Digital platforms and large technology companies are no longer just transforming how markets function. Their expansion into retail, services and logistics, is gradually changing the balance between independence and dependence, especially for small businesses and the middle class. What once looked like a purely technological shift is increasingly taking on clear social contours.
In a recent Finextra column, Oleg Boyko reflects on this transformation as part of a broader acceleration of technological progress. He looks at how speed itself has become a defining factor of change, shaping not only business models and productivity, but also the ability of institutions and individuals to adapt to a rapidly reconfigured economic reality.
When speed becomes the risk
The exponential advance of science and technology is handing businesses powerful tools, from automation to new data models. At the same time, it is amplifying instability. Companies are rebuilding operating models, governments are rewriting rules, and society is reworking long-standing patterns of employment.
The challenge is that institutional adaptation is lagging. Regulation moves slower than technology, while infrastructure ages faster than it can be modernised. As a result, progress itself turns into a source of systemic stress.
Acceleration, in this context, is no longer merely the backdrop to change. As the pace intensifies, systems built for gradual adjustment may continue to function, but their margin for stability steadily shrinks. This tension is captured in a metaphor used by Oleg Boyko.
A system can be pushed far beyond the limits it was designed for and still appear operational. Like a train running at 500 km/h on tracks built for another era, it keeps moving forward, while the strain reveals itself in persistent vibration. The warning signs emerge long before any visible breakdown, in the slow erosion of resilience that accumulates over time.
Big Tech squeezes the middle class
The growing reach of Big Tech is reshaping markets in a more structural way. Large platforms are steadily moving into areas that were once the domain of small and mid-sized businesses. Retail, cafés and restaurants, food delivery, last-mile logistics and pickup points, all show the same pattern. The shift is no longer abstract. It is already part of everyday economic life.
Marketplaces undoubtedly improve convenience for consumers. At the same time, they concentrate economic power within closed ecosystems. Platforms define the rules of participation, set commissions, control distribution and increasingly determine which products and sellers are visible at all. Access to the market becomes conditional, mediated and priced by the platform itself.
As Oleg Boyko observes, this changes the nature of entrepreneurship. Many marketplace sellers remain independent in legal terms, yet their economic reality begins to resemble salaried work. Margins tighten, conditions are dictated externally and competition becomes effectively limitless. What emerges is not simply a tougher business environment, but a deeper social shift that compresses the middle class and narrows the space where independence and upward mobility have taken shape.
Transition stress and the challenge of governance
Between today’s economy and the much-discussed future of technological abundance lies a quieter, less visible phase. As automation and AI make goods and services broadly cheaper and more accessible, societies are forced to pass through a period of adjustment that is rarely smooth.
Jobs disappear unevenly, work is redistributed, income gaps widen and expectations collide with reality. For governments, this becomes a question of governance. For businesses, it translates into unstable demand, shifting behaviour and an increasingly uncertain operating environment.
As Oleg Boyko notes, the difficulty is not simply that old professions vanish while new ones require time, skills and cultural adaptation. The deeper problem is that the pace of change itself keeps accelerating. The rules are rewritten faster than people and institutions can internalise them, leaving little room to build strategies that are meant to last rather than merely react.
Robots, AI and the meaning of work
Technological progress inevitably raises productivity. Fewer people are needed to produce more goods and services, and over time this may lead to a period of relative material comfort as robots and AI take on a growing share of work.
At the same time, risk does not disappear but shifts from the economy into the social sphere, with direct consequences for health, motivation and quality of life. When large groups are effectively sidelined from productive activity, societies begin searching for ways to preserve income and social stability.
This is where debates around post-capitalism and guaranteed income begin to take shape. Wealthier countries are already moving in this direction, while many other regions remain outside this process.
Yet these arrangements carry an overlooked cost. Humans are not adapted to prolonged inactivity. Reduced effort gradually undermines health and weakens motivation, eroding the capacity for growth itself. When goals fade and effort loses its purpose, the forces that have long driven human progress begin to recede. The risk that follows is not only economic, but anthropological, raising questions about the direction of human development itself.
When simplicity becomes a signal
It is not accidental that major international forums increasingly return to the idea of “living simpler,” consuming less, working less and striving less. These ideas emerge not as lifestyle advice, but as a reflection of deeper shifts, a society reacting to the growing gap between technological speed and human adaptation. Familiar models of progress no longer offer clear answers, and the search for a new balance remains unresolved.
The risk lies not in comfort itself, but in what happens when comfort replaces purpose. When life narrows to passive consumption and effort loses its meaning, the foundations that have driven human development begin to weaken. For a species shaped by action, competition and creativity, such a trajectory points less toward renewal and more toward uncertainty.
What businesses and entrepreneurs can do
The forces reshaping markets are not going away. Big Tech will continue to expand, and technological acceleration will persist. For businesses, this is the reality they must operate in.
At the same time, this does not eliminate opportunity. In almost any industry, there are still areas where companies can build a defensible position if they understand the direction of change early enough. The key is to assess what this shift means for a specific niche, including demand, margins, sales channels and costs.
There is no universal playbook. Outcomes will depend on the country, the sector and individual capabilities. In the view of Oleg Boyko, those who adapt most successfully are the ones who understand the new market configuration faster than others and manage to preserve not only income, but also independence, the capacity to grow and the ability to create value.
