As a kid, I watched the little stores in my neighborhood disappear as the supermarkets arrived. Then I watched the malls take over. Then Walmart become the cheapest place to shop. And over the years, I watched as every area aspect of my life, bit by bit, taken over by a handful of megacorporations. And now private equity firms are grabbing whole industries — health care, real estate, financial services, pet care — and turning them into monocultures of profit-making.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the fundamental flaw, the false promise we’ve swallowed, is bigness itself. Big farms, big data centres, big platforms, big media, big finance. Each step along the way we thought: Big is better, more efficient, why not save a bit of dough? And no one had the stones to say, Fuck no!