Big
Thinking about the last post and the comments unfolding there, it strikes me that now that we count ourselves in the hundreds of millions or billions and manage life on a mass scale, the most important thing any two entities can have in common is bigness. Bigness reconciles a multitude of differences. Thus, for example, a Wall Street-K Street alliance is natural, because big entities understand each other, and are motivated to get together to become even bigger. Rick Warren (big) could be invited to speak at the inauguration of Obama (big). You can think of dozens of other examples. The big marry each other and do mergers. Ideology is much less influential than size.
I hear the title “Big” (the Tom Hanks movie) in counterpoint with another: “An Army of Davids” (the Instapundit book). That’s a happy notion, but the fact is that today, to be small is to be helpless, nonexistent. Even David needs a Goliath in his corner, and most Davids dream of incredible-hulking into Goliath-Godzillas who will finally loom above the mass and be seen. Goliaths make more Goliaths, like chess masters queening pawns or Olympians immortalizing their favorite boy- and girl toys: Oprah elevates James Frey, McCain uplifts Joe the Plumber, Instapundit queens Althouse. Yes, in the blogosphere Insty is Goliath himself.
In a democracy, in a marketplace, little guys have only one form of bigness: their numbers. And so they are courted and manipulated instead of brutalized. It’s the very best a little guy can hope for.
Ambiance 
Maxwell said,
June 16, 2009 at 5:09 pm
It’s the dark side of this.
Bruce B. (chickenlittle) said,
June 16, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Maxwell,
Odd, I was reminded of statistical mechanics, wherein the single individual molecule matters little; rather it’s the collection or ensemble of molecules that counts.
Ennui said,
June 16, 2009 at 6:59 pm
That’s a happy notion, but the fact is that today, to be small is to be helpless, nonexistent.
Contrast this with the technology boom. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google. They weren’t always big. What’s the difference. No more frontier.
Ennui said,
June 16, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Um, that should have been “what’s the difference?” (although the absence of the question mark lent a complex flavor of apathy mixed with insolence to my post, if I do say so myself).
amba12 said,
June 16, 2009 at 10:04 pm
If you hadn’t said it yourself, I would’ve, but not as well.
Donna B. said,
June 16, 2009 at 11:01 pm
::sigh::
As if I weren’t depressed enough by trying to figure out whether I’m more conservative than liberal. And it IS depressing to question why one hold’s one belief over another.
Even though depressed a bit, I have a cheery outlook — there are more frontiers, we just have noticed them yet.
wj said,
June 17, 2009 at 10:12 am
I think Ennui nailed the important counter to this rather depressing post: what is critical is that who is “big” is not set in stone. Certainly it is a help if your family can give you a head start. But there are lots of other ways to get there.
And the fact that there is an opportunity to grow is very important. Not least because, even if you personally do not rise to great heights, there will always be a significant number of those among the “big” who did. And some of them will remember where they came from. That, as much as anything, is why the opportunity continues to exist. And thank God for it!
Ennui said,
June 17, 2009 at 1:42 pm
there are more frontiers, we just have noticed them yet.
True enough. I guess that what I was getting at is the importance of the “frontier” (be it geographical or technological) for the maintenance of the American Dream (or “circulation of elites” if you roll that way). You’ve got to have some place without class distinctions where the active and energetic nobodies can take silly risks beyond the reach of the larger culture. These places (whether it’s Lincoln County, New Mexico or the University of Washington Computer Room from 12:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m.) are usually unpleasant by most standards. Which is the whole point. The fact is, well it’s not so much as a fact as it is a very fixed idea in my mind that looks very much like a fact, you don’t make it big, really big, unless you’re blazing a trail of some kind. If we’re long on “big,” it means, for the moment, we’re short on frontier.
Paradoxically, I’m not sure that the internet is helping this situation. There was a line from Dan Zukovic’s “The Last Big Thing” where he says something to the effect of “It is axiomatic in this culture that anything you think of, either has or will happen within four to six years…” And, especially with the internet, it’s hard to find a spot where the flashlight is not already being shined.
PatHMV said,
June 17, 2009 at 1:56 pm
As you say, the frontier is not always a geographic location. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak were working on the frontier, as were Hewlett and Packard before them, and Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin after them, though all worked in the comfort of suburban garages or dorm rooms.
By definition today, most people don’t recognize the frontier until after it’s been explored. Unless we ourselves are involved in the exploration, we don’t know any better than the president of IBM who saw a need for only maybe 4 computers in the entire world. But our lack of recognition of where the frontier is not evidence that there is no frontier left. You can’t see the spot where the flashlight isn’t already being shined until somebody new shines the flashlight there and goes: “hey, look what you’ve been missing!”
It’s an infinite universe. There will always be frontiers, right up until our last day.
amba12 said,
June 17, 2009 at 2:19 pm
If we’re long on “big,” it means, for the moment, we’re short on frontier.
That’s marvelous. It means it’s up to imagination to either discover new niches or create them. It is impossible to think that every millimeter of human experience is mapped, any more than, say, the depths of the ocean where they’re finding amazing “extremophilic” organisms and getting ideas for new industrial processes from them. The frontiers in science are absolutely exploding, and new technological and then new experiential and cultural frontiers will result. The trouble is, you need to be armored in Ph.D.’s to even go there, much as you need a pressurized space suit to walk on the moon.
amba12 said,
June 17, 2009 at 2:21 pm
It’s an infinite universe. There will always be frontiers, right up until our last day.
And after our last day! Thus my motto, from Kafka: “There is infinite hope, but not for us.”
PatHMV said,
June 17, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Remember a few years back, when Francis Fukuyama wrote “The End of History“? It was a remarkable work of hubris.
The notion that we have invented all there is to discover (other than minor tinkering) is hubris in the extreme. The notion proclaims us, as a species, to be omniscient, to know all there is to know.
Now, if you’re talking about a temporary imbalance, that we’ve entered a phase of exploitation of prior discoveries, with less emphasis placed on new discoveries, that’s possible. But the little inventors, the guys thinking in their basements and puttering up new stuff, those (especially in this country) are always doing that. And while the new things they must invent may be more complicated than in the past, may require more specialized equipment and knowledge, the costs of such equipment and of acquiring such knowledge have fallen dramatically. Plus, there are more and more people with money who are aware of the potential for massive gains from such start-ups, so that it’s easier for the garage inventor to obtain $200,000 or $500,000 just for the equipment he needs than ever before in human history, I expect.
I see no reason to be bleak about the state of the technological frontier.
Maxwell said,
June 17, 2009 at 3:23 pm
As someone who knows numerous entrepreneurs, including at least one who looks likely to be extremely successful, I’m with Pat on this one. I think the Internet still creates as many opportunities as challenges, both by putting information out there that might not be found otherwise, and by creating large-scale fads and fusses that help smaller communities continue to work in relative obscurity.
PatHMV said,
June 17, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Just a couple of quick examples. There’s lots of folks out there building mini-refineries in their garage to transform used cooking oil and other biomass into diesel fuel. And that’s folks without Ph.D.’s, but with good basic knowledge and a willingness to experiment and do research into the specific knowledge they need.
Most of the competitors for the X Prize for the first private spaceship to orbit the earth are by small, closely held, private companies started by one or two guys.
Somewhere, right now, somebody is working in an uncomfortable office or basement or garage, inventing something that in 10 years we will all have heard of, but which right now we can’t even imagine.
You also need to consider the long tail phenomenon. Because costs of invention, marketing, production, and shipping are so low, we’ll see more and more specialized products, being invented and made on a relatively small scale, but shipped all over the globe. We don’t hear a lot about them, unless we happen to be looking for the particular product they’re offering. I recently bought a prescription dive mask from an individual optician, who specializes in such things, in New Jersey. I got 2 day service and an excellent product for little more than I would have gotten from a larger company.
Personally, I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be “small.” If you serve a market where there’s maybe only 100,000 potential customers in the world, 50 years ago, you’d have to be located in New York or Paris or London in order to have enough customers to survive. Today, you can be in Peoria, and market and ship anywhere in the world you need to.
Ennui said,
June 17, 2009 at 11:11 pm
PatHMV and Maxwell,
You’re probably (almost certainly) right about the internet being a net positive in opening up more niches for little guys to compete. But I believe that there’s a difference between a niche and a frontier (this occured to me when I reread my flashlight metaphor – you don’t need a flashlight to find a frontier). The internet, in 1993, was a frontier. Everyone knew it was there. Anyone who was willing to take the time knew as much about it as anyone else (of course this was usually quite a lot of time). Obviously, no one knew the importance it would eventually assume, but it was there, and there for the taking.
That said, it’s undoubtedly the case that the internet’s opened up niches that wouldn’t otherwise exist and made other existing niches habitable for little guys.
PatHMV said,
June 18, 2009 at 12:00 am
Ennui, I see what you’re saying, but I still think there’s plenty of frontiers that you’re not seeing, right now.
Take 3-D printers. You can get a 3-D printer for about $5,000 right now. When that price comes down to $500 and everybody can afford one, that’s going to be huge. That will certainly build and rely on older technologies like the internet, but the internet relied on older technologies, too.
amba12 said,
June 18, 2009 at 12:01 am
The whole notion of a 3-D printer just kills me. It’s magic — straight out of Harry Potter. Who would think of such a thing!!
wj said,
June 18, 2009 at 10:18 am
What Pat and Maxwell are saying, if I may presume to rephrase, is that there are two kinds of frontiers. There are the ideas, which the Internet may have an impact on in the sense of shining lights onto lots of places. But then there are the actual actions — people going out and doing the hard work needed to take some wild idea and turn it into reality. And all the Internet does for that is provide more people with access to ideas that they might be moved to work on.
It’s that latter frontier which is still with us, and likely always will be. Frontiers, actually, because there are lots of different areas where new (or even old) ideas could be turned into real stuff. And lots of people, from the guys puttering in their garage to the folks in big corporate or government labs, working away at doing that. As with any frontier, a lot of them won’t succeed. But they are all part of what it takes to explore a frontier.
karen said,
June 23, 2009 at 9:10 pm
~~”Personally, I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be “small.”~~
i like that.
It seems to me that the past and the actions for the successes of the past are the ~new~ frontier– what’s old is new again. Except that there are entities out there in the world that have a mighty high opinion of themselves and tend to throw their weight around in the name of power and privelige(i’m sorry- i’m too tired to look it up in my Webster’s, guys)
Today, we got our bill for our revised milking system on the new farm(which is almost 100 yrs old-lol). $15grand$. Nice, eh? No, i ‘m not quite sure HOW we will pay for it– they hold our milkchecks for up to 6 weeks when we begin a new venture in production(gibberish- sorry, again).
So, my point about this bill is that the dude that put in the system and tweeked her good– has more work that he really can handle, but he’s content and doesn’t want the headache of more workers, another truck, more area, etc. Yet, the company he sells for- SURGE- tells him that he has to merge w/another dealer(a larger yet much less busy dealer) or he’ll lose his dealership.
WTF? I don’t get business. Is the power in us- the little folk- or the ones that we peddle for(ie- SURGE, Stonyfield,you name it)?
O/T, sorta. Heard a comment on NPR about credit cards and how some people are just going w/out. I never dared to own one for fear of getting in over my head– i like cash, i guess. Some guy running on for about two minutes about thinking purchases through and spending less, etc. Uh, that was what i was taught to do to begin w/. My folks take over a yr to buy a freaking car! It’s not peeH2O- it’s money. Geesh. What’s old is new again.
Hey- Donna B!!! Hang in there, girl. You’re just questioning things, which is a good sign:0). I haven’t budged much on my opinion except to try very hard to at least respect the office of President. After watching Obama in his Press Conference today– i was not impressed. At all.
amba12 said,
June 23, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Karen — I’m too tired to say much except “Amen!” We could sing to credit cards, “We got along without ya before we met ya, gonna get along without ya now.” Surely we don’t need all those elaborate air castles of fine-spun credit to be prosperous.
And, send me your new address, I still have a book for you!
karen said,
June 24, 2009 at 2:36 pm
:0)- i know all about tired, now. Sorta like nursing a newborn, i feel.
I picked on Stonyfield unjustly in my above comment, too. I was on an S-curve and took a wrong turn. It’s a great company and an amazing product line full of Omega3’s and 6’s, etc– and our farms milk.
Right now my new address is the same as my old address because only the cows have moved w/out us– we travel to them. It’s only a few miles, but it isn’t like walking down to the barn– and to see our barn empty is like a loss to us. If anyone wants a little organic farm to keep cows, horses, beef– you name it- on… we’ve got a little piece of Heaven for sale in the NEKingdom!!