Technology

I think Napoleon said something similar to "the army is commanded by me and the sergeants"?

Well, not true anymore today. All this connectivity and processing power, however seemingly inefficiently they are used, allow to centralize the world more than it could ever be. No need to consider what sergeants think.

(Which also means no Napoleons, cause much more average, grey, unskilled and generally unpleasant and uninteresting people are there now.)

It's about power and it happened in the last 15 years.

I think it's a political tendency, very intentional for those making decisions, not a "market failure" and other smartassery. It comes down to elites making laws. I feel they are more similar to Goering than to Hitler all over the world today.

This post may seem nuts, but our daily lives significantly depend on things more complex and centralized in supply chains and expertise than nukes and spaceships.

We don't need desktop computers which can't be fully made in, say, Italy, or at least in a few European countries taken together. Yes, this would mean kinda going back to late 90s at best in terms of computing power per PC, but we waste so much of it on useless things that our devices do less now than then.

We trade a lot of unseen security for comfort.