The Role of Technology in Centralized Corporate Control: Franchising and AI

“It absolutely does, and it started in the nineteen nineties with broadband internet and is accelerated now with AI for sure. So think about the nineteen sixties, right, you want to have this legal structure where this independent operator is operating the restaurant they kicked me back, or royalty. I try to control everything they do, But how can you wear the control you can? There's fax machines, there's telephones. You can send secret shoppers, but there's only so much you can really do.”

“By the nineteen nineties, particularly with broadb interne connected to the cash registers through point of sale systems, there's a steady data stream now going back to headquarters where they have an intense amount of control. And I think onely interesting things about that technological changes. First of all, in terms of, you know, the motivation for these kinds of outsource industrial structures. It's usually technology is a story. But they started doing this way before the technology. But now the technology exists, it allows just think about like a truly verticallygated corporation like US Steel or General Motors in nineteen fifty, the control they have over all of their plants is less than McDonald's that they own, and they employ you know, those hundreds of thousands of industrial workers. McDonald's now hardly employs anybody, but they have way more control because they're able to get that stream of data.”

“And now the AI has made that surveillance of workers themselves. And by way, you don't have to fire them if they're too slow with the register. You just send a note to the franchise. Hey, so and so. They even know the names of the employees. You know, it's a little too slow. Do something about that, you know, you.”