What’s the big advantage of having a monopoly? That you make lots of money?

No. It’s that you can enjoy a quiet life.

Traditional businesses succeed or fail by a power law. When you start one, you are staring down the barrel of a 71% failure rate over ten years. Success will depend on various factors, many of which you cannot control. And even if you succeed, uneasy hangs the head that wears the crown. Your continued success requires luck, skill, ability to respond to market changes, and on a long enough scale all businesses fail anyway. Uber (according to Yves Smith) is apparently “succeeding” by kicking the can down the alley, postponing the date of its inevitable failure until the guys at the top cash out.

But a monopolist is free. Free to grow complancent, free to deliver substandard products and services. When there’s no rivals nipping at your heels, you can walk, or trudge, or even sit down. You can even go backwards.

Piers Anthony once had an editor point out a continuity error, and he defended himself by saying “anything can happen in Xanth.” Monopolies have the same dubious virtue – anything can happen in them! As far as I can tell, this is the central argument to be made against monopolies, they have no reason to be excellent, or to do anything beyond ensuring that they continue to exist. It’s not as simple as the monopolist not having any competitors. I can imagine scenarios where a single monolithic entity produces excellent work. But there clearly needs to be some kind of pressure, otherwise innovation and quality in a market dawdles.

It’s a difficult pill to swallow, because other than this problem, you’d expect a monopolistic business to outperform a business in competition. Global co-ordination. The ability to leverage economics of scale. No wasted resources spent fighting competitors.

You could even argue that a benevolent monopoly would be in the interests of consumers. A big issue with fractured, balkanized industries is that they are susceptible to negative externalities – if I own a factory in Region 1 that pollutes a river running through Regions 2 and 3, sans regulations I might say “not my problem”. But if I own all the factories in all the regions (and hence am accountable to all customers), then maybe I’ll take pollution seriously.

A state can fulfill this role to an extent, but they’re not really anyone’s go-to example of efficiency par excellence (see Shturmovshchina), and an ideal solution seems like a fusion: how do we combine the best features of the free market (competitive drive, innovation, efficiency) without the crappy gridlock and balkanisation?

I don’t know that if this would just be good to have. I think we might need it. I was reading about nuclear power, and what’s stalling it in the US. It seems to be dying a death from a thousand cuts, including ever-changing regulations, competing standards, PR disasters such as 3 Mile Island and Fukushima, and the lack of a stable and reproducible plant model. Looming above everything, like Zeus throwing thunderbolts, is the fact that nobody’s on the same page.

“…our electricity sector is split up among dozens of different utilities and state regulators. As a result, US nuclear vendors had to develop dozens of variations on the light-water reactor to satisfy a variety of customers. “

(They also mention a few interesting things: although high-profile disasters didn’t help public acceptance of nuclear energy, construction of new plants was already tapering away before 3 Mile Island.)

The article also looks at the countries that have gotten this right, they mostly seem to have either state-owned utilities or a single industry working on a single solution. But statecraft also has the ability to choke nuclear power, as we see in France. What’s the solution? A market monopoly over nuclear energy, perhaps? But that introduces another wrinkle – this is really something we really need the regulation of a state over. Success means nuclear power lighting up America. Failure means…the exact same thing.

When I was born, Australia had lots of wilderness and very few computers. I didn’t like this arrangement. But now that we have less wilderness and more computers every day, I’m starting to relax. My side is winning the war.

The years keep coming, and we need all of the computers we can get. They’re under our control. Predictable. Every single one of them has a known state, known behavior, and a known purpose. No more of them exist than we desire to exist. Nobody ever woke up and had to weed unwanted computers from their front lawn.

The world’s getting too big, too complex, and too interconnected for unpredictability. I want every idea, thought, and entity to either submit itself to humanity’s control or die. The big killer in the modern world isn’t technology, it’s wildness – by which I mean chaos, and unpredictability.

Cars are big stupid blocks of metal, exerting only a few hundred thousand joules of kinetic energy on impact. Meanwhile, the United States has thousands of nuclear warheads, each of which would release dozens of petajoules of energy on detonation. Yet cars massacre hundreds of thousands annually, while nuclear explosions have killed nobody in years not ending with “4” and “5”. You know why? Because are nukes are domesticated and cars are wild.

You could invent a disease par excellence, such as an airborn variant of Ebola, and so long as it stayed in a test tube or petri dish it would infect nobody. Meanwhile, 36,000 die per year thanks to the flu. It’s like having a foolproof plan to beat Mike Tyson/Mr Dream and instead you get knocked out by Glass Joe.

There’s a prayer that goes “God, don’t give me a lighter load, give me a stronger back.” Safety follows a similar precept: we don’t need a less dangerous world, we need a better control on that danger. And anyway, the world will keep getting more dangerous anyway, so what choice do we have?

I like the idea of a more mechanized world. Roads with perfect right angle intersections. Hills graded flat, so nobody has to switch gears. Maybe there’s a point where someone recognises me as wildness, but so far the domestication of our autonomous bodies has produced good fruit (glasses, artificial limbs, “Vote for Pedro” shirts for the continuation of one’s virginity, etc) and I’m interested in what happens next..

But there’s a risk: what happens when computers start to become wild? In September 2016, a malware called Mirai spread across the internet, brute-forcing unsecured devices using a table of common default usernames and passwords. The resultant effect was very wild: a large botnet of thousands of devices, capable of crashing web servers with a massive 1Tb/s influx of traffic. At the moment, such chaotic effects are only possible through human mismanagement. At the interface of the computers themselves, a transistor can only be on or off. Not much room for stochasm between those two points.

Maybe one day, we’ll have quantum computers that are capable of spontaneous wildness. They’d be machines par excellence, the highest echelon of computerhood. I’ve always been impressed by how the education of computers the same as the education of humans, just with the direction arrow reverse. They start out sane, and have to learn to be mad.

TV killed the radio star, but it created the radio star first. “Rock Around the Clock” was a megahit, the song that helped launch the rock and roll genre, but upon its initial release in 1954 it was a commercial failure. Only after it found its way into the credits of the Blackboard Jungle did it climb the charts. A lesson was learned: if you want a hit, get it in a movie.

Music benefits from a visual component, then, now, and always. Start pulling the threads that start with the ceremonial dancing of the Bhimbetka (documented thirty thousand years ago on a cave wall) and you can follow it through to the Greek tragedies, Japanese kabuki theater, the first “talkies”, Michael Jackson’s music videos, the tacky 8-bit LSD visualisations of mp3 players, and so forth. A photogenic element lets music work from another, more literal dimension – for example, taking the implied “scariness” of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor and making it explicit with horror visuals.

The visuals of a movie likewise benefit from sound, in a way that isn’t immediately obvious. We walk around with our experiences clouded by some emotional content, good or bad, and you never experience anything its own. When you eat a pastry you’re also eating the argument you had five minutes ago: you will enjoy the pastry less because you’re angry. When you spend money you’re only as happy or unhappy as the thought of how much is left in the balance. But most of this is gone in a movie – you’re watching a recorded slice of fake reality that you have no intrinsic attachment to. A soundtrack helps recolour all of the moments that have been bleached of their emotions by celluloid. The music acts as a little cue. “Feel sad here. Feel happy here.” That’s why scoring and foley is such an important part of film, even if it’s unmemorable on its own. Films are fake reality, and sound of all kinds is another graft of flesh over the mechanism.

But it must be depressing for a songwriter, knowing that your work will receive much of its impact from a visual component (which you had nothing to do with). It’s as bad works of literature getting culturally steamrolled by their film adaptations. Speaking of which I want to knock on Fitzgerald’s coffin and inform him that people will forevermore visualise Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay when they read The Great Gatsby. I am a bad man.

But that can’t be helped. Like Barthes said, authors are corpses who haven’t got the memo. Millions think “Born in the USA” is a patriotic anthem. That’s a valid reading, and there’s nothing the Boss or anyone else can do.

But I’ve never liked obvious soundtrack biscuits. If movies are cyborgs and music is artificial flesh, soundtrack songs are like plastic doll skin. You’re watching a movie, and then the narrative is interrupted by a cringingly obvious wannabe music video sequence. You can almost see the MTV logo appear.

In the 90s, there was a trend of songs from Disney movies becoming crossover mainstream hits. “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid won a Grammy. “A Whole New World” from Aladdin was a number one hit. From then on, every animated film needed that song. The worst was that shitty song Phil Collins put in Tarzan. You know the one. Where he doesn’t even reference the movie at all but just blandly rhapsodizes about finding yourself, et cetera.

Music and film have a troubled relationship, but they’re never far apart. Although it might seem like songs get swallowed whole by movies, subsumed until they’re just another part of the great machinery, they sometimes outlast the films they’re in. “Rock Around the Clock” achieved fame through the Blackboard Jungle, but who remembers that movie now? Bill Haley had the last laugh.

Sometimes the most insignificant things are the most enduring. Dwarves might stand on the shoulders of giants when walking through a field, but history isn’t a field, it’s quicksand. When the dwarf and the giant hit a but when the ensemble hits some soft quicksand, the giant sinks into obscurity first.