@bravojohnson

AT&T used to tell us the Bell System was a single vast cybernetic organism, too complex to dissect without plunging America into communicative darkness—a humming national nervous system held together by priests in white shirts and actuarial tables. Break it up, they said, and the phones would stop ringing, the switches would melt, and the future would cancel itself. This was nonsense, but it was high-status nonsense, the kind that passes for realism when uttered by people who own the infrastructure. When the breakup finally happened, the sky didn’t fall; instead, innovation escaped from the basement. Modems screamed, prices collapsed, weird devices proliferated, and the network turned out to be not a sacred organism but a stack of solvable engineering problems wearing a monopoly like a lab coat. “Too complex to unwind” turned out not to be an empirical claim at all—it was territorial pissings, a way of saying the system worked fine for them

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