This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead.
I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).
Because we all sold out to the man. Culturally, we have chosen the lavish life promised under the man's umbrella, to doing the work of trying to go our own way. We now reap what we've sown.
The centralization of power also means the leaders of those large organizations have disproportionate power. Everyone is looking for the singular strongman at the head of an organization with nation-level power to save them from current turmoil.
> I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon
I do! Unironically: AI assisted software development – and please, we can call that anything else, we do not need to confuse it with Serious software development.
Just the amount of super simple software (Apps Script, Office Script) that baseline tech savy people can now/soon build to enhance what they think their business needs are, without the impossible constraint of having to pay a dev to find it out for/with them (because that is really not how you can find that out, while you find out everything else about your super small business) gives me a lot of hope here.
There is a chance that local models get good enough and efficient enough that we won't need the large companies, so much as a reasonable graphics card.
I recently moved away from as much big tech as possible. Canceled Spotify, won't order anything from Amazon, deleted Instagram, trying not to watch as much YouTube Videos etc. Sadly cant move away from WhatsApp and Google yet...
Instead, I am sitting here right now working on a blogging engine so I can create personal blogs to let my friends keep up to date with my shenanigans. Basically give them a chance to participate in my life without enabling them to doom scroll.
I really hope its not only me growing tired of all these addictive unhealthy apps and subscriptions that sneaked into most peoples everyday life. I can only recommend boycotting big tech with CEOs only caring about their own enrichment.
Its only the internet part of life, but this is where I spend most of my time. In real life I try to buy from the local stores as much as possible. However, I do not participate in many other smaller organizations...
I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).