We often talk about the relentless expansionary drive of corporations like Amazon or Facebook as due to greed; CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg are just obsessed with accumulating money and power, we might say. But it’s not quite so simple. The reality is that these firms, and the CEOs who run them, are subject to a structural imperative for growth. The Zuckerbergs of the world are just willing cogs in a bigger machine.
