The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Plenty of people have called me to discuss the idea of the long tail, which seems to be the exact opposite of the concentration implied by scalability. The long tail implies that the small guys, collectively, should control a large segment of culture and commerce, thanks to the niches and subspecialties that can now survive thanks to the Internet. But, strangely, it can also imply a large measure of inequality: a large base of small guys and a very small number of supergiants, together representing a share of the world’s culture—with some of the small guys, on occasion, rising to knock out the winners. (This is the “double tail”: a large tail of the small guys, a small tail of the big guys.) The role of the long tail is fundamental in changing the dynamics of success, destabilizing the well-seated winner, and bringing about another winner. In a snapshot this will always be Extremistan, always ruled by the concentration of type-2 randomness; but it will be an ever-changing Extremistan.