Oligarchs and Intellectuals

Cohen, a legal scholar at Georgetown, argues that the concentration of immense power in the hands of tech companies represents a new and urgent form of oligarchy, one rooted not just in wealth but in their control over digital infrastructure and legal-political systems. These tech elites are reshaping global power structures. They are not merely seeking regulatory capture for profit: Their ambitious projects, from artificial intelligence to space colonization, are not fantastical forays but strategic efforts to dismantle existing institutions and design a future governed by their own interests and ideologies.

“The ongoing debates about global tech platform companies, state authority, and networked power, however, typically do not give systematic attention to the phenomenon of oligarchy—to extreme concentrations of material wealth deployed to obtain and protect durable personal advantage. Popular and press accounts of the power of “big tech” tell a different story. The biggest tech companies are dominated to a singular extent by a small group of very powerful and extremely wealthy men who now wield unprecedented informational, sociotechnical, and political power. Those men have increasingly espoused an activist political agenda directed toward advancing their views about the importance of unfettered technological development. At the same time, though, they also have played uniquely influential roles in structuring technological development—and, more recently, government reorganization—in particular ways that align with their personal beliefs. Developing an account of oligarchy and, more specifically, of tech oligarchy within contemporary political economy has become a project of considerable urgency.”

In a guest talk at Brown, Mazurek, an associate professor of history at Columbia, shows how the roots of modern development theory emerged from the political upheavals and nation-building efforts of the interwar period in Poland. She describes how the country’s economists leveraged its liminal status between the industrialized West and colonized regions to craft inclusive economic models aimed at multiethnic integration. Her book reframes development theory as a deeply situated, political, and transformative project.

“Development is often imagined as planning for the other, but at its roots, if we think about development from the perspective of Eastern Europe, it was a local knowledge for local people, not for some remote destinations. And I look in this story at people who sought to improve living conditions for the entirety of Poland’s population, which consisted of a multi-ethnic mass of people. Poles, ethnic Poles, but also Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, and people who in the early 20th century didn’t know who they were in terms of their national belonging. And I call a set of theories and policies designed for the multi-ethnic Polish society as true employment developmentalism.”

According to Cohen, a psychoanalyst, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han criticizes digital capitalism as a system of insidious self-exploitation that erodes meaningful experience by replacing contemplative depth with constant stimulation, transparency, and performative positivity. It creates an “achievement society” in which individuals internalize the demand to optimize themselves and in the process risk burnout, hollowed-out subjectivity, and the collapse of trust, love, and aesthetic experience into commodified, surface-level interactions. For Cohen, even as Han does offer a glimpse of utopian alternatives rooted in contemplative stillness and “Far Eastern” philosophical notions of emptiness, he displays a relentless negativity that could reproduce the very absolutism he criticizes.

“The thrust of Han’s writing is, above all, philosophical. Social and cultural life are occasions for addressing metaphysical questions. As such, the surface symptoms of digital culture are secondary to its ontological premises. Like Martin Heidegger, on whose concept of ‘Stimmung,’ or mood, he wrote his 1994 PhD thesis (as well as a 1999 introduction to Heidegger), he seeks to unearth the underlying metaphysics of our present-day culture. In particular, and again like Heidegger, Han is concerned with how the environment of a hyper-accelerated culture conditions the fundamental relationship between consciousness and the world. … The Burnout Society crystallised the critique of the self-exploitative logic of contemporary capitalism that Han has been elaborating ever since.”

Sarican, an anthropologist and Kurdish activist, explores the Rojava revolution in northeastern Syria as an ongoing experiment in radical democracy, women’s liberation, and antistate socialism, rooted in community self-organization and collective governance. For her, the revolution is a process of continual transformation shaped by Kurdish political thought, anti-colonial theory, and thinkers like Abdullah Öcalan and Murray Bookchin, but that is not reducible to any single ideology. Despite military threats from Turkey, remnants of ISIS, and new power players like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Sunni Islamist group that runs Syria’s interim government, the movement persists through grassroots justice systems and dual-power structures, striving for deeper social change.

What does the direct democracy look like? Now, it’s interesting because the movement has never really called it direct democracy, it’s always called it radical democracy. It’s slightly different in a way where it’s a radical, and radical in the literal sense of the term, to the root of it, a radical democracy in terms of understanding what it means for people to take charge of their own lives, but in a collective sense, not in an individual sense. The precursor, the condition, and the continued guarantee of that being women’s liberation. What that looks like in practice is, obviously, decision-making.