Democracy and the Good Life: Consumer Packaged Ideology

There is an old joke about the trains in Nazi Germany being so efficient that they left ahead of schedule. Missing a train that left early creates a paradox of efficiency. Things can be too efficient, and there is something similarly paradoxical in our reaction to hyper-efficient markets. Nobody likes the annoying and constant inefficiencies that plague lousy markets. The closer a market comes to perfect efficiency, the less human it will be, and there is something off-putting in that perfection.

Before digital, no market really came very close to perfection. All physical transactions and goods are loaded with friction that prevents perfect exploitation by the most efficient supplier. In the digital realm, though, perfection is, if not obtainable, at least visible in the distance. Digital can reduce information and transaction friction to almost zero. And where purely digital exchanges take place there is a strong push to monopoly or something close. It’s not so much an advantage of scale (though that’s critically important to social media), it’s that without friction, even small competitive advantages will nearly always win.

It’s no surprise, then, that almost every core digital service is dominated by a single company. Amazon owns Ecommerce to an extent that no physical retailer (not even Sears) ever matched. Google…