The Mass Disintermediation of Modern Life

I found a picture of some of the earliest LLMs (Large Labor Machines, hat tip Wilson Bilkovich for the alternate rendering of LLM) more than a century ago!

The earliest Large Labor Machines

Imagine a world where you happily share your stories, photos, and videos with friends for free and yet Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok do not exist.

Imagine a world were you submitted your tax filing every year without TurboTax or the government knowing sensitive details of your life but with iron-clad certainty that you conformed to the letter of the law.

Imagine a world where you could quickly connect with a service provider for a ride, to fix your washing machine, clean your gutters, remodel your kitchen, get your hair done before a big party, or find the perfect recipe for that fun holiday meal, but Uber, Lyft, etc. etc. etc. did not exist out there vacuuming up your data, selling it to the highest bidder and incessantly pestering you to spend more money on something that benefits them but not you.

Imagine a world where you could buy a product and not be prompted for 87 other types of similar products yet still receive accurate and helpful suggestions from people you trust, but Amazon.com doesn't exist.

Imagine a world where you could listen to your favorite music, read your favorite books and watch your favorite shows for a reasonable fee and even share them with friends, but Netflix, Spotify, Audible, etc. did not exist.

What would make you not choose to live in this world I've described?

Think about that for more than a second...

Our lives are ruled by "intermediaries" that avow they are providing us so much value and we could never live without them.

All. Utter. Bullshit.

The actual truth is that these entities, with their motto and rallying cry, "Data Is The New Oil!" (along with their ideology of state and surveillance capitalism), are incredibly destructive, completely unnecessary, in no way inevitable, and easily replaceable.

How in the world, with all the technological progress over the past five decades, did we end up in this state of affairs?

Why Does a Database Exist?

Email is a rather clumsy and stupid digitization of pre-existing letters and business memos.

Databases are rather clumsy and stupid digitizations of the draws of files that a business maintained about suppliers, customers, processes, drawings, engineering plans, etc.

Paper, as with any physical thing, has weight, takes up space, etc.

Information is a radically different thing. Copy it, you still have the original. It takes a fraction of the energy to transmit at the speed of light anywhere in the world that a radio signal or pulse of light in a fiber can reach. Out into space as well.

Information does not need intermediaries. There is no reason whatsoever that to send you a message it first has to route through Facebook's or Google's or TikTok's systems and databases, be surveilled, be recoded, etc.

My supercomputer (i.e. smartphane) can send it directly to your supercomputer, or it can hop along a network of such supercomputers, and the actual contents of it need never be seen by any hop along the way. Just little blobs of "random" (i.e. encrypted) bits of information.

But back in the day when the world ran on paper, it would be impossible for you, as an individual consumer, to keep track of all these various companies that you interact with.

You wouldn't take your dental file to the dentist, your car maintenance record to the mechanic, your home appliance purchase history to the retailer, etc.

So these companies, sensibly, maintained those data files for you in their nice little drawers.

And then when digital information processing became economical, those companies started transition their operations from paper to digital records in databases.

But then something even more interesting happened. The Internet.

And along with the internet a few individuals (extremely shrewd, fairly capable, and quite devoid of human compassion or decency) realized that there were in fact billions upon billions of dollars to be made by collecting all this, now extremely cheap, data in a way that could hopefully be turned in an unlimited spigot spewing cash into their pockets.

And so they did.

Capitalists, But Not Really

These intermediaries, along with claiming that they are incredibly valuable to society, also like to claim that they are superior because "competition" means that the better option has won.

Of course, that's a lie, and sometimes one of these fools, like Peter Thiel, will tell the truth: "Competition is For Losers", in Chapter 4 of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future:

Creative monopoly means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival. So why do people believe that competition is healthy? The answer is that competition is not just an economic concept or a simple inconvenience that individuals and companies must deal with in the marketplace. More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it&embash;even though the more we compete, the less we gain.

Yeah, you read that right, competition is for losers like you. Sucker.

Let's review basic microeconomics 101 and the supply-demand curve: In a market with perfect competition, the price paid for a good is the cost of producing it.

Somehow these avowed Capitalists with their allegiance to "competition" and "free markets" are giant fucking liars because every quarter they stand up there and report their EBITDA or whatever with gross margins that would make the biggest carnival hucksters blush a little.

In 2024, the combine advertizing revenue of Meta and Google was ~$400 billion. Yes, that's right, Four. Hundred. Billion. Dollars. Billion, with a B.

For what? What did the world get for pouring $400 billion into these two companies?

Fuck. That. Noise.

Meanwhile, with all this "innovation" and "disruption", the US pays the highest percentage of GDP for health care costs, which are increasing, not falling, and has worse outcomes than any other advanced industrial country.

How the fuck?

The cost of education has also climbed through the roof in the past thirty years.

Why are there any un-housed people, people without health care, people without food, people without basic material necessities in a country that can spend trillions of dollars on not-even-stupid liebots?

A Future Possible

Most people in the world now walk around with a supercomputer in their pockets or bags. A supercomputer, with more information processing power in every single individual device than the entire world combined possessed less than 100 years ago.

There is not a single thing that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, etc. provide that cannot be replaced, either immediately or without that much relative capital investment, in the very near future.

If Silicon Valley wasn't just trying to scam you out of your money like every middleman does, this is the "disruption" and "innovation" they'd be pursuing.

Don't hold your breath. The Coneheads and Peter Thiels of the SV aren't interested in any sort of innovation that helps the average person.

Nope, salvation is in your own hands. A supercomputer that can process digital, encypted information and communicate peer-to-peer with other supercomputers in other people's hands (with a few other computers helping out, mostly by storing encrypted data). That's all it takes.