daft_pink 2025-09-24 16:47 UTC link

I’m not sure if that’s true.

As a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.

Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks and cable tv.

It may be true that big organizations deliver these things, but big organizations delivered them before and it’s definitely more possible for small organizations to have big impacts now than it was before.

iambateman 2025-09-24 16:54 UTC link

This is the best thing I'll read today. Things I want to remember:

1. small organizations have been carved out by a move toward the individual and a move toward large organizations. 2. This provides some comfort in the form of cheap goods while contributing to a sense of meaninglessness or being undifferentiated. 3. Tao thinks we would benefit by seeking and participating in grassroots groups.

rglover 2025-09-24 16:55 UTC link

This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead.

I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).

alberth 2025-09-24 16:57 UTC link

Is this a surprise though?

50-years ago, if you wanted to:

- read the news (local paper),

- get coffee (local coffee shop)

- get groceries (local grocery)

- buy tires (local tire dealer)

You’d get this from your local small business … and this created local small community groups.

But now between the internet and national distribution of goods/services - all those small local companies are gone (or has a much reduced role as Tao would say) … because CNN, Starbucks, Kroger, Discount Tire has replaced the need for those small local businesses.

cs702 2025-09-24 16:59 UTC link

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:

* The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.

* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.

* Banks were prohibited from entering riskier businesses, resulting in a compartmentalized system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... : Your bank did not try to sell you investments.

* Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_... .

The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.

Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.

nostrademons 2025-09-24 17:04 UTC link

Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of themselves.

I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering and shrinking away.

Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations becoming dysfunctional, but not dying because they have sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their replacements become large organizations.

FloorEgg 2025-09-24 17:06 UTC link

It seems to me that:

- on average, complexity is increasing.

- most patterns in how civilization is arranged oscilate over time

- what's happening right now is most likely an artifact of right now (economics, power structure, culture, politics, etc).

- it seems that a shift back to smaller groups is likely in the future

- what I'm not sure about is whether the larger groups need to dissolve or stabilize in order for smaller groups to rebound

- I can't help but think that if our whole economic system reconfigures after reaching sufficient abundance, more of people's time will be spent on satisfying the soft needs met by smaller social groups, and less time will be spent on what feels meaningless

scottfr 2025-09-24 17:08 UTC link

In the early 1800's Alexis de Tocqueville attributed a lot of American success to its small organizations/associations:

"There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America....

In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one."

[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/805328.html

fraserharris 2025-09-24 17:16 UTC link

Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving product.

stego-tech 2025-09-24 17:45 UTC link

I would argue that the role of small orgs has shrunk significantly from the perspective of the majority, but grown in importance and impact for groups outcast from that majority.

The example I like to trot out is the amalgamation of furry and queer persons into a larger unit when collaborating at scale, but otherwise fostering positive impacts in smaller groups. The response to their successes has been attacks by larger orgs who are unable to integrate or co-opt them for profit (corporations) or power motives (politicians), as well as cringe-y reputations by individuals not included in those groups (see the mocking of both subcultures and groups by eRandos). Yet despite these negative attacks, both groups continue to grow and create parallel economies, logistics networks, communities, and even limited forms of governance (cons, parades, and social forums).

So in that vein, I believe we’re simply in the midst of an era of transformation, from a broken system to something new. Smaller orgs often lead these changes until one or more balloon in size, at which point they become the larger and more dominant organizations in the new era that follows. What we’re seeing now is a classic fight between opposing political, social, and economic views, aided by technology on both sides of the battle and fundamentally reshaping how conflicts are waged.

w10-1 2025-09-24 18:07 UTC link

Great post.

But not sure I'd pre-position small organizations as having some kind of "role" -- effect maybe?

I'm reminded of a term "the locus of relevant possibility" used to characterize where people spend their time and effort. This enables one to compare across activities (say, believers, merchants, workers, etc.), and also to propose that change happens where people put their efforts -- nowadays into larger organizations.

Small organizations became relatively less effective at producing any relevant possibilities for people due to loss of locality for people and gain of targeting by large organizations.

People now are participating fans in sports, politics, hardware, and of course work (most jobs come with a cultural context). If/when organizations get better at targeting people, they can scale.

"Local" is a function of time/space/effort cost. Often now it's hard to visit your parents, but easy to engineer complex PR with someone across the world. So physical locality is not a proxy for relevance or possibility any more.

(Too bad locality is still the basis for political representation.)

There's also a key difference in the small organization: it incentivizes people to take some responsibility for others, i.e., some organizing roles, to keep the organization afloat. A world with large effective organizations has fewer leaders -- fewer individuals effecting change.

Probably the main small organizations are personal work networks. That's what determines ability and possibility in an increasingly productive world. In many cases, it centers on a rainmaker effect: people who can find and/or make work are followed.

(I would love to see some clean way to distinguish the organizations with their own cultures vs. those that labor under rainmaker sub-cultures -- alignment vs competition, efficiency vs relevance...)

solatic 2025-09-24 18:13 UTC link

Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to individuals and much more power to large organizations at the expense of small organizations. Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own? Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if I go into the desert or wilderness, somewhere where there are no individuals, small organizations, or large organizations as of yet; that means it is literally impossible for any of them to come in, develop it, and make it a center of power?

There's a much simpler explanation. Most entities most of the time (with such probabilities increasing with the size and age of the entity) seek to defend and expand their power. The American political tradition held that the blessings of liberty would be granted and prosperity would grow if the power of the largest such entities were kept in check; first and foremost the British Crown, second the newfound American governments (at different levels), and eventually the largest private entities as well. But America abandoned its commitment to that tradition in all but name. America is no longer committed to property rights, free markets, free expression, or free association, such protections exist today only on paper. So every entity makes locally optimal decisions, leading society into a slow collapse.

yesfitz 2025-09-24 18:24 UTC link

I've been thinking about this due to a renewed local interest in Bowling Alone[1].

Besides the main identified contributors of personalized media, suburbanization, real estate prices, and the increase of dual-income households, I've started to suspect that government-funding of organizations has also had a significant impact.

In the past, organizations had to raise funds from their communities. As government grants for organizations increased, the cost floor was raised on all organizations (i.e. fundraising, rents, salaries, etc.), and led to the professionalization of what was previously handled by volunteers.

In the same way that the 30-year mortgage and zero-interest-rate policy made it harder for individuals to raise the initial funds to buy a home (by enabling an increase in home prices, making it easier to buy a home if you already own one), I suspect access to government capital has made it harder for small organizations to remain small while they compete with more professional (read "larger") organizations for their members' time and money.

And this is a problem because as Terence Tao points out, "...[Small Groups] also fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have real influence on their direction."

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

chaseadam17 2025-09-24 18:25 UTC link

Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US.

* Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans.

* Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not contributing to growing the economy (but creating money out of thin air to flood the market with mortgages does increase housing prices...).

One way to solve this problem is to break up the big banks and incentivize small regional banks to lend to productive small businesses. Worse for the bankers but better for the economy. Incidentally, this is exactly China's strategy, but as long as big banks are paying politicians millions for luncheon talks, it's unlikely to happen here.

999900000999 2025-09-24 18:39 UTC link

Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community.

This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems .

For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore.

There's not a really good solution to this. I'm lucky enough to be in a game dev group, and I do have my bar that I go to every now and then, but aside from that I'm not really a part of any small organizations.

I haven't been to church in decades, but arguably that's why most people actually go. It's not because you imagine God is taking attendance, but it's the joy of being around other people. Historically most people stayed in the same town from cradle to grave, maybe you would move for work, or marriage, but for the most part you just stayed put.

ppsreejith 2025-09-24 18:49 UTC link

In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:

> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.

Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:

1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.

2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.

3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)

softwaredoug 2025-09-24 19:29 UTC link

Is there data to back this up? I'm skeptical.

I see all kinds of "small organizations" forming in Slack communities, subreddits, and other online spaces. Some might be described as influencer driven communities like substack. Or audiences of a specific podcast. And so on. It's almost never been easier to participate in one of these "organizations".

Even locally, where I live, the school board, city council, local advocacy groups, etc are heavily attended. We have a local group advocating for immigrant rights. Another YIMBY group. Another group that argues against the YIMBYs. PTA meetings. Another group that advocates for the homeless.

I'd say its true that many are in the "universe" of one political sphere (in my case left-leaning). But that does not mean they have been wholly subsumed by "The Left", they often disagree and fight against "Left" politicians. And often "The Left" is not a uniform thing in a city with differing interests and stakeholders.

lifeisstillgood 2025-09-24 21:25 UTC link

He should look up Roald Coase - mid 20C who tried o answer the question of why have firms at all - big or small. The “market” ought to be able to supply services (secretary, welding etc) - but his “Theory of the firm” suggests that there are complex processes inside a firm that are pretty easy to employ someone and teach them, and pretty hard to write a contract for.

So there is a natural size of a firm that is a tug of war between savings of contracting out and the cost of contracting to the market

My still to be published magnum opus claims this is upended by software - that processes can be written and followed in software reducing the cost of hiring and changing the dynamics in favour of large companies.

But software literacy in all employees will enable smaller companies to outperform larger ones - we hope

seu 2025-09-25 07:46 UTC link

> An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray.

This guy may be a math genius, but he should at least pay minimal respect to the thousands of people who have studied human cultures, societies and civilizations, and to their findings, before coming up with a post about groups of people based on what "post-apocaliptic fiction" has portrayed. As an anthropologist, I just stopped taking his ideas seriously at that point.

mdnahas 2025-09-25 11:27 UTC link

We have done a lot to reduce risk, which has lowered the need for trust. We have national paper money, credit cards, insurance, flood-prevention infrastructure, FEMA (or did), etc.. We have less need for safety brought by connections with our neighbors.

And, with shipping being cheaper and the internet, you can stay at home and get food delivered, homegoods delivered, entertainment delivered, etc. and live without even interacting with your neighbors or seeing them at the local store.

yifanl 2025-09-24 16:50 UTC link

Those tiny businesses are reasonably well-coordinated, so its not really the same type of "small organization" as what Tao is talking about.

Oarch 2025-09-24 17:02 UTC link

I'm reminded of the sixties idea of "the man" a lot recently. The man definitely won.

zwnow 2025-09-24 17:05 UTC link

I recently moved away from as much big tech as possible. Canceled Spotify, won't order anything from Amazon, deleted Instagram, trying not to watch as much YouTube Videos etc. Sadly cant move away from WhatsApp and Google yet...

Instead, I am sitting here right now working on a blogging engine so I can create personal blogs to let my friends keep up to date with my shenanigans. Basically give them a chance to participate in my life without enabling them to doom scroll.

I really hope its not only me growing tired of all these addictive unhealthy apps and subscriptions that sneaked into most peoples everyday life. I can only recommend boycotting big tech with CEOs only caring about their own enrichment.

Its only the internet part of life, but this is where I spend most of my time. In real life I try to buy from the local stores as much as possible. However, I do not participate in many other smaller organizations...

nextworddev 2025-09-24 17:05 UTC link

Many big corps launch small brands to fake authenticity

rangestransform 2025-09-24 17:08 UTC link

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b?

- Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development?

- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?

There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades later. The same could be said for all the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few years.

femiagbabiaka 2025-09-24 17:09 UTC link

The centralization of power also means the leaders of those large organizations have disproportionate power. Everyone is looking for the singular strongman at the head of an organization with nation-level power to save them from current turmoil.

mediaman 2025-09-24 17:13 UTC link

The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes.

The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession").

One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.

jstummbillig 2025-09-24 17:17 UTC link

> I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon

I do! Unironically: AI assisted software development – and please, we can call that anything else, we do not need to confuse it with Serious software development.

Just the amount of super simple software (Apps Script, Office Script) that baseline tech savy people can now/soon build to enhance what they think their business needs are, without the impossible constraint of having to pay a dev to find it out for/with them (because that is really not how you can find that out, while you find out everything else about your super small business) gives me a lot of hope here.

CalRobert 2025-09-24 17:21 UTC link

I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)

jmyeet 2025-09-24 17:29 UTC link

> The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network

For the record, this system where AT&T was broken up between long distance and regional local companies (called the Regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs) was a terrible solution to anticompetitive behavior and is one of many examples (some of which you also quote) about how the US is terrible at breaking up monopolies.

The problem is the RBOCs simply became regional monopolies and regional monopolies aren't really any better than national monopolies. By the 90s the RBOCs could become long distance providers by meeting certain criteria and of course the whole system was gamed.

What needed to happen is the exact same thing that needs to happen with national ISPs today: municipalities need to own, maintain and build last-mile infrastructure.

dh2022 2025-09-24 17:35 UTC link

Interesting take. What is the market-serving product you mentioned?

Karrot_Kream 2025-09-24 17:39 UTC link

> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.

Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.

I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.

lordleft 2025-09-24 17:40 UTC link

Tocqueville is the first person I thought of reading this!

kansface 2025-09-24 17:59 UTC link

People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces?

One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!

Karrot_Kream 2025-09-24 18:14 UTC link

I've found this to be a funny framing on the left because it always ignores what happens when the group stops being outcast. It's always a framing based around the current time and conveniently orients itself around the mores of the current era. Anime and otaku interest groups used to be like this in the '80s and '90s, generally ideologically aligned, creating parallel economies, in response to attack and scorn from the outside. Then it became mainstream. The stigma in liking anime went away. And with it the pressure to organize against the mainstream.

We need to think about durable small organizations, not ones that are based around the social mores of the moment. The magic of a neighborhood group is that as long as people live in an area together there will be neighbors.

FWIW opposition-based interest groups have a long history in pretty much every state we've ever had records of.

brap 2025-09-24 18:37 UTC link

On one hand you’re saying property rights and free markets, on the other you’re saying private entities should be kept in check (by who? I assume the government). Isn’t that a contradiction?

huijzer 2025-09-24 18:37 UTC link

> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.

They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can expect little support from the government (and surely no big subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many small business owners are extremely tough since larger stores were allowed to stay open while the small businesses were not.

talbo888 2025-09-24 18:56 UTC link

It’s almost certainly more profitable to make to make 1,000 $100k loans from a banks point of view as the single loan will be much riskier (effectively not benefiting from the law of large numbers). Not to say there are benefits of dealing large loans such as cross selling other financial products to the large business.

Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as a result of (broadly good) government policy. A bank wouldn’t mind making uncollateralised loans any more than a mortgage, although it might charge more interest for the risk. However the government penalises banks based on (approximately) the sum of their risk weighted assets [0]. Here mortgages, as collateralised loans, are greatly incentivised over uncollateralised loans to business.

It’s hard to say if the situation would be worse without it, it’s possible we might have more risky business loans leading to growth, but also more likely we could see a serious global financial crisis.

[0] I am simplifying here slightly but you can see how the US ranks major banks here, higher is worse from the banks point of view https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P261124.pdf

daxfohl 2025-09-24 19:01 UTC link

Yeah, I remember he commented on every town having its own local newspaper too, which has obviously been replaced by commercialized mass media today.

kjkjadksj 2025-09-24 19:11 UTC link

Two decades ago department stores were not making products. They were and still are leasing shelf space. The only difference between them and modern amazon is that their shelves are finite, so some level of quality control was done to ensure the shelves would be stocked with things people are actually interested in and wouldn’t fall apart and jam up the returns department too badly.

azemetre 2025-09-24 19:34 UTC link

I've recently finished Tribe by Sebastian Junger. I highly recommend it as well.

pnathan 2025-09-24 19:46 UTC link

I would concur. It's my observation from 20 years of watching and participating - the volunteers are the retired, the wealthy, the underemployed, and the stay at home parent. "Normal" working people are not volunteering and handling the complexity of doing these things, they are at their work. I can only imagine that prior generations had the working parent participate through the free time freed up by the stay at home parent.

It suggests to me that there is a long running flaw. I believe Bowling Alone pegs the inflection point in the late 50s or early 60s, ('57?) and the substantative issues came about with the generation hitting the workforce in something like 1960. So the kids born in the 1935-1945 era had something in their culture materially different than prior eras that kept on spreading.

xmprt 2025-09-24 20:06 UTC link

I think this is what Tao is saying that large organizations are filling the niche that was previously served by smaller organizations. eg. Discord, Slack, and other online platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Fortnite, Roblox, etc., are being used instead of smaller forums and local communities.

drivers99 2025-09-24 20:13 UTC link

> I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.

There was a lot of stuff available that was advertised in magazines and stuff as well. To use one niche as an example: I'm thinking of the ads in computer magazines sometimes with hundreds of obscure items crammed into a page.

bccdee 2025-09-24 20:36 UTC link

> Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators

Right, but you don't know these people. You're not in a community with them. Tao points to Dunbar's number as a rough boundary between small and large communities; how many of these "tiny" creators have fewer than 150 followers, and how many of them foster close social ties among those followers in ways that couldn't scale to a larger audience?

Before the era of ~2k subscriber youtube passion project channels, people were forced to find people in their area with shared interests and establish social clubs. This necessarily meant a smaller audience, but it also meant actually being friends with the people you were communicating with. Youtube is definitely a different kind of thing.

That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that the Discord- and groupchat-ification of the social media ecosystem is a backswing toward smaller groups.

GeoAtreides 2025-09-24 20:53 UTC link

>Is there some zero-sum pie of power

Yes, that's exactly how power works. You can dilute power (in non-hierarchical organizations) or you can concentrate it (in rigidly hierarchical societies), but there's a finite amount of it and it's deeply coveted by all

grogenaut 2025-09-24 21:07 UTC link

I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people.

Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it.

Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year.

I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.

mmmore 2025-09-24 21:17 UTC link

> a zero-sum game

I don't see any reference to the game being zero-sum in Tao's words.

> Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own?

I don't think Tao is saying the uncontrollable force of technological and economic advancement exhibits a genuine agency of its own. Just that our current technology and society and has expanded the role of the extremely large organization/power structures compared to other times in history. This is a bit of technological determinist argument, and of course there's many counter-arguments, but it at least has a broad base of support. And at the very least it's a little bit true; pre-agricultural the biggest human organizations were 50 person hunter-gatherer bands.

Honestly, I feel like you are filtering his words through your own worldview a bit, and his opinions might be less oppositional to your own than you might think.

Karrot_Kream 2025-09-24 21:29 UTC link

I think the key difference is that online communities are "cheap"; they're easy to create and easy to destroy. Offline communities are difficult to form and as such more "sticky". A great example is ideological differences. Lefty political groups (no doubt Righty ones have this too but I'm not as familiar with them) constantly reorganize based on perceived ideological bounds. Leftist groups splinter from liberal groups, labor-forward leftist groups split from identity politic leftist groups, and on and on.

A PTA doesn't do that. The folks in the PTA all have the same shared interest in the school their kids attend. They can't just splinter off into another PTA over a perceived difference. This forces the folks on the PTA to work together and makes the organization sticky in a way an online group might not be.

If the activation energy to form and join a community needed it's also really easy to just churn from the community. Moreover when splitting is this easy it prompts the creation of hyper-specific communities which lead to things like radicalization and dehumanization of the other (look at the acrimony between leftist identity-politic progressives and center-left liberals on the internet right now for example.)

pessimizer 2025-09-24 21:53 UTC link

There was an explosion of these little groups in the US after the 1st edition of Robert's Rules of Order was published, which incidentally was also heavily adopted by churches (and women's suffrage groups, who helped him with the Newly Revised.) I'd say this fulmination culminated in FDR and strong unions, aspects of both made illegal afterwards - term limits to limit democracy, striking made into a kabuki ritual by the NLRB, unions being forbidden from offering their members health insurance (they're the ones who started doing this), but employers offering insurance being subsidized. Elites were so terrified that they got close to pulling a coup and installing a dictator with the Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot).

They got everything tight again with WWII, McCarthy and the Cold War, though. Lucky, right?

I think there has been an intentional effort to isolate people from each other, and to destroy communities, and even make them look suspicious or evil in some way. Isolated, atomized people are more easily controlled. I think the encouragement of labor mobility and the trashing of small towns and small business in favor of the internet has also been an intentional effort in that regard. I also think there has been an intentional effort to consolidate media and merge it with government, which reached a frenzy during the Biden administration. Oracle's nepo baby is going to have Paramount, CBS, Tiktok, and who knows what else.

An evil antidemocratic streak has been encouraged among the "left," who now love benevolent dictators, credentialism, and decision by "consent" which immediately devolves into rule by the loudest and the whiniest cluster B personality or sociopath. Votes mean that you don't get your way a lot, but you get stuff done. If you don't get your way too much, you can just leave and join a group that works for you. Monopoly, and rule by anointment take that away from us, and that's what's happening.

It's been devastating for black Americans. Our media used to be vibrant and exciting, now it doesn't exist at all. This is the fate of all minorities under cultural consolidation. Alone, getting your directions from a screen, with the screen listening to any conversation you manage to have and reporting it to your rulers.

They'll eventually go after the churches, too, or consolidate them. I'm sorry, they'll go after the "christofascists."

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