A sky in regulation – colourless, obedient, efficient. No birds, just the buzz of surveillance drones dancing above the rooftops, recording every silent judgement. The air bleeds only the smell of bleach and fear. You look to your feet, every patch of green grass under you a different shade of grey. What will it be today? Capitalism, socialism, communism, or some other hybrid economic system gift-wrapped with pretty colours and slogans.
It doesn’t really matter – it is always concentrated power, diminished agency, and a system more interested in preserving itself than the people it claims to serve – like clamshell packaging.
“Everything is fine” he said.
“That’s what people say before things aren’t” she said.
“Well, everything will be fine” he said.
“That’s worse” she said.
Capitalism looks sexy, it’s the top shelf stuff on the magazine stand, freshly pressed, sharp cut, glossy cover for easy cleaning. But then we see America, where capitalism has reached stage IV of its cancer and has begun to devour its own democratic foundations.
In Marxist theory, Marx dreamt big, like a child sketching castles in the fog. Socialism, the halfway house to the economic nirvana that is communism, where workers take the reins and guide the carriage to classless bliss. In practice, has rarely followed the script, with every attempt being less about omelettes, and more about breaking eggs.
The pattern here is well-known – when a state assumes total control of the economy and the lives of its citizens, even if initially justified by revolutionary ideals or equity, falls toward authoritarianism. Often, the justification is survival – the revolution must be defended from internal enemies, class traitors, and foreign powers. In the end, the state’s grip tightens, and the utopian ideal blurts into dystopian rule, like the popping of a spot.
But don’t think the other side wears a halo. Capitalism, that glistening machine of freedom, innovation, and bespoke coffee, hides its rot behind a subscription where you can’t even buy eggs, let alone break them.
You are free, kinda, like a fish in a tank, and they seem content, I think.
I admit, I often forget that capitalism isn’t about the fat getting fatter, but is actually about competition, and I agree we do need competition, but it’s what capitalism becomes when there isn’t competition that concerns me.
The theory, to my understanding, is that even if you’re greedy, you’ll be forced to behave, because someone else will undercut you, outbuild you, outthink you, but lobbying has now changed what winning means.
Now when a company becomes dominant, its smartest investment is not a new product, but a new rule, such as a compliance requirement that behaves like startup-extinction. Suddenly capitalism isn’t competing on the playing field of innovation – it’s competing on the playing field of lobbying.
Competition dies the way friendships die, – not with a dramatic betrayal, but with unanswered messages and a forgotten birthday card. Once that happens, you don’t have capitalism, – not in the romantic sense people imagine, – you have a gated economy, a marketplace with a bouncer, a system where the winners decide who the winners are.
Which brings me to a very old observation, dressed in a very modern suit.
Robert Michels coined the Iron Law of Oligarchy after noticing that every organisation, no matter how democratic at birth, tends to drift toward elite control. Leaders consolidate authority, bureaucracies entrench themselves, and the system begins serving itself before it serves the people.
I don’t think oligarchy is just a political failure, I think it’s an efficiency pattern. Large systems need management, management becomes class, class becomes interest, interest becomes self-preservation, and self-preservation becomes ideology. Combined with Technology?
Breathing in through closed teeth like a plumber calculating a quote.
Technology has an annoying habit of changing the rules so violently that yesterday’s empire wakes up as a museum exhibit for tomorrow’s empire, and this is why I think the modern oligarchy is weaker than the traditional one.
A feudal lord could be stupid and still survive because land doesn’t require innovation. You can be a medieval parasite for centuries if your peasants can’t leave and your neighbours don’t have gunpowder yet.
But a tech oligarchy lives on a treadmill, – its legitimacy is progress for a profit built on novelty, removing innovation also removes relevance. And on the global stage, stagnation isn’t just embarrassing, it’s fatal, and for politics, it is a recipe that history has cooked before, and it never tastes good.
So the dystopia I’m worried about isn’t just greedy corporations, because that’s like worrying that sharks are wet. It’s the dystopia as a system where the winners stop competing, the law becomes a product, innovation becomes a threat, and the future is something you subscribe to.
Welcome to Political Enshittification.
A world where democracy still exists, technically, in the same way a TV still works when the screen is 70% ads and the remote takes credit cards instead of AA batteries. But unlike enshittification, – where customer interests are swapped for the interests of shareholders, now that the customer has nowhere else to go, political enshittification is citizen interests swapped for government bribes, you still have nowhere else to go, but you wouldn’t be able to afford to anyway because your economy just crashed.
Anyway, if you like to learn more about Political Science, then I’d recommend a video on YouTube called Dumb Ways to Die. For like a fly with its wings stuck in honey, there is something seductively philosophical about building the perfect political economical system. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is actually achievable. – The problem is every system needs someone in charge, but no one should ever be in charge. To quote Douglas Adams –
The major problem – one of the major problems, for there are several – one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Personally, and honestly, I think we should just give power to whoever can pull a sword from a rock and hope for the best.
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