The greatest theme of our times? Big v Small.

For most of the past hundred years or so Bigness was the thing. Technology was clunky and expensive, so it made market and operational sense to pool resources to buy it and manage it. 

Bigness made the notion of mass-scale ‘planning’ on both sides of the Iron Curtain popular, although Communism of course messed it up since it could not measure cost or value once markets had been suppressed. Hence eg the heavier a Polish washing machine the more it added to the glory of state output statistics: hopeless washing machines, environmental ruin, institutionalised self-delusion.

In East and West alike huge, literally and figuratively ‘heavy’ corporations developed to run mass production of everything from cars to news – remember the Grandstand outside broadcast cameras as large and unwieldy as those Polish communist washing machines?

Today many organisations in both the private and public sectors exist in the form they do in part because of information management and market entry issues from decades earlier. But they are vulnerable.

The rise of the computer age has made Smallness viable. The cost of entry into many sectors is plummeting. So choices are soaring. 

Big Media are especially vulnerable – in the way that elephants are vulnerable to locusts. Hence devastating psychological stress in the journalist profession.

Big Government has a sort of monopoly power. But it too is vulnerable to competition from ways of doing things differently. And from public dissatisfaction at government’s inability to cope with soaring complexity and to do basic things properly. 

To be continued…