Miguel Afonso Caetano on Nostr: "While it’s true that our politics is thoroughly oligarchic, the power afforded ...

"While it’s true that our politics is thoroughly oligarchic, the power afforded entrepreneurs is problematic for separate reason. They rule us without ruling through politics. They rule directly in and through their economic power. The loans they get, the funds they raise, and the capital they wield is a direct power over the future direction of our collective life. Whether they decide to pour billions of dollars into AI or crypto, mushroom coffee or space travel, virtual reality glasses or self-driving cars, they determine the future course of our collective cultural and social development. They really do end up deciding what will be available for us to consume and produce, what our forms of enjoyment are and what our social interactions will be like.

And they make these decisions in an utterly unaccountable way. Precisely because their power is economic, a question of how they spend their immense sums of capital, they decide for us all without it being all that clear that is what they are doing. They are, at most, accountable to their creditors, who they have to pay back – or spin a tale to explain why they need another loan. But in virtue of that dependence on creditors, they can utterly ignore the public itself. That is a special kind of power to rule. It is the anti-democratic power of the entrepreneurial elite. It is their native power, which requires no conversion of wealth into oligarchic domination, no insidious corruption of our democratic procedures or public officials. They can shape the future of society, the trajectory of culture, without passing any laws."

https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-machiavellis-of-the-market-entrepreneurs-against-democracy/

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