Essay argues bureaucracy and money are being replaced by digital computation as civilization's coordination layer

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A DEV Community essay contends that beneath every institution lies a coordination layer, and that civilization has relied on bureaucracy and money to perform it for millennia. The author draws on Robin Dunbar's research on social group limits to argue that formal orchestration mechanisms become necessary once groups exceed roughly 150 people. Bureaucracy is likened to a B-tree data structure, with its efficiency at scale paired with brittleness such as single points of failure and costly reorganization. The piece also considers Hayek's defense of markets as efficient knowledge aggregators, while arguing that extreme wealth concentration re-centralizes economic decisions and that both systems produce exponential income distributions. The essay frames the current shift toward digital computation as a transition comparable in significance to the invention of writing.

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