What explains this? Simply: capitalism itself. The Blade Runner curse isn’t real; it’s normal. The economist Joseph Schumpeter famously pointed out that monopolies can’t last forever in a free market because monopolies get ossified and overly dependent on their existing business models. Entrepreneurs and innovators figure out new techniques and technologies that run circles around the big guys. That was the whole point behind another Ridley Scott masterpiece, his 1984-themed Super Bowl commercial for Apple Computer, which symbolically dethroned IBM as the Orwellian colossus bestriding the personal-computer industry.
As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations, the only thing that can make a monopoly permanent is government, because only government can prevent the sort of innovation and competition that undermines every corporate behemoth.
