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Information Superhighway

The Information Superhighway's Toll Roads: An Idiot Index Analysis

Explore how industries like tax prep, credit scores, and digital signatures exploit artificial tolls on the information superhighway. Learn about the Idiot Index, a metric exposing the $2 trillion 'stupidity tax.

By Leo Guinan 4 min read
The Information Superhighway's Toll Roads: An Idiot Index Analysis

The $2 Trillion Dollar Stupidity Tax

In 1993, we were promised an "information superhighway" - a free-flowing network where knowledge would democratize and empower. Instead, we built a highway system riddled with artificial toll booths, where simple database lookups cost $30 and basic math costs $300. These aren't necessary infrastructure costs; they're rent-seeking parasites with idiot indices approaching infinity.

Defining the Information Idiot Index

Elon Musk's idiot index for manufacturing is elegant: if a part costs $5,000 but contains $50 of aluminum, that's a 100x idiot index - a clear sign something's wrong.

For information products, the formula becomes:

Information_Idiot_Index = Price_Charged / (Computation_Cost + Legitimate_Liability)

Unlike physical products with material floors, information can be copied infinitely at near-zero cost. This means idiot indices can reach absurd levels - not 100x, but 10,000x or more.

The Toll Roads That Shouldn't Exist

The Tax Preparation Cartel

TurboTax and H&R Block

  • Service: Basic arithmetic and form-filling
  • Price: $120-500
  • Actual computation cost: $0.02
  • Time required: 30 minutes
  • Idiot Index: 15,000x

The IRS could file most people's taxes automatically - many countries do exactly this. Instead, Intuit spends $11.6 million annually lobbying to keep taxes complex, creating a $11 billion toll road on basic math.

The Digital Signature Racket

DocuSign

  • Service: Cryptographic signature (solved problem since 1976)
  • Price: $40/month
  • Actual computation cost: $0.001
  • Idiot Index: 40,000x

A digital signature is computationally trivial. The entire "value" is artificial scarcity created through network effects and legal uncertainty.

The Credit Score Gatekeepers

Experian, Equifax, TransUnion

  • Service: Database lookup of your own data
  • Price: $30 per report
  • Actual computation cost: $0.0001
  • Idiot Index: 300,000x

These companies collect data about you, without your permission, then charge you to see it. The government had to mandate one free report per year because the absurdity became too obvious.

The Background Check Barrier

Employment Screening

  • Service: Aggregating public records
  • Price: $50-200
  • Actual computation cost: $0.10
  • Idiot Index: 2,000x

Public records are, by definition, public. The entire industry exists by making public data artificially difficult to access, then charging to remove the difficulty they created.

The Financial Advice Theater

Basic Investment Advisors

  • Service: "Buy index funds and hold"
  • Price: 1% of assets annually (forever)
  • Actual complexity: One conversation
  • Idiot Index: ∞ (perpetual rent on simple advice)

The advice hasn't changed since John Bogle created index funds in 1976. Yet millions pay thousands annually for someone to repeat: "Stay the course."

The Mechanisms of Artificial Scarcity

These toll roads persist through four mechanisms:

1. Complexity Theater

Making simple things appear complex through jargon, unnecessary steps, and deliberately confusing interfaces. TurboTax asks 200 questions when 10 would suffice.

2. Regulatory Capture

Industries write regulations requiring their own services. Tax preparers lobby against tax simplification. Real estate agents mandate their involvement in transactions.

3. Liability Fear

"What if something goes wrong?" becomes the justification for 10,000x markups on trivial computations. DocuSign doesn't prevent fraud any better than free alternatives, but provides a corporate entity to blame.

4. Network Lock-in

"Everyone uses it" becomes its own moat. These products often have negative standalone value - their only worth is compatibility with others trapped in the same system.

The Liberation Potential

Every toll road with an idiot index above 1,000x is vulnerable to:

Open Source Decimation

  • GnuPG destroyed the $300 digital signature market
  • LibreOffice ended the Microsoft Office tax for millions
  • Linux broke the server OS monopoly

AI Automation

  • GPT-4 can already do most tax prep
  • GitHub Copilot writes better code than most contractors
  • ChatGPT replaces $200/hour consultants for basic questions
  • People who've navigated complex systems sharing paths
  • Turning lived experience into economic value
  • Charging 10x actual cost instead of 10,000x

Regulatory Sunshine

  • Open data mandates (making "public" actually public)
  • Standardized APIs for government services
  • Right-to-repair for information systems

The Math of Liberation

If we eliminated every information product with an idiot index above 1,000x:

  • Tax prep industry ($11B) → Free auto-filing
  • Basic legal documents ($16B) → Open source templates
  • Credit monitoring ($8B) → Automatic free access
  • Simple financial advice ($100B) → Public education
  • Digital signatures ($5B) → Open protocols

That's $140 billion annually in the US alone - roughly $1,000 per household spent on artificial toll roads.

Building the Actual Superhighway

The real information superhighway would have:

Universal Base Services

  • Automatic tax filing (like Estonia)
  • Digital identity that you control (not corporations)
  • Public records that are actually publicly accessible
  • Open source legal documents for common needs

Transparent Complexity Pricing

  • Services must disclose their idiot index
  • Computational cost vs. price charged
  • Time required vs. time charged
  • Actual liability vs. liability premium
  • People who've successfully navigated share paths
  • Compensation for destroying unnecessary complexity
  • Economic rewards for simplification

The Idiot Index as Liberation Tool

Every time you encounter a service, calculate:

  1. What's the actual computation/time required?
  2. What are they charging?
  3. If the ratio exceeds 1,000x, it's a fake toll road

Then ask:

  1. Who's navigated this without paying?
  2. What's the open source alternative?
  3. How can AI eliminate this?
  4. Who profits from this complexity?

The Coming Collapse

Information toll roads are built on latency arbitrage - they profit from the time between when something becomes technically possible and when people realize it's simple. That latency is collapsing:

  • AI makes complexity navigation free
  • Open source provides alternatives
  • Navigator networks share hidden paths
  • Regulation increasingly mandates transparency

Companies with the highest idiot indices are the walking dead. They just don't know it yet.

Call to Action

Stop paying the stupidity tax:

  1. Calculate the idiot index of every information service you use
  2. Share your liberation paths when you find ways around toll roads
  3. Support open alternatives with time, money, or advocacy
  4. Demand transparency in computation vs. pricing
  5. Become a navigator for others trapped on toll roads

The information superhighway was supposed to democratize knowledge. Instead, we built a system where checking your credit score costs 300,000 times its computational cost. This isn't innovation - it's extraction.

The idiot index exposes the scam. Navigator networks provide the alternative. AI makes the toll roads obsolete.

The only question is: How fast can we tear down these unnecessary toll booths?

Every hour spent on artificial complexity is an hour stolen from human creativity. Every dollar spent on fake toll roads is a dollar diverted from real value creation. The idiot index isn't just a metric - it's a map to liberation.