Hospital Beds Are a Monopoly

The casket to hospital bed monopoly pipeline

The great James Boyle tells an important parable about the coining of the term “ecology.” Before the term came into wide use, the “ecology movement” as we know it was just a bunch of fragmented, seemingly disconnected issues.

https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf

Like, if you’re worried about owls and I’m worried about the ozone layer, it’s not immediately apparent that we’re fighting the same fight. It’s not intuitive to link the fate of charismatic nocturnal avians to the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere, right?

All that changes with “ecology.” The introduction of that conceptual umbrella term turns 1,000 issues into one movement with 1,000 on-ramps. It welded thousands of fragmented activist causes into a single, solidaristic force to be reckoned with.

Which brings me to Big Tech.

For years, I’ve been fighting against Big Tech. There are a lot of potential allies in the fight to demonopolize our tech world, because tech is woven into so many facets of our lives: romance, employment, civics, culture, education, family life, etc. But as vast as that resistance might be, it’s minuscule when compared to the legions who are harmed by all forms of monopoly.