguards have sometimes ended up being roadblocks to important and even urgent government action. Our frustration with inaction can sometimes lead us to forget that these are important safeguards against the tyranny of giants, whether giant governments or determined majorities.
The Industrial Revolution, even as it inaugurated amazing increases in prosperity and well-being, also provided fertile ground for commercial giants, giants that we still contend with to this day. Jack’s story notwithstanding, our solution was to implore the ogre’s kindly wife (government) to protect us. A combination of (admittedly imperfect) commercial regulation and antitrust statutes have at least diminished the most egregious actions of commercial giants.
That said, however, we should not ignore the evidence that the ogre’s wife is not always our friend. I’m not suggesting that giants are as evil as portrayed in Jack and the Beanstalk. What I am suggesting is that Jack’s story compels us to consider that these two giants will invariably protect their treasure whether we like it or not.
For evidence of giant-protecting-giant behavior, we should look no further than the aftermath of The Great Recession, an economic downturn triggered by financial system failures. Many concluded (including those in our giant federal government) that certain financial entities had become “too big to fail”, meaning that their failure would be disastrous to our financial system.
One might have thought that “too big to fail” would mean “too big to exist”. This would have meant the remedy for being too big would be to split them up into multiple smaller entities, much as we did with Standard Oil and AT&T. But no, our colluding giants collectively decided on a different remedy, a remedy that ensured that the financial giants remained giant. Rather than breaking up the large financial institutions, the “solution” was to increase regulations and provide government backstops that would prevent giant financial institutions from failing. In the end, the ogre’s wife chose to make sure that the ogre’s treasure was protected.
This brings me to our newest giants, those augured in by the Information Age and epitomized by Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Until recently, most of us ignored (or were merely mildly bothered by) the power exerted by these giants. Their ubiquitousness provided us with what we collectively desired: free and easy access to a large common audience. Advertisers and users both found the network effects of the media giants to be compelling.
Recent political events have triggered a re-evaluation of the monopolistic position of our social media giants. Depending on their political persuasion, many believe that the social media giants have moderated user content either too much or not enough. There have been few declarations that content moderation has been of the baby bear variety.
Some argue that the social media giants are private entities, and as such have the right to moderate content as they see fit. Others argue that these giants are providing the equivalence of a public square, and that any moderation of speech should adhere to established First Amendment protections. If the speech being talked about weren’t so politically charged (and in some cases arguably dangerous), this debate would be far less important.
It should not surprise us that there have been calls from both sides of the debate for the ogre’s wife to step in. Implicit in both sides of the argument is that the social media giants are too big to fail. Implicit in both sides of the argument is that giant government should be the ultimate decider about social media speech.
Lest we forget, a Donald Trump giant government and a Joe Biden giant government would make quite different decisions about such matters. It’s just as dangerous to have one decider as it is to have only one platform. Good governance is never guaranteed. We can’t count on the ogre’s wife never to betray us.
It’s not clear what should be done about our social media giant problem. It’s certainly not a good idea to ask the ogre’s wife for help. I’m hesitant to impose a regulatory scheme that mimics the too-big-to-fail approach we used for financial institutions. At the same time, I’m not sure that if we were to split up the social media giants, that either: a) network effects would eventually drive users to a dominant platform and/or, b) public speech would get even further balkanized in a world already polarized to the extreme.
I think many of us are surprised that social media platforms seem to have driven us apart more than they have brought us together. Their promise was so much more. It will likely take individual acts of cunning and guile to steal their treasure. We should begin thinking about what acts those should be. The giants are unlikely to relinquish their treasure under their own volition. And as to the ogre’s wife … we should not forget Jack’s story.
