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California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies
(www.theguardian.com)
What democracy?
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
259 points (99.2% liked)
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Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Big tech doubles down on a bad bet. It's because they spend their lives in a dark room away from other people. Why would we look to computer programers to save us all? They are good with computers, not people. They belong in the back room, running the IT, not the country.
If you think engineering types are running Big Tech these days, you are not paying attention.
To wit: the vast majority of competent engineer friends and colleagues I know view LLM codegen crap as categorical snake oil. But all the C-suites are busy circlejerking about it and pumping that bubble.
The part you’re missing is that “Big Tech” is not those people. Yes, many engineers are stereotyped as that, which in turn leads to a field with those people in it, but “Big Tech” is largely CEOs. It’s accountants trying to get rich by using technology created by other people. Big Pharma is the same people, but using a different tool, and the same goes for corrupt auto manufacturers like GM and Ford.
Democracy in action on a grand scale.
Time to change, as already proven, democracy doesn't work.
Unlimited political donations and money as speech doesn’t work.
Democracy is better than every alternative.
Which hasn't been proven. But what has been proven, is that democracy doesn't work. Mathematically or otherwise.
What would you suggest instead then? Communism? Theocracy? Feudalism?
I would definitely suggest trying them, along with anarchy. Democracy is ripe for making corruption easy, not to mention how crazy it is to have a handful of people voting on just about everything in our lives because a few of their alleged policies at the time of their campaign were able to convince people to vote for them (without much alternatives). The truth is that nobody would ever agree with everybody's policies and they put the important ones on the long finger to use in the next election citing how much they've done.
We've tried all of them. Read a history book already!
Theocracy has never been tried in history (not properly). Not feudalism, nor communism. What history book do you suggest I read? What countries can you show me as an example of somewhere that has tried any of them to their exact definitions?
Anyway within what is considered a 'civil' society today and knowing what we now know and with the technology that we now have, we could try. Which we haven't yet had (a truly civil society), and is debatable whether or not we have one now.
What Trump has shown the world is that the scales are uneven and need to be balanced. It is my belief that anarchism would be the best to reset them, I could easily be wrong and would hold my hands up to that. We have been taught that anarchism is a bad word and as a result, most people don't understand it. One thing is certain. Democracy isn't working, and doesn't work. Politicians hold too much power for such a small group of people, and they are easily bought, especially now when there are billionaires that can literally afford to buy a country if they wanted to.
Theocracy has never been tried in history (not properly).
You're looking at it wrong. If your understanding of theocracy has never been seen in history, that only means that your understanding of theocracy is flawed. More generally, we need to accept that all systems evolve and change, and account for that.
The problem with the 'democracy' we have now is that it is a democracy of the rich. Those with the wealth to buy politicians, courts and media houses. So the solution is to prevent that - either prevent people becoming that rich in the first place, or, as a compromise, regulate political donations, media ownership and the assets of judges and other regulators.
Anarchism is the removal of such regulations, and any public authority that can enforce them. As such, it will only make things worse.
You're looking at it wrong. If your understanding of theocracy has never been seen in history, that only means that your understanding of theocracy is flawed.
Give me an example of true theocracy being used in history. One where the governments ruled by a holy scripture or Bible, and the citizens lived by the same script..
More generally, we need to accept that all systems evolve and change, and account for that.
Yes, and democracy has evolved even moreso into a one sided scales. Other options have not been attempted in a modern westernised world and we already know that they have evolved.
So the solution is to prevent that - either prevent people becoming that rich in the first place, or, as a compromise, regulate political donations, media ownership and the assets of judges and other regulators.
Aren't those things already in place, to a degree, yet proven to be easily circumvented, as those same people create and uphold the laws regulating them. - Not working.
Anarchism is the removal of such regulations, and any public authority that can enforce them. As such, it will only make things worse.
No. Anarchism is not the removal of regulations, it does remove central authority, the coercive and corruptible bodies in control. It is based on the belief that we can govern ourselves as a whole. So rather than then being imposed regulations, they would be agreements that communities as a whole have planned together through natural occurring issues as they come up. So universal agreements would become a law through mutual respect and cooperation with each other.
Before you go any further into this, I want to reiterate my point from the beginning.
Democracy in all of its current forms, in the world that we live in today, is not working. It is badly broken. There is far too much to fix, even by your own admittance. It has grown into the very ugly behemoth that we see today.
I am not saying that any and every other system is better or perfect, I am saying we need change to fix the things that are broken. That will not happen within the democracy that we currently have.
Give me an example of true theocracy being used in history.
The theocracies that actually existed - the caliphate, or imperial Japan - are the true theocracies. In general, whatever exists is real and true; if our expectation does not match up to it, then it is our expectation that is flawed or incomplete.
Aren't those things already in place, to a degree, yet proven to be easily circumvented,
If they were easily circumvented, you would not hear billionaires crying about progressive taxes or labour standards.
as those same people create and uphold the laws regulating them.
And that's the problem with a completely free 'democracy'. The rich will use their greater wealth to buy politicians or spread disinformation. We need to either remoce wealth inequality, or at least prevent it warping democracy. This requires rules, and an authority to enforce them.
Anarchism is not the removal of regulations, it does remove central authority, the coercive and corruptible bodies in control.
If rules are not enforced, they might as well not exist.
Democracy in all of its current forms, in the world that we live in today, is not working. It is badly broken. There is far too much to fix, even by your own admittance. It has grown into the very ugly behemoth that we see today.
I agree with all points except the third. A truly democratic state - one in which all people have equal voice - is the only defence against the rich and powerful abusing their wealth and power.
That will not happen within the democracy that we currently have.
I don't know. I hope peaceful change is possible. But those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.
Okay then. Come back when you find a provably better system.
Come back where? To text at somebody stuck in their ways? Why would I do that?
The US is hardly a good example for democracy.
But it's the biggest, and look how corrupt it has become. You think that those big techs are stopping at the U.S.?
I can understand to not see India as a real democracy right now but not in the context of framing the USA as the poster child of how democracy fails. In that instance India is far larger still.
India is still holding remnants of feudalism since their independence, which can be seen in certain areas and way of thinking throughout India. India is also a far, far poorer country than USA, per capita especially, there's no competition.
Poorer countries are easier to corrupt and India will find it very hard to dig itself out of the hole it's in without outside interference and a lot of prosecutions.
But, corruption exists in (I would argue) every democratic country. They make up stats and skew them in their own favour in an attempt to hide it, but the people on the street aren't blind to what is happening and are very much aware of the corruption regardless of any statistics.
Trump has just taken a highlighter to everything and lit it up for those that haven't seen or didn't believe the extent it was happening.
In that sense (and I'm pretty sure it's the only sense), Trump is actually doing something good.
It's also one of the oldest (in the modern sense), an early adopter with little to no best practices to learn from. Not to mention that it kind of wandered into being a democracy through legal interpretations rather than being one by design.
Anyway, you're not looking at things structurally enough and missing the fundamental problem: excessive consolidation of power. By which I don't mean the "big government" conservatives like to complain about, because governments don't have to be monoliths, but simply what it sounds like: one entity having an excessive power at its disposal that it's able to use at its own volition. To prevent that in government you need to not only design it in a way that not one part of it has an excessive amount of power (through separation of powers, independent institutions etc.), but also have mechanisms in place to keep it that way, because it's ultimately people who are doing the execution. And any such mechanism that does not involve accountability to the public is doomed to failure, because that mechanism is, once again, executed by people, and the fewer people are involved, the easier it is to take over. In other words, it's not simply that democracy can work, it's the only thing that is structurally capable of working. Any other form of government is inherently more susceptible to corruption.
However, implementation details matter and a flawed implementation can cause it to fail. And basically every modern democratic state has one big flaw: it has political democracy, but not economic democracy. As a result, there is very little constraining private actors from accumulating as much capital (=power) as they can, based on the naive assumption that market forces are enough to prevent them from accumulating too much. And so once enough capital has accumulated in once place, that power can be used to undermine political democracy as well. So the problem here isn't that democracy doesn't work, it's that we don't have enough of it.
But we already know that democracy doesn't work. What it sounds like you are describing in much of that post is anarchism (yes, I know I have mentioned it a few times, before I read your post), and with technology, which we heavily already rely on, I see no reason to attempt to try it again. Obviously on a much smaller scale so that we can easily see where lies flaws and boundaries, but we should also be doing that with democracy on a daily basis.
We don't actually know that it doesn't work, because as I've said, all modern democracies have a particular flaw and we don't know what happens when that flaw is fixed. I would also say that what you're describing as "anarchism" is just another form of democracy; democracy is a set of principles, not a concrete system. And that anarchism would in practice not be as different from what we have today as you're imagining. Instead of top-down it would be bottom-up, maybe (which has some problems of its own), but you still end up with elected representatives at higher levels of governance, because even with modern technology it would be impractical to have all the stakeholders of the Rhine, for example, do consensus-building in one big meeting. And those representatives would need to be held to account, just like today.
I think it's far more fruitful to look at the actual problems we're having and what structurally is causing them and try to do something about those causes, instead of going on about what systems would or wouldn't work, because there's never going to be a perfect system, we're always going to have to solve problems as they come. Especially when clearly the problem here isn't the system itself, but the existence of power structures that exist outside of the system and are therefore not constrained by the system, allowing them to undermine the system. If solving that problem results in something that can be described as "socialism" or "anarchism", so be it, but one thing it absolutely has to be, is a democracy. Because again, anything that is not a democracy is going to be inherently more susceptible to corruption (and therefore be ineffective at solving problems) than even a mediocre implementation of democracy.
We do know it doesn't work.
Look up arrows impossibility theorem.
Anarchism is one of many, and while it is in some ways similar to democracy, it is less open to corruption and it doesn't have a handful of people deciding everything for us because they got the most votes based on a minority number of issues that they (at the time) claim they will fix.
That you want to stick with democracy and aren't willing to even be open to the suggestions of anything else, but surely that in itself goes against your beloved democracy, by just assuming that democracy is the best option. Many have thought that their 'solutions' were the best option for them in centuries gone by. Feel free to look up quite a few religions for example.
We also know what is causing most of the problems, corporatism and capitalism has been allowed to run limitless and therefore allow them to overspend their crazy profits on controlling the politicians. It's an endless loop, and it's a good enough reason to try something else. It's only going to get worse when all of the politicians are being paid by corporations to get what they want to unblock any other barriers that limit their wealth or earnings.
Arrow's impossibility theorem just states that strictly speaking, there is no system within a particular subset of voting systems that is guaranteed to be immune from spoilers affecting the outcome. So not only are you using an overly strict definition of democracy that doesn't even encompass all democratic systems implemented today, let alone all the ones that could be (which again, includes anarchism), but you're disqualifying things based on not meeting a level of perfection that is unreasonable to expect of anything. It's not like anarchism would be free of irrelevant factors affecting decisions; it would be a lot more affected by relationships between people and people's standing in a community for one thing.
None of the problems you point out are innate to democracy. The reason you associate them with democracy is not because of any inherent quality of democracy, but because of history. To simplify things a lot, the people who championed democracy back in the days of absolute monarchies and nobility also championed a liberal economy. At the time that would have made sense, since it was seen as more fair and meritocratic than an economy managed by the nobility. And compared to that it was, but ultimate it just ended up creating a new nobility in all but name.
But just because they were wrong about one thing doesn't mean they were wrong about everything. You can pick and choose ideas, and the anarchism you're promoting is one such attempt.
Again, you have skipped over the principal point or points that i am making.
Democracy is not working. An important difference to distinguish between anarchism and democracy is how easy it is to coerce and/or corrupt the central body in charge. That is what is happening now on a massive scale, it was always happening on a large scale we can assume, but now it's leaps and bounds above anything that we have seen before, just look at what is happening in South America as a result, for example.
My main point is still that democracy is not working now, and ANY alternative could help, if not least, to reset the whole thing.
A governing body made up of a very small minority easily corrupt with many career political families only benefits those already with the power and money.
Your points? You haven't been making any! All you've been doing is treating the assertions that democracy is susceptible to corruption and anarchism less so as almost axiomatic, backing it with little more than "look at how bad things are!" (while ignoring all other factors that created the current state of things) and a need for an alternative, while being dishonest about what democracy is.
All forms of governance, with no exceptions, require delegation. But as soon as you delegate, there is room for corruption, and therefore a need to prevent it. In other words, there is always going to be a minority of people mandated with authority and a need for mechanisms to ensure that they don't abuse that authority. And any system of accountability that involves fewer people than the public, is going to be more corruptible than one that does involve the public. Even anarchism would, without a democratic core, inevitably decay into a dictatorship in all but name. By insisting that anarchism is distinct from democracy, you're contributing to undermining the very thing you're trying to achieve.
If you're trying to say that there are some very fundamental problems with current implementations of democracy, I wholeheartedly agree. But do put it that way, then. Democracy is entirely too important to be reduced to a lure for replies.