Very oversimplified version of the Scott model: whatever surpluses exist will eventually be captured by government/managers/”people in power”, except to the extent that the surpluses can be hidden by illegibility.
One thing this implies: improvements in biotech or construction or cities or space or energy or transportation or medicine are under-incentivized, since any large surpluses will likely be co-opted by government/managers/”people in power”. But information technology is special, since it’s directly a tool for increasing legibility. So IT is unusually high-value for governments/managers/”people in power” to invest in, and the people with the technical skills to build/run the IT systems have an unusually large amount of bargaining power.
Some examples of what this view looks like in practice:
“large surpluses co-opted”: this includes a stereotypical libertarian picture where government regulations force all new surplus to be spent on some form of political theater (safety theater, for instance), or a stereotypical Marxist picture where landlords capture all the surplus of San Francisco’s tech scene, or a Zvi-esque Mazes picture where any surplus generated by a company is gobbled up by parasitic middle management.
IT as a tool for increasing legibility: the modern IT industry got its start with the 1890 census tally. Creating “dashboards” for managers is still one of the main ways that people actually manage to sell B2B software today.
Bargaining power: Software (and data science) is itself not-very-legible to nontechnical people, so analysts end up having a surprising amount of real decision-making power (especially via how they present the data).
Very oversimplified version of the Scott model: whatever surpluses exist will eventually be captured by government/managers/”people in power”, except to the extent that the surpluses can be hidden by illegibility.
One thing this implies: improvements in biotech or construction or cities or space or energy or transportation or medicine are under-incentivized, since any large surpluses will likely be co-opted by government/managers/”people in power”. But information technology is special, since it’s directly a tool for increasing legibility. So IT is unusually high-value for governments/managers/”people in power” to invest in, and the people with the technical skills to build/run the IT systems have an unusually large amount of bargaining power.
Some examples of what this view looks like in practice:
“large surpluses co-opted”: this includes a stereotypical libertarian picture where government regulations force all new surplus to be spent on some form of political theater (safety theater, for instance), or a stereotypical Marxist picture where landlords capture all the surplus of San Francisco’s tech scene, or a Zvi-esque Mazes picture where any surplus generated by a company is gobbled up by parasitic middle management.
IT as a tool for increasing legibility: the modern IT industry got its start with the 1890 census tally. Creating “dashboards” for managers is still one of the main ways that people actually manage to sell B2B software today.
Bargaining power: Software (and data science) is itself not-very-legible to nontechnical people, so analysts end up having a surprising amount of real decision-making power (especially via how they present the data).