Advanced Technologies Increasingly Require States or Other Large Orgs; Loners Lose Out

As history progresses, it's increasingly the case that as an individual, you can't compete with the amazing technologies that have been created and manufactured by large groups of people. This is the opposite of the trend anticipated during the "internet-optimistic" early aughts.

For instance, drones are cool, and seem to put some surveillance (and minimal transport) capabilities back into the hands of individuals. But it seems to me that large organizations (corporations, governments) stand to benefit more by the tracking and surveillance opportunities they create than a single person or family.

There are endless examples of this, many of them with complex technology with capital requirements too great for individuals, depends on large groups to be designed and manufactured, and where there are organizational economies of scale. Maybe you have your one drone, but your state police force has a hundred of them, to watch you and your drone and maybe even knock it down. Space colonization is another case - while it might be a corporation and not a state that finally colonizes another planet, it's likely to be a large corporation.

Consequently, history is increasingly favoring the people who can maneuver into positions of power in large organizations. This is also related to the problem that wealth (rather than income from labor) is more important to individuals and the economy as a whole, and that the best thing you can do is save enough money to invest in these large organizations - yet most people have difficulty getting into a position where they're not dependent on wages. Even forgetting about class based on inheritance - the increasing cognitive demands of these kinds of positions effectively rule them out as possible career paths or life choices for (again) increasingly large slices of the population.

The problem of the benefits of technology accruing more to states and corporations than individuals actually does seem to be a new one (there is a qualitative difference between autonomous drones and swords made of Damascus steel) and this is therefore concerning that we're running into this problem for the first time, rather than it being a cyclic economic problem (for example, complex and leveraged investment instruments) that we've survived going back centuries or more. As recently as the Middle Ages, well-organized nomads could come out of the Eurasian steppes and over-run the most advanced states of the day. While on one hand it's comforting that this is unlikely to happen today (see second half of this article) it does suggest that we passed a threshold in history where states are invincible and the biggest will win - which suggests we should all learn Mandarin.

Is this argument false? If so why? If true, are we screwed, or is there some other way small groups can compete, or is there an inverted U shape to this phenomenon, as the libertarian digerati more freely imagined a mere 15 years ago?