Is there a point at which societal change moves so fast that
some people not only do not see it, but emphatically deny that it’s
happening?
That’s the question I was left pondering after the event last
week, “An Army of Davids or the Triumph of Goliath”
(co-sponsored by the Reason foundation, TCS Daily, and the Smith
Family Foundation). I looked forward to the event — which I
enjoyed — especially hoping to see the panelists engage in some
informed controversy. I got controversy alright — some of it
surprising.
First up was Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit fame,
and now author of the new book whose title gave the event its name.
We’ve often heard the story of how blogs and new media undermined
Big Media’s former stranglehold on information, and Reynolds
recapped again, but went a step further that should make us all
optimistic. He wondered: Will new media eventually become old and
complacent, and ultimately “sell out” to create a new information
monopoly? No, because people will continue to do this for free.
Give people a soapbox, and they’ll want to get on it and rant,
regardless of whether they make money from doing that, because,
quite simply, it’s fun.
Next up was Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean,
who was credited with helping the campaign raise huge wads of cash
through online contributions. Trippi added another insight: Having
helped launch an insurgency within the Democratic Party, he
experienced firsthand the power of new information technologies to
shake up large institutions from within. Blogs and online world
activities like fundraising, he noted, have given voice to
constituencies within large institutions — like political parties
— to make their voices heard if they believe that those
institutions’ leaders have lost touch with them.
Good points, all well made. So far so good.
But then we come to Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation —
and author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the
Global Corporation — and the discussion
got…interesting.
Monopolies and oligopolies, argued Lynn, are taking over ever
greater chunks of today’s American — and global — economy. Large
corporations, through use of their market power, are consolidating
their already-powerful positions, enough so to render the shots
from the slings of an “Army of Davids” just so many petty pinpricks
— a pretty standard leftist critique of corporate power, so there
was nothing new or particularly outrageous here.
Lynn admits that a lot of the business consolidation he decries
has benefited consumers, but that more competition is still
necessary, and that it must be “imposed” through antitrust
regulation. Left alone, a few large corporations will leverage
their market share to squeeze suppliers and choke off competitors.
The system is skewed to favor already-dominant players. Lynn’s
scenario may partially describe corporate behavior — after all,
everyone tries to drive the best bargain possible — but omits one
inconvenient fact: Corporations, including very large ones, fail.
If large companies’ power were as awesome as Lynn implies,
corporate bankruptcies would be rare.
During comments, Trippi offered an example that undermined
Lynn’s corporate-gigantism-is-here-to-stay argument: the public
relations disaster that hit the fast food chain Wendy’s when a
woman claimed to have found a human finger in her chili at one of
the chain’s restaurants. The claim was later found to be a hoax to
sue Wendy’s for big bucks, but not before it went all over the Web,
creating a PR nightmare for Wendy’s and severely hurting its sales.
So couldn’t enough of these Davids bring down a Goliath like
Wendy’s?
Yes, said Lynn, a handful of individuals put Wendy’s on the
defensive, but that’s of no consequence, because that occurred in
“the digital world, not the real world.”
Really? Are the digital and “real” worlds — the latter
described by Lynn as the world of factories and brick-and-mortar
stores — two realms that never shall meet? Then where would my
purchasing a copy of Lynn’s book — hard copy, mind you — through
Amazon.com, rather than at the brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble
down the street, fit into that scheme? Or airline tickets that take
me from one physical destination to another purchased
though an online travel site like Travelocity or Expedia?
Trippi’s entertaining example, in my view, sank Lynn’s argument.
But once in that hole, Lynn couldn’t stop digging. During the
Q&A session, a member of the audience asked Lynn how the
increased competition to the Detroit Big Three from Japanese and
European automakers that began in the 1970s squared with his view
of corporate invincibility. “Because we invited them in.”
We? Invited? Foreign automakers were not “invited” by the U.S.
government — if that’s who Lynn means by “we” — but were simply
not kept out of the U.S. market. According to Lynn, this
reinforced his argument for the need for stricter antitrust laws.
Yet the only “we” that “invited” foreign auto sales were consumers,
not Washington regulators.
In the end, Lynn’s apprehension about the changing economy is
understandable. His remarks suggest a worldview based on power
struggles between oppressors and oppressed — capital vs. labor,
Wal-Mart vs. mom-and-pop stores, and such. New technologies like
the Internet undermine this paradigm by diffusing power. This is
great news for society at large, encouraging greater cooperation as
more people are able to engage in the market in different ways. But
for the society-as-power-struggle crowd, it may mean that
everything they know is wrong — and who wouldn’t want to deny
that?
