https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-everywhere
"Today I want to start with a comment by a colleague, Texas antitrust lawyer
Basel Musharbash, observing a restaurant trying to do a renovation in Dallas.
“Something funky is happening in the building materials supply chain,” he wrote
. “A 3,000 sq. ft. commercial space in a strip mall shouldn’t cost $720,000 to
renovate into an Italian food joint.” He’s right. It shouldn’t. And yet it
does.
This attitude of ‘something is very wrong with our society’ is everywhere now.
Corporate procurement officers just assume costs are going up, it’s in budget
projections for the Defense Department, and we expect cost overruns on
everything. ‘Inflation’ is now a catch-all for a basic view that stuff is just
going to suck more and more.
So what’s going on? Today’s piece is about a concept I am going to call
‘economic termites,’ which are instances of monopolization big enough to make
investors a huge amount of money, but not noticeable enough for most of us. An
individual termite isn’t big enough to matter, but the existence of a termite
is extremely bad news, because it means there are others. Add enough of them
up, and you get our modern economic experience.
The concept of an economic termite is the cousin to Cory Doctorow’s
‘enshittification’ or Yves Smith’s ‘crapification,’ terms that describe how a
platform gradually degrades the quality of its service as it gains market power
and gets pushed to extract cash by financiers. Economic termites describes
where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our
society and profiteer.
These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting
services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go
into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that
makes our world turn, there’s fortunes to be made, and bottlenecks to foster.
They also explain a dynamic we all face, a profound wariness in our society, a
sense that stuff just costs more and is more difficult, for no discernible
reason. Added up, these end up sapping our faith in the American system,
because they make what seem like simple problems become not just unsolvable,
but not even capable of being diagnosed. In this issue, I’ll cover some of the
companies you don’t realize are gnawing at the foundation of our society -
Verisign, Autodesk, Linde, Assa Abloy, Gracenote, and LinkedIn. And yes, there
are legal tools to address them. But first we have to realize that these
bottlenecks are everywhere.
We’ll start with a corporation I pay to host this newsletter."
Via Wayne Radinsky.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
