What all this abstraction... «Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age»

What all this abstraction does accomplish here on earth, however, is make everyone and everything more dependent on highly centralized standards. Instead of granting power to small businesses on the periphery, the net ends up granting even more authority to the central authorities, indexers, aggregators, and currencies through which all activity must pass. Without the search engine, we are lost. Without centrally directed domain name servers, the search engines are lost. Further, since digital content itself needs to be coded and decoded, it requires tremendous standardization from the outset. Far from liberating people and their ideas from hierarchies, the digital realm enforces central control on an entirely new level.