Outlook Outages and Evil Monopolies

This will be another short post.  How have all you readers been over the last 24 hours?  Were you idled in your work by reason of the Microsoft services outage?  Were you idled even though some of you may have been employees of various government agencies worldwide?  If so, you have experienced the hidden and potentially catastrophic downside of relying on a single monopoly service provider.  Indeed, the Associated Press has run an article whose headline reads, "Microsoft outage shows the risks of relying on a single technology provider for essential services."  

One thing that is especially true of "big tech" monopolies and oligopolies is their insistence on limiting our access to tried, true, and proven technologies in order to force an ever more extreme reliance on the products and means of delivery offered by big tech.  That's why it's been surprisingly hard to find CD players lately.  (Spotify and other music streaming services don't mind, however.) Nevertheless, in response to the Microsoft service outage, there are people, businesses and agencies who have revived the use of technologies which seemed destined for the scrap heap of history.  In Japan, for instance, some people and businesses have turned to fax machines for business-to-business communication.

All of these things remind me once again of some of Gene Sharp's words in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy: 

"Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak, and the government too strong. Without a change in this imbalance, a new set of rulers can, if they wish, be just as dictatorial as the old ones."  

And, 

"Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands.  Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors."

I will also repeat something I wrote several weeks ago: "Dictatorships can be entirely governmental, or they can start out as economic hegemonies that morph into political hegemonies.  And note that what Gene Sharp says about governments that are too strong applies just as firmly to businesses whose owners become too rich, even if the governments in the nations where these rich people reside are weak."  So I think it can be safely said that a business which establishes itself as a de facto monopoly occupying a key role in the economic life of a society can be regarded as a potential dictatorship.  Such monopolies can seem quite robust, perhaps due to a well-established system of risk management.  Yet humans cannot possibly foresee every potential risk.  Thus the arrival of a truly unanticipated "black swan" can result in widespread and catastrophic failure.  On the other hand, it is those societies which contain a multitude of diverse independent centers of economic power, a robust set of economic offerings from a widespread array of diverse small to medium enterprises (SME's), and a shared and democratic set of means of coordinating economic cooperation between businesses which are most likely to survive the appearance of black swans.  Interesting, no?  And now try to get some work done today!