In this day and age you really can’t hope to achieve scale with deep relationships, you need broad light relationships that create vast probablistic oportunities for sucess. I’m glad to see that Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett know this:

Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn’t pick the buggers off one by one anymore; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn’t understand. They’d never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester.

He’d been particularly proud of Manchester.