Big Tech’s Three Identical Strangers

The U.S. government must determine how to deal with the negative consequences of some of the last decade’s most successful internet-based businesses. Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon grew up as strangers and have developed monopolies in search, social media and in e-commerce. The stock market has been very excited about the control over people they have attained and the “big data” they use in advertising and e-commerce. In many ways, these tech behemoths are “three identical strangers.”

The arms race in streaming content created a flourishing environment for documentaries. Humans are learners and the stories told in documentaries teach us about subjects we might not have learned otherwise. On a recent flight, I watched Three Identical Strangers, it’s the story of three identical triplets separated at birth. Each one of these boys was adopted by a different family and those families had no idea the other two brothers existed.

The happen chance reunion of these brothers became a national media story amid a frenzy of excitement. They were very much alike in ways other than the obvious genetic match. For a few years, their separation was a “feel good story.” Nobody knew the story behind the story. As bottom-up stock pickers, we continually search for the story behind the story, and that’s why these identical strangers matter so much.

In the documentary, we learn that the adoption agency and a psychiatrist had colluded to separate twins and triplets at birth for the benefit of studying parenting. It was the big “nature versus nurture” debate which rages to this day. The problem with the adoption agency and the psychiatric study was that the families involved did not know that their lives and families were going to be forever affected by the downside of the experiment. By playing God with these lives, it is possible that irreparable damage was done to these siblings separated from those closest to them.