Is the future socialist?

This is a hard blogpost to write. My usual view of socialism is absolutely this tweet by Elon Musk:

But it is a good mental exercise to consider options that you've long ruled out.

The original case for socialism in the 19th century was that industry was growing more and more organized, concentrated and monopolistic. This wasn't just a pathology – there were really good reasons why you might want, say, a single company running railways all across America. People could see this, and thought: "why not continue this process?" Industry was going to become a single vertically-integrated monopoly, and it could then be taken over on behalf of the people, instead of run to profit a single capital owner. I think that was the nub of Marx's argument about the economic historical inevitability of socialism.

From 2020, the case looks the same. I stopped buying stuff online in 2008 because my credit card got stolen from a little specialist internet shop, who just couldn't have adequate security. When I started again, it was with Amazon, because I thought I could trust them. And I still buy 90% of my stuff from Amazon.

In short, the internet has created huge forces making monopoly efficient. (Remember back when everyone had email provided by their own ISP? It sucked.) More recently the need for big data to feed to AI does the same.

Yet, this pressure to monopoly inevitably makes the incumbents lazy, and stifles innovation, because any firm with a new idea can see it copied by one of the Big Four. Firms like Evernote, Dropbox and Slack are struggling against incumbent copies (Apple Notes / iCloud and Google Drive / Microsoft Teams).

At this point, with huge profits being made by a few big and not especially innovative firms, why not take the next step and socialize them? Monopoly has outcompeted competition. We should acknowledge that.

I see the appeal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the end I'm not convinced.

• The advantage of Big Tech may be a passing phase, driven by the relative rarity of high-level tech skills. During lockdown I started buying things from local firms online. My favourite coffee shop put up a website with a nice clean interface, probably provided by Shopify. They delivered within a day. I no longer felt scared to order. Similarly, much research in AI is about working with smaller datasets which don't require a planet-scale infoharvesting operation.
  
• Breaking up monopolies is just as plausible a remedy as taking them over.
• Administering huge companies "for the benefit of the people" still suffers from the usual principal-agent problems. It might look less like putting Google under state control, and more like lending Google the power of the state.
  

It seems to be a universal rule of human cognition that we confuse local improvement with global optimality. "A step in this direction will make things better, so let's continue in this direction forever and reach Utopia!" So far, socialism has always proved to be a mirage like that. But who knows how many steps we will take towards it this time?