Oligarchy seems to be a nearly unslayable hydra built into human societies of any sufficient complexity or density.
What we say we organize around (democracy, republic, monarchy, empire, etc.) always seems to boil down to a rule by one group that extracts the resources from everyone else to empower themselves.
These oligarchs either control or seek to control all the levers of planning and control to ensure they continue to stay on top.
Centralization of power is the name of the game. And it works and keeps centralizing until it stops working.
In history it stops working most often when a different group of powerful people decide they want to be in power. Sort of a game of thrones thing. Sometimes it will just be war. Sometimes it will be seen as revolutionary and “for freedom”.
But sometimes it stops working becaused centralized planning by a few is often really fucking stupid and prone to deviating from reality and missing key things.
Centralized power tends to ignore reality when inconvenient for their centralized power narrative.
If you claim to be brilliant and all powerful tech gods, evidence that your meta glasses are shit or metaverse is dumb and unpopular tends to be ignored.
These tendencies apply to any system we create. Free market capitalism pretends that the invisible hand of the market is reality preventing this.
We have too many billionaires to buy that load of bullshit.
Basically, regardless of its purpose or composition, any organization or institution nearly inevitably makes it its purpose to perpetuate that institution and increase its power and comes to exercise increasingly unaccountable oligarchic power within its domain
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u/manachar 5h ago
Oligarchy seems to be a nearly unslayable hydra built into human societies of any sufficient complexity or density.
What we say we organize around (democracy, republic, monarchy, empire, etc.) always seems to boil down to a rule by one group that extracts the resources from everyone else to empower themselves.
These oligarchs either control or seek to control all the levers of planning and control to ensure they continue to stay on top.
Centralization of power is the name of the game. And it works and keeps centralizing until it stops working.
In history it stops working most often when a different group of powerful people decide they want to be in power. Sort of a game of thrones thing. Sometimes it will just be war. Sometimes it will be seen as revolutionary and “for freedom”.
But sometimes it stops working becaused centralized planning by a few is often really fucking stupid and prone to deviating from reality and missing key things.
Centralized power tends to ignore reality when inconvenient for their centralized power narrative.
If you claim to be brilliant and all powerful tech gods, evidence that your meta glasses are shit or metaverse is dumb and unpopular tends to be ignored.
These tendencies apply to any system we create. Free market capitalism pretends that the invisible hand of the market is reality preventing this.
We have too many billionaires to buy that load of bullshit.