Pattern recognition is also easier when dealing with a confined game, such as a literal sports match or something like the weather. The limits just described help explain why, so far, human prediction has mainly been successful in a limited number of settings where copious amounts of data are available with patterns that can be recognized. (Outside

the platforms today, whatever they may say, are really in the business of herding a rather mercurial and moody form of livestock (us).

its power does not lie in production but rather in catalysis. It resides in the hosting of economic activity and the extraction of value, including the harvesting of specialized assets like data and human attention.

In our times, the great tech platforms should be understood as the public callings of our time and given similar duties. Businesses depend on them; we depend on them; they are, for better or worse, the utilities of contemporary life. And as in those times, there is reason to expect more of them—to impose duties that we do not impose on other

Technology has never been neutral, but rather reflects ideology and what it is designed to do.

What’s left after a firm has grown too big may not be any great efficiency but just the capacity to bully.

As the tech platforms have grown and evolved over the last decade, they have focused their attention on refining their methods of extraction. In return for an undeniable and unescapable utility, they are fine-tuned to take as much as possible—data, attention, profit margins—from everyone else.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the anti-monopoly enforcers were of a different and much tougher mindset. They were closer in disposition to Theodore Roosevelt and tended to see the stakes of anti-monopoly as transcending mere economics and spilling into questions of democracy and political destiny. Influenced by the recent experience of the Second

Antitrust enforcement by challenging the monopolist can serve as a key tool of economic rebalancing. Its remedies can be used to open platforms and target excessive aggregations of economic power. It is, in that sense, an essential element of an alternative to both pure capitalism and communism.