Big Tech is Soviet

Posted 2026-04-21

Scott’s Seeing Like a State describes what large organizations need to manage a system. Everything must be made visible, countable, and comparable; in other words everything must be standardized.

The problem is that standardization serves the center, not the periphery. It simplifies administration, but at the cost of destroying local adaptations that made things actually work. For example, precolonial land tenure systems that assigned use rights in complex ways according to season, kinship, and historical agreement were illegible to colonial administrators. They were replaced with systems of private title that were legible and administrable, but which dispossessed most of the existing users. The same logic recurs in forestry, urban renewal, and agricultural collectivization: the abstraction that makes central management possible also strips out the complexity that made the original system work.

These kinds of failures follow a pattern:

A central authority identifies a problem.
Its experts devise a technically sophisticated solution.
The authority then implements that solution at scale without adequate feedback from the people whose lives will be affected.
And then discovers that the solution creates new problems that it can’t accommodate.

Classical economics states that rational economic allocation is impossible without market prices, because prices aggregate information about relative scarcity that no central planner could collect and process. As Cassidy describes in Capitalism and Its Critics, this argument has long been used as a theoretical refutation of socialism, and the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse was taken as empirical confirmation.

But in The People’s Republic of Walmart, Phillips and Rozworski argue that what the Soviet Union’s collapse actually showed was that the Soviets lacked the computational resources to coordinate a complex economy. They compare it to companies like Walmart and Amazon, which operate planned economies at a scale that would have been implausible in the mid-twentieth century. Amazon knows the location and movement of nearly every item in its fulfillment network in real time. Walmart’s supply chain management, built over decades, coordinates pricing, inventory, and logistics across thousands of stores in ways that simple weren’t possible before large-scale networked computing.

These companies are not market economies internally: they are command-and-control systems with enormous information advantages over any planner from the 1950s. And as the last few years have shown, if unconstrained, they tend to treat their workers no better than a Soviet-era factory manager.

See also Spufford’s wonderful Red Plenty, which I’m not even going to try to describe.

Cassidy2025: John Cassidy: Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 978-0374601089.
Phillips2019: Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski: The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Verso, 2019, 978-1786635167.
Scott1998: James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998, 978-0300078152.
Spufford2012: Francis Spufford: Red Plenty. Graywolf Press, 2012, 978-1555976040.