Technology

It's just a race. Perhaps you don't need the biggest and newest available thing, but you also will subconsciously discard what's "less" than what you already have or what's normal as obsolete. This creates an engine for a race, where good faith players can't compete.

Like with web browsers, a hypertext networked system even with advanced formatting, executable content and sandboxing can be so simple, that there'd be hundreds of independent implementations. But if you always race the de-facto standards with the speed you the monopolist group can maintain, and good faith competitors can't, then you'll always be the "best".

The Matrix movie actually talks about that, with its "there's no spoon" moment. It's not a usual market game, it's a meta-market game. And most people don't understand the rules of the meta layer, being sitting ducks there.

Nobody can compete with the industry leaders on their field. And unlike with steel or gasoline or even embedded electronics production, there's no relativity in the field at all. But the new possible fields are endless. Everyone can discover new pastures here, because it's not discovery, it's conception. But since that's counterintuitive, and the network effects work on psychology too, most people are not trying.

It's a bit like military logic, there were Western "controlled escalation" doctrines, because slow gradual escalation works in favor of the side with most resources, thus the West, and the Soviet "scientific-technical revolution" doctrines, which despite sounding stupid is a correct name, when you're the second in the race, your best chance lies in being unpredictable, unreasonable and changing the rules. One of the reasons Soviet doctrines gained such a crappy reputation as compared to Western ones is that, well, they are kinda similar to preventively going all out guns-a-blazing before you are forced to fight by the enemy's rules, which requires willpower from those making the decisions (and also capability to, well, do anything scientific and technical, LOL), and which means you prepare for some sort of general battle (that be nuclear war, or short highly concentrated offensives, such stuff) at the expense of "aggressive negotiations" scenarios. So - in our time anyone trying to heal the Silicon Valley's effects is playing USSR and can only expect anything good from breaking rules.