Peter Hickey has pounded me for years, obsessed with oligarchy (and guillotines).
I've told him that oligarchy is not only normal in democracies but in ANY human grouping. To steal from John LeCarre, some must lead society and so some must reluctantly claw their way to the top.
But we're on the precipice of something QUALITATIVELY different.
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties.[1] It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of the organization.[1]
Michels' theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise. As he put it in Political Parties, "It is organization which gives dominion of the elected over the electors. [...] Who says organization, says oligarchy."[2]
But, as demonstrated just a week ago, one particular oligarch - Elon Musk - managed to BLOW UP a carefully negotiated (and unlikely) agreement between House Democrats and Republicans by unleashing multiple O-DARK-THIRTY tweets threatening any Republican supporting that bill (their own REPUBLICAN bill negotiated by President-Elect Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson) with a primary if they passed it.
They folded like a house of cards and Democrats had to rescue them on the rebound.
This ISN'T a further development of Oligarchy 1.
It is a qualitatively different beast.
THESE oligarchs create and control the infrastructure that maintains the increasingly significant VIRTUAL aspect of our lives: algorithms that determine what we do and do not see as well as increasingly powerful artificially intelligent systems that will augment - and possibly replace - human decision making.
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