A faulty update in the popular Crowdstrike software caused a global IT systems outage this weekend. This was another reminder why capitalism is an inefficient way to order our economy. It leads to monopolization and profit seeking above all else. Rushing broken software to the market to please shareholders has been business as usual for tech companies since their founding. Crowdstrike will still be entitled to the millions of dollars of revenue they make this year even though many people were affected by the outage their software caused. I only ever took two economics classes during my failed undergraduate attempt, but I believe that is called a “negative externality”.
Once again we see that a capitalist organization of the economy is meant to privatize profits and socialize the costs. Working people created, continue to support, and rely on those technical achievements. The endless pursuit of profits leads to inefficiencies like the major outage we saw this weekend. Our technology infrastructure is used by everyone daily, so we can no longer afford a “fail fast” approach. Instead, we need to treat it like a public good, similar to our transit infrastructure.
When the highway system was built it transformed cities and businesses. We take for granted that the costs associated for maintaining our roadways are completely socialized. Unlike the privately-owned technology infrastructure, we all benefit from public roads. Internet companies benefit too and wouldn’t be able to connect anything together without public right-of-ways (created by our road system!). Do these companies share their profits with the rest of society? No, of course not. They socialize the cost and privatize the gain.
The internet used to be known as the “information superhighway”. Like our other highways, let's make our technology infrastructure accessible to all and take it under our common ownership.