We have come to the third of our three introductions. The first introduced the problem for the century; the second the problem for the decade. This one is about the problem for this year. We are long past due firmly getting an intellectual grip on our problems. That we have to solve now.
As we said earlier, this story will be driven by characters. The argument will be narrated by a Psychohistorian. Before launching our argument proper, we will portray the conflict that motivates our Psychohistorian’s hunt for a better narrative. There are obstacles in his way. This essay and the next is about what they are—and what they need to be overcome.
Our Psychohistorian
We will imagine our Psychohistorian starts out believing the standard economic orthodoxy. But he will be knocked off this position when he encounters a nemesis: an inarticulate engineer, alienated by general incomprehension of his difficulties. This engineer is not a radical. Politically he is conservative—even deeply conservative. Yet something about “what technology wants” is pushing him toward a dramatically new worldview. Incomprehension of this effect is fueling his angry alienation.
In telling this story, I will elaborate what I mean by “the worldview of engineers.” Most people, hearing that, would think we mean the worldview they have heard from Silicon Valley marketers. Or from Negroponte, Paul Graham, Andrew Yang or others like them—that is to say, engineers doing a policy intellectual shtick. This is emphatically not what I mean. Engineers are too incompetent to do this prognostication properly.
Encounters A Story
Instead, what I mean is the worldview of actual engineers concerning actual engineering. Only that is reliable. It is very low-level: it has nothing to say about larger social problems. It only concerns the specific difficulties of engineers. As a result, it is, for the most part, something most have never heard. If they had, they would consider it merely strange and incomprehensible. As a result, it is necessary to expound my raw material.
A main goal of this section is to elaborate the image of an alienated conservative engineer: to give him motives, a name, a face, and a cause. His frustration and despair will drive us. Our goal will be to convince him that intellectuals can understand him and champion his concerns.
In the last chapter, during our challenge, we talked abstractly about how technology can kick conservatism off its tooth. We want to make this concern concrete—and urgent. To that end, we will introduce the image of a modern character who will represent discombobulated conservatism. The hope is by doing so, we can save conservatism—and by extension, democracy itself.
We told a super-distilled version of this story at the end of the last chapter—the one which outlined our challenge. There were real events which inspired that streamlined synopsis.
Our synopsis was simplified to clarify the central conflict. But in real life there was no such clarity. People talked past each other. Logical connections were dropped. The key to the puzzle was lost in the dark.
Intellectuals hunted for it. But they hunted under the streetlamp, where there was light. As a result, they never even got near it.
Told Backward…
An impatient reader could skip this chapter. Those who want proof we are capable of clarity should definitely skip ahead. This dramatization will be intentionally confusing. Deliberately, we will present ideas in the disjointed, phantasmagorical manner one would have encountered them in real life. Later, when I lay it all out again in proper logical order, it will become apparent that our presentation gets everything backwards. It moves in reverse from consequence to cause.
This movement is deliberate: the purpose is rather like that of the movie Memento. Time runs in reverse to give the viewer the disjointed feeling of life with no short-term memory. The point is to emphasize exactly how strange the encounter with this worldview was. My apologies to those who actually don’t understand it. Stick with me, and it will all be explained in due course. Persistence can unveil clarity even in the deeply phantasmagorical.
And Without Abstraction.
As will become richly apparent later, we are enchanted by the power of abstractions. But we are also terrified of them. Easily, one can become so enamored of them that one loses touch with the actual experience of the lives they rule.
Abstractions can also accrete layers of baggage and prejudice. Then they stop carrying their actual meaning. It is easy to become so dependent on the light they shed that one can no longer find a key lost in the dark.
For that reason, this book will insist on periodically touching base with the specific and un-abstracted. It may mean opening ourselves to the annoyance of the reader. The impatient may judge such interludes merely discursive. Nonetheless, we will insist. After all, such readers may be making the opposite mistake: their taste for abstraction is not enough tempered by terror.
Additionally, the unfair judgments of low-information voters are predicated on a particular lack of information: not seeing the true difficulty of problems. Later we will make it all look easy. But we will devote at least a few sections to making it look hard. We may need this to beg angry voters for forgiveness of our sins.
Abstraction Hallucinated…
As we complained earlier, academic arguments were incestuous. They reacted to their own abstractions. When engineers made their case, they did so without abstraction. That is to say, Tim Berners-Lee explained the political issues surrounding the World Wide Web by describing the architecture of the web; David Clark explained the political issues of networks by describing the architecture of networks; and so on. They did not seek to simplify, generalize, or abstract. The abstract framework was hallucinated by politicians and academics. Therefore, their confusion was the deficiencies of their own thinking coming back at them.
Krugman himself at least half-recognized this mistake—in a blog post in 2010 he wrote:
I saw some bad logic in the arguments the [technology] enthusiasts were making, and—being the professor I am—I extrapolated that into being dismissive of everything they were saying… In the ’90s, I learned to take very seriously what people on the ground are saying about the economy, even if it isn’t well-argued.
It was one of only two mistakes he admitted in a retrospective over twenty years. Since he already admitted the mistake, I don’t want to complain about it too much.
Leads To A Challenge…
We do not mean to complain. Instead, we will illustrate the dilemma. The key we seek is deeply hidden in the dark. The story will dramatize the difficulty.
As he said himself, Krugman’s diagnosis of the problem flowed from his professorial bent. He dismissed arguments with obviously bad logic. He certainly expressed his attitude with flair: he explained beautifully his expectations. He challenged the anti-Microsoft force with a colorful rendition of the standard textbook model of monopolist pricing incentives.
Like a rapper who lays down a challenge, Krugman opens a fight by throwing down a literate gauntlet. However, his challenges are phrased as silly stories. My response, thrown down earlier, follows this form.
His story starred a Baron Wilhelm von Gates, the owner of two castles perched at strategic spots along the Rhine.1 It analyzed the level of tolls on the river traffic. The question was whether they would increase or decrease if Baron Gates was forced by the Holy Roman Emperor to gift one of his castles to a nephew. Krugman issued a challenge: “… the results of this breakup were not quite what the emperor’s legal department had promised.” He was obviously challenging the (real) legal team to come up with a rebuttal.
A more detailed exposition explains the key point in Krugman’s logic. Krugman’s assertion of increased cost to the consumers from increased competition is non-intuitive and somewhat disturbing. He hails from a community that worships the Invisible Hand; so why are they suddenly so surprisingly sanguine about the loss of competition? We see the core idea in what he calls the Network Monopoly Case: “… assume that the consumer MUST [pay tolls at both castles] as in the Baron von Gates story Krugman tells. Both quantities are interdependent—you need to travel both parts of the river to get any use out of it.” Without that assumption, we have more the intuitive result: increased competition lowers costs, as expected.
Imagine Krugman checking this logic over and over—and concluding it airtight. The consumer must get an operating system; he must get a browser. He can’t start reading a web page until he has both. From this observation, the result follows immediately. What can possibly be wrong with this logic? It is simple, clear, and utterly incontrovertible.
Or seemingly, at least. We will shortly dramatize the Psychohistorian’s hunt for the flaw. We seek the divergence of this logic from that of the real world. Hunting it down will not be easy.
Apparently (and not surprisingly) Krugman did not get an answer. Shortly afterward, he complained bitterly that “conventional economic analysis of costs and benefits has been brushed aside, in favor of guesses about the effect of policy on technological innovation.” He complained darkly: “because the determinants of innovation are not well understood, clever advocates can invoke technological progress as an all-purpose justification for whatever policy they favor.”
But Key Ideas…
In that he was wrong. There was a lack of logical coherence in the arguments that highlighted “determinants of innovation.” But it wasn’t a cleverly empty ploy. If anything, it was too earnest: not enough of a ploy.
Where did the phrase “determinants of innovation” come from anyway? I couldn’t find the speech by Negroponte which Krugman referenced. However, such phrases were ubiquitous in that era, for reasons I will explain shortly. It sounds like something Lawrence Lessig would have said. He tended to wax rhapsodic about the Internet as “a platform for innovation.” So he naturally would talk up innovation’s “determinants.”
Lessig was one of the few humanities intellectuals who worked hard to learn the worldview of engineers. As such he had an outsize influence on the particular phrasing that would have wafted up to Krugman’s attention. Prolix paeans to “platforms for innovation” were Lessig’s style. Krugman was using a specific and technical mode to interpret wording that was meant to be poetic and inspirational.
As I will explain later, there may be a Gift-of-the-Magi style story behind all this. Lessig could have been less poetic and more strictly accurate about the exact source of his notions. If he had, he might have produced a formulation that was both more recognizable, and more amenable to technical analysis. The painful part is that Lessig’s flowery phrasing might have flowed from the fixed idea in his mind that the more prosaic but accurate version would be ignored.
Are Ignored…
Krugman’s dismissal of “determinants of innovation” was shocking. Indeed, the opinions of “technologists” he was hearing were pretty empty.2 But he attacked one of the few sentiments that was authentic. In honing in on Lessig’s signature phrase, he singled out for attack the one intellectual who was making a serious effort to communicate in something like his mode. He called the most honest communication cleverly manipulative.
Instead, it was almost everything else that was cleverly manipulative. Or perhaps not ’cleverly’ so. The manipulativeness might have been inadvertent. As I mentioned, engineering advocates were hardly adept at wielding abstractions. They lacked the talent to use them manipulatively. Intellectuals saw their own abstractions reflected back at them, as in a fun house mirror. Then they complained about the distortion.
However that may be, Krugman denounced the one true thing. One has to hand one thing to him at least: he does have an uncanny knack for getting to the heart of the matter! Except in this case, he got to the heart of the matter—and stole it. Then he lost it in the ocean.
Krugman misjudged technologists: he gave them entirely too much credit for care in historical reasoning. They were claiming the monopolist story only in the vaguest, most impressionistic way. They didn’t know enough to do better.
Because Engineers…
They made no secret of this: for instance, Neal Stephenson wrote a free-form musing on the politics of operating systems titled In The Beginning Was The Command Line. It opens a frank assertion: that casting Gates as a nineteenth century robber baron is absurd. This assertion motivates the essay. Its goal, loosely, is to construct a better model to describe the strangeness of the operating system world.
What is notable about this attempt is that, certainly by Krugman’s standards, it abjectly fails. Stephenson’s attempt is a discursive thirty-seven-thousand-word meditation on models and metaphors. In all those words, doesn’t succeed in spinning a useful and lasting story. We learn only one thing from it: model building is hard. Smart people can honestly try and simply fail. The key is lost deep in the dark.
The monopolist story stuck merely because it was the best anyone could do. Everyone knew that, as a model, it wasn’t perfect. Or at least I thought everyone knew. Surprisingly, Krugman didn’t seem aware of this not-even-hidden secret.
Speak Nonsense With…
In addition, an aside in Krugman’s essay panning “determinants of innovation” highlighted how dramatically Krugman’s judgment differed from mine:
So even though much of the real animus against Microsoft involves fear of its power and wealth—remember the T-shirts showing Bill Gates as a Borg, with the caption “Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated”—the official argument for breakup claims that splitting Microsoft will be good for technology.
This comment reveals his understanding of the Borg image: what he thinks was being assimilated, and why people were afraid of it. He asserts it is all about fear of power and wealth. That assumption leads to his a conclusion about the “real animus.”
We will explain all this later. The Borg image will open the chapter title Pandora’s Box. A New Economy is akin to Pandora’s Box, we claim. When opened, it releases new hope. But with it comes many ills and afflictions. That chapter is a catalog of those afflictions. Principal among them is the bogeyman called the Borg.
The previous chapters lay the groundwork. The preparation is elaborate. But it is a key idea. The leisurely pace of exposition allows us to lay out proper historical context—and fully explicate the logic.
In-Crowd Meaning…
As we will explain briefly later in this essay, and at more length later in the book, this concern about “being assimilated” is intensely about technology. Krugman’s assertion about the “real animus” was made without understanding the fear he was denouncing. But we may not be surprised that Krugman misunderstood. It was an obscure “in-crowd” notion. What was more surprising is that he misunderstood so aggressively.
He was (at the time) an MIT professor. Not only a professor, but a researcher whose job (one might suppose) was to investigate the world around him. And the world that called out for investigation was near at hand. He could hardly have thrown a piece of chalk in his classroom without hitting a person in passionate possession of this animus!
And are Misunderstood.
Even if one had no idea what the image meant, that it was so ubiquitous at MIT cast serious doubt on his interpretation. Was it plausible that MIT students were taken over by a wave of neo-Marxist anti-corporate anxiety? Harvard students might spend their leisure time hatching fulminations against excessive corporate power and wealth. Incoming Harvard students might be sucked into irresponsibly youthful political passions. But at MIT?!! Unbelievable.
Not, one might note, because MIT students are too politically mature. No, exactly the opposite: because they are too utterly politically incompetent. A political passion at MIT has to be honestly about technology. MIT students are just too abjectly politically apathetic for anything else.
The Opposition’s…
What was the origin of the intellectual rebellion which so bothered Krugman? If its authors were indeed honest and had a serious point to make, why didn’t they step up and make it properly? What so incensed Krugman wasn’t so much that his argument was opposed. It was that it was “brushed aside.” Whatever you think of his critique, nonetheless this brush-off was rude. So what was behind it?
A single leader of this opposition is difficult to identify. It was all but leaderless. But we can identify someone quotable to explain its origins.
Books rarely excited the computer science students around me. Especially snubbed were books about people or society. There was, however, a notable exception. A book called The Mythical Man-Month was hot. It was so influential that every idea within it was explained to me by some excited enthusiast.
Despite the impression the title might give, it is not (explicitly) about economics. Amazon’s introduction explains: “Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless… The classic book on the human elements of software engineering.” It was written by Fred Brooks, a superstar project manager.
The book’s most quoted line, by far, is the practical aphorism: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it more late.” The author distills his storied project management experience into simple lessons for others in his profession.
Alternate Worldview’s…
However, looking back at the evolution of his thought over the twenty-year gap between the first and second edition, the author reflects that he has evolved more than just working tips. He has built a worldview:
The biggest mistake in the “Build one to throw away” concept [highlighted in the 1975 edition] is that it implicitly assumes the classical sequential or waterfall model of software construction… The basic fallacy of the waterfall model is that it assumes a project goes through the process once, that the architecture is excellent and easy to use, the implementation design is sound, and the realization is fixable as testing proceeds…
There has to be Upstream Movement: Like the energetic salmon in the chapter opening picture, experience and ideas from each downstream part of the construction process must leap upstream, sometimes more than one stage, and affect the upstream activity. Designing the implementation will show that some architectural features cripple performance; so the architecture has to be reworked. Coding the realization will show some functions to balloon space requirements; so there may have to be changes to architecture and implementation.
[TODO: insert salmon picture? This is important enough to be worth the trouble.]
This worldview is in direct opposition to Krugman’s picture of the Baron Bill on the Rhine. We might match up Fred Brooks’s hated Waterfall with Krugman’s Rhine. Of course, to match them up we have to claim they are commensurable. Arguably they aren’t. But given how badly Krugman wanted an answer to his challenge, we will take what we can get.
Connecting logic…
Let us pause to connect the logic of this alternate worldview—and support our assertion that it is a complete worldview. We should note that the Borg story is directly related to this reverse-flow. Step into the mentality of a practitioner who believes strongly that the upstream movement of “experience and ideas” is key to the success of a software project. Then imagine such a person’s greatest fear. Might they not fear that some monster would wade into the stream to eat these “leaping salmon?”
The image of the Borg expresses this fear. Mixing metaphors flagrantly, we substitute Borg assimilation for salmon ingestion. These images are phantasmagorical—but at least they coexist. The world they cohabit is strange indeed. But it is internally consistent.
Despite what Krugman might say, such a fear is only tangentially related to power and wealth. Instead, it is intensely concerned about what is “good for technology.” Suppose we accept Brooks’s premise that the leaping salmon are key to excellence in software management. Then defending against salmon-ingesting monsters is part of furthering that goal. The motivation has nothing to do with the kind of classically leftist anti-corporate fulmination that Krugman impugned.
However, one must embrace ideas as strange as those backward-swimming salmon to appreciate the sincerity of the sentiment. Without that in the picture, the fear makes no sense. So it isn’t surprising that Krugman missed what was being “assimilated.” He also missed why it is feared. The referenced threat didn’t exist in his worldview!
On Different Scales…
An observer might object that Brooks’s model isn’t a directly comparable Krugman’s. They exist on hugely different scales. Brooks is talking about the dynamics of a single project. By contrast, Krugman is talking about entire industries.
However, the reverse-flow appears on all scales. In the case of Microsoft, this was pointed out by Neal Stephenson in his the essay on operating systems. He wrote:
All of the peripheral gizmos that can be hung off of a personal computer—the printers, scanners, PalmPilot interfaces, and Lego Mindstorms—require pieces of software called drivers… Because the hardware market has become so vast and complicated, what really determines an operating system’s fate is not how good the OS is technically, or how much it costs, but rather the availability of hardware-specific code.
These drivers, like Brooks’s salmon, move upstream from the “customers” back to Microsoft. Lego and Palm are “downstream:” they send their driver code “against the current” of the “stream”. One could visualize Windows as a big school of downstream-spawned device-driver salmon clustered around a tiny nugget of Microsoft-spawned kernel. So this reverse flow is relevant on the scale not just of projects, but also of industries.
Made the Picture…
Krugman obviously expected an answer to his challenge to take a particular form. He expected it to nibble around the edges of his model, addressing some aspect of the logic of pricing. But Brooks’s counterpoint is far more radical than that. His picture has the river running the other way!
The whole context of Krugman’s carefully reasoned argument gets thrown out the window. The defenestration is brutal. Brooks frames a different question. As we will explain later, he is seeking to solve a different problem. However, the reasoning behind this change of frame was left unstated.
Obscure.
Additionally, Brooks lacks the self-conscious defensiveness of the intellectually radical. He casually tosses Krugman’s picture out the window. He doesn’t apologize or explain. He barely even notices it is there. If he does notice, it isn’t a conflict with which he feels any obligation to engage. We see the source of the negligence which so incensed Krugman. There are no two ways about it: it is negligence with a vengeance.
However, for all of Brooks’ purported intellectual radicalism, he is not a political radical. He is a card-carrying Republican. His listed affiliations include—alongside a massive set of prestigious engineering societies—additionally the “Elizabeth Dole Committee,” “Huckabee for President”, “John McCain 2008,” as well as two National Republican congressional committees. According to his biography, he was also active in religious life at Chapel Hill: he “chaired the Executive Committee for the Central Carolina Billy Graham Crusade in 1973” and “taught an adult Sunday School class for over twenty years.” In other words, he’s the kind of voter who was once a mainstay of the Republican party’s centrist support. If there is radicalism here, it doesn’t come from Brooks’ political predilections. It comes from the technology itself.
Incommensurable Worldviews…
Neither Brooks nor his followers were likely to answer to Krugman’s challenge. I might claim these two worldviews are opposed. In fact, they are frustratingly incommensurable. I have labored to display the two models side by side. Finding their point of departure from each other was difficult. The result is severely strained. Brooks’s model is not fully comparable to Krugman’s.
Krugman is a pro: all his logic is clear and beautifully laid out. Brooks is not: he backed into the enterprise of model building. He does it unwillingly, without looking where he is going. Later in this book, I will lay out Brooks’s (implicit) logic in a style more similar to Krugman’s. It will become apparent that Brooks dropped us into the second or third step of an argument. He doesn’t state the essential point of departure. Nor does he provide the connecting logic that motivates the conclusion. In addition, there is an initial assumption he doesn’t bother to state at all. It is a bit of a doozy. If there were a leaderboard for all-time audacity of argumentation with unstated assumptions, this is a prime contender for top billing.3
And Resentful…
For all that, Brooks showed no deference or remorse. Not only that, he had a curmudgeonly arrogance all his own. Brooks hated the Waterfall model every bit as vehemently as Krugman hated the stealth resistance to his Rhine story. Brooks complained bitterly about its persistence:
The waterfall model, which was the way most people thought about software projects in 1975, unfortunately got enshrined into DOD-STD-2167, the Department of Defense specification for all military software. This ensured its survival well past the time when most thoughtful practitioners had recognized its inadequacy and abandoned it. Fortunately, the DoD has since begun to see the light.
With the same tone of imperious entitlement that Krugman used to denounce those who “brushed aside” his arguments, Brooks denounces those who aren’t fully up to speed with the current consensus of “thoughtful practitioners.”
Self-Pity…
In general, Brooks exudes an air of self-pitying resentment about his difficulties in communication with the managers above him. Near the beginning of the book, he describes the joys and woes of programming. Listed principally among the “woes” is this complaint:
Other people set one’s objectives, provide one’s resources, and furnish one’s information. One rarely controls the circumstances of his work, or even its goal. In management terms, one’s authority is not sufficient for his responsibility. It seems that in all fields, however, the jobs where things get done never have formal authority commensurate with responsibility.
This diagnosis reveals a blindness: Brooks doesn’t even notice a more likely explanation for his woes. In the course of his efforts to “get things done,” he has generated a dramatically non-standard worldview.
In addition, his presentation of the logic of this new worldview is painfully disjointed and unclear. When intellectuals encounter his story, the exposition runs backwards from consequence to cause. And the ultimate driving force is lost in the dark.
This failure of communication is much more likely to be the root of his problems. Yet not only does he not grapple with this problem; he doesn’t even seem to notice it.
Led To…
Krugman had a meta-blindness that matched that of Brooks. When engaging Microsoft’s opponents, he didn’t realize the depth of the challenge. His opponents were challenging him not just on notions of remedies or regulations. They were challenging his worldview in a fundamental way.
That mistake flowed from another. To my eyes, he systematically misjudged to whom he should listen. He gave more weight to the opinions of technologists who spoke his language—or at least adopted his form. And he dismissed the truly weird, for no other reason than its weirdness.
However, the strangest idea were bubbling up from the internal conversations of engineers. They were talking to each other intensely about the imperatives imposed by their work. To my eyes, that should have given those opinions special weight. Such a conversation may sound strange. But the discussion has its own discipline.
Krugman judged Brooks’s argument undisciplined. His judgment was not without cause: in the form of its argumentation, it was undisciplined. Massively so. Shockingly so, even.
But Brooks was subject a different discipline. His book wouldn’t have become known as the acclaimed classic if its project management advice hadn’t captured precisely the pressing concerns of such professionals.
People who get things done, and want to help others so focused, can’t say just anything. They can’t pander to their donors, or manipulate a stock price, or throw up a smoke screen to hide malfeasance, or puff up their ego, or indulge in any other sins of argumentation so beloved by technologists who wade into political prognostication. Their compatriots would see through such things. There is a seriousness in all this; and a lack of guile. Krugman couldn’t see it. Or perhaps he could, dimly: his later comment suggests as much. But this strange discussion was too shrouded in mists, populated by phantasmagorical beasts. Perhaps he was simply too afraid of the dark.
This disconnect may be, if not natural, at least understandable. But it is also deeply strange. How could such a deep intellectual disconnect could go unbroken for so long? After all, I first observed this misunderstanding twenty years ago. And in all that time, it has not been resolved.
Not only that, the battle hasn’t even been declared. Elizabeth Warren still confidently references Krugman’s story of the two Barons on the Rhine as the definitive analysis of the issues at stake. The technologists still protest the inappropriateness of this analysis. But they do so without actually answering the implicit challenge. They don’t counter with a presentation of their alternative worldview. Still. Nor do the researchers squeeze it out of them. Twenty years later. Still.
An Impasse.
How could such an impasse be so durable? An intellectual and emotional disconnect led to an unbreakable failure of understanding. Later we will devote ourselves to unraveling this misunderstanding. So we will spend a little while longer characterizing it. In the process, we will develop the portrait of our characters. And we will drill down to the root of their misunderstanding.
We won’t venture a formal analysis yet. We will let confusion wash over us. But we will characterize the logical disconnect informally. Readers will see ideas from the first chapter reappear, tying together our themes. And as we proceed backwards from consequence to cause, a coherent picture will emerge.
Our character’s passive-aggressive struggle mirrors our current political malaise. We can view their fight as a microcosm of the tangled knot of our current predicament. With such a miniature in hand, we have hope to unravel the perplexity. Later we will pick apart the knot. But first we will depict the tangle.
- He chose this colorful example because it was the original inspiration for the term [“robber baron”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist). The original robber barons were actual barons who stole from travelers. “Medieval robber barons most often imposed high or unauthorized tolls on rivers or roads passing through their territory. Some robbed merchants, land travelers, and river traffic—seizing money, cargoes, entire ships, or engaged in kidnapping for ransom.” Later this term was applied to unscrupulous 19th century industrialists. Krugman was harking back to the original meaning, just for fun. We will hate on this model. But even so, we have to admit it was extremely clever. ↩︎
- In the category of dubious assertions, I might note that I’m including the assertion that Microsoft was a classic monopolist. This book will discuss at great length a formal description of Microsoft’s villainy, as a way of describing in general what goes wrong in a New Economy. In particular, we will exert care to identify the proper historical analogy. The story won’t be of 19th century robber baron monopolists. Not only that, it won’t even be set in the 19th century. ↩︎
- The dropped first step is not merely an oversight: there is an emotional effect at work forcing it out of view. We will talk about this later, when we discuss the special psychology of the situation. ↩︎
