Dissolving Markets: How Sharing Technology Redistributes Power | Lum Ramabaja

Dissolving Markets: How Sharing Technology Redistributes Power

Jul 4, 2026

1948 words

10 minute read

For most of history, if you wanted something written down, you paid a professional. A contract, a letter, your own will: all of it passed through the hands of a scribe. Reading and writing was a trade, and a market. Then, over a few centuries, everyone learned to read. The market for scribes did not become more competitive, and it did not become more efficient. It vanished. Nobody would call that a loss. This essay is about a strange idea. The idea that the scribes’ story is not a curiosity but a template. That true empowerment does not come from better markets. It comes from dissolving them.

Most often, our default mode of thinking about technological innovation is in terms of efficiency and utility. Better optical fibers enable faster data transmission; more energy-efficient chips enable cheaper AI inference. What this framing overlooks are the second-order effects, the things an innovation does to the distribution of power. History offers plenty of examples. Cheap, mass-produced firearms distributed power: A warhorse and a suit of armor were things only a lord could afford. But a rifle was something a farmer could own. The telegraph did the opposite. The network was costly to build and therefore owned by few, enabling the first truly centralized nation-states and continent-spanning corporations. In each case, the direction of the shift was determined less by the technology itself than by the terms of access to it: who could afford it, who owned the infrastructure, who held the knowledge of how it worked.

Which is to say: how a technology is shared with the world is just as important as the technology itself. An innovation can be kept private, locked behind trade secrets, proprietary infrastructure, and exclusive access, or it can be shared openly. That choice determines which asymmetries it creates and which it dissolves, and whether it reinforces existing hierarchies or disrupts them. This, in my opinion, is the ultimate measure of whether a technology truly serves as a democratizing force or merely strengthens established players. But to see why, we first need to examine what markets fundamentally are, which asymmetries sustain them, and which ones corrupt them: secrets, property, capital, and, increasingly, control of the networks that move information itself.

A market is a self-organizing system where participants exchange goods, services, or resources. Markets persist as long as asymmetries exist between participants. Without asymmetries, for better or worse, markets naturally dissolve. These asymmetries come in fundamentally different kinds: some reflect what a participant can contribute, others what a participant can exclude others from. The division of labor is the archetype of the first kind. By specializing, some participants can provide goods or services that others lack the skills to produce. From a computer science perspective, this specialization resembles knowledge sharding: instead of every individual storing the same set of useful ideas (or “memes”), knowledge is distributed across a subset of people, enough to sustain and reproduce the collective knowledge of the community. In this sense, markets act as emergent systems that optimize the storage and use of knowledge within a community.

While some asymmetries, like division of labor, can benefit the entire community, others are less cooperative. For instance, a participant might deliberately create an information asymmetry by keeping knowledge of a new technology secret. By leveraging this trade secret, they could offer a product or service at a lower cost or higher quality than competitors, accumulating wealth in the process.

Consider a company with exclusive access to an advanced AI architecture that can reason more effectively than publicly available systems. This company could offer services with superior contextual understanding that competitors simply cannot match. The exclusive control of this cognitive architecture creates a significant market advantage, which allows the secret holder to extract premium fees while other market participants struggle to compete with inferior technology. Over time, this accumulated wealth can be used not only to control the labor of others but, as we will see, even to influence their attention and decision-making processes. In this way, the closed-source philosophy concentrates power in the hands of the secret holder while systematically disadvantaging other market participants.

Free-market maximalists might argue that competition alone sufficiently addresses this issue, but this perspective overlooks a crucial reality: while competition can temporarily reduce prices, competition without deliberately dismantling exploitative asymmetries inevitably leads to monopolization. It is worth...