Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe…

Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe I have with @doctorow’s work is the belief I sense that ‘competition’ i.e. taking down all ‘monopolies’, is some intrinsic good. It ignores human social realities. /1 https://t.co/DHoPex03kK

And when you peel it back is really just a boost for the market philosophy of social life, that competition drives optimal societies. Humans don’t compete, they imitate, they form status hierarchies, based on that imitation. That’s not a bad thing either. /2

We imitate because we can’t all know or do everything. So we look to who to trust to do all of the things we don’t do ourselves. And then we emulate/imitate them. Which creates a hierarchy. Which in economic terms becomes a ‘monopoly’. It’s unavoidable. /3

It’s also the most efficient way to do business and run anything. The problem with hierarchies or monopolies isn’t their size, economies of scale is what we want. It’s the refusal to regulate them, under the umbrella of an over-arching hierarchy of public government. /4

As Cory says in this latest thread, public ownership of journalism for example is probably the model we’re being forced back to, as the only one that actually works. The same is true of any essential social service. Decades of libertarian privatisation has failed. /5

The answer isn’t more competition, to bring down all monopolies, destroying their economies of scale. That’s the same libertarian schtick. It’s to restore the fractal order of hierarchy, the ‘public’ level of hierarchy that all other (unavoidable) hierarchies operate inside. /6

To restore a common world, a public space, as our baseline for social life. Not to all go out and compete in frenzies of individual innovation, hoping it will all magically agglomerate via some invisible hand into collective society. It never will. /end