Every skill we lost has a legal entity behind it

— Nothing, if you measure by life expectancy. Then the argument is over, you win. Let me offer you a different ruler. Name the things you depend on. Not in the abstract — by name.

— Literally. Name ten people without whom you wouldn't have had breakfast this morning. First name, last name, where they live, what's going on with them right now. Forget ten, name three.

— And he could have named all ten, and added which of them has a bad back and who didn't pay off his debt last year. That's where the substitution happened, and it's the reason we're having this conversation at all. Dependence isn't when someone gives you orders. Dependence is what you can't do for yourself. The peasant depended on roughly five things and knew all five by name. You depend on several thousand and can't name a single one. And we mistook the disappearance of the name for the disappearance of the dependence.

— They can't. And that's actually not the most important difference. Imagine you're standing waist-deep in a river. The current pulls at you, you feel it on your skin, you brace your feet, you know where you'd be swept if you slipped. It's hard, but it's clear. Now they've put you in a boat with a motor. You don't feel the current at all anymore — you go wherever you want, upstream included.

— The boat is better, I'm not arguing. The catch is that the current hasn't gone anywhere — it's just that the motor holds it now. The motor doesn't belong to you, you don't know how to fix it, and you remember it exists exactly once — when it stalls. And that's when it turns out that over those years in the boat you forgot how to stand in the water.

— February 2021, Texas. A storm, the grid went down. 69% of the state without electricity, almost half without water. The official death toll was 246; estimates based on excess mortality run as high as 700. The key detail: people weren't dying of hypothermia out in a field or in the woods. At home, under a roof, in apartments with central heating.

— A house with central heating isn't a house with a stove. You own a stove; you don't own a pipe. A pipe is a subscription to warmth. As long as the payment goes through, there's no difference.

— Everything, exactly. And notice there's no villain here. Nobody took your stove away, you gave it up yourself, and you were right to — a stove means smoke, firewood, ash and carbon monoxide. My point isn't that we were tricked. My point is that every skill we lost has a legal entity behind it that now sells that skill back to us. And you don't know that entity's name.

— In the spring of 2020 all of America decided exactly that. Everyone sat down at home and started baking bread. And discovered there was no flour and no yeast in the stores. Meanwhile there was grain in abundance and the mills were running normally. What was missing was packaging lines: the industry had spent 40 years learning to ship flour to bakeries in 16-kilo sacks, not to people in one-kilo bags.

— It simply wasn't built for anyone wanting to. Those are different things, and the second is more reliable than the first. You can break a ban; you can't break a bagging line that doesn't exist.

— The average American supermarket carries about 33 thousand items. The meat in them is four companies under 70-odd brands. In 1980 that same four held roughly a third of the market; now it's about 85% of the slaughter. Look at what happened over 40 years: the number of wrappers on the shelf went up, and the number of people behind them went down. At the same time.

— You're choosing between wrappers. And that's not a side effect, that's the design. But the nastiest part isn't even that. The peasant could go to the landlord and ask for an extension in a bad harvest year. He could run off to another province. He could, in the end, pick up a pitchfork. All of those actions had an addressee.

— There's nobody to petition a logistics chain. You've been given a button that lets you choose between brands, and it presses honestly enough, it's just not wired to anything except your sense of control. That's not a remnant of power. It's a prosthetic for it.

— I completely agree.

— Absolutely. The division of labor gave us everything we value, and no economist will tell you specialization is bad. I don't want to do my own dentistry either. I'm not saying "depending is bad." I'm saying: we made a trade, probably a good one, and we stopped calling it a trade. We call it liberation. And nobody has ever shown us the receipt.

— Partly. Let's start with the simplest line item. With what that destitute peasant ate for breakfast.