The philosophes of the 18th century developed (or borrowed from antiquity) the revolutionary idea that political sovereignty should lie with the people and economic sovereignty ultimately lay with the consumer. I read Adam Smith too. But of course they could not foresee a time when giant government and giant corporations could form a virtually unwritten pact to serve each other's interests and operate as the corporate state.
"The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system – have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time."
..."How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes. In other words, this is no longer just about private companies providing the bullets and bombs for both sides in a foreign war and obtaining the rebuilding contracts after. The military-industrial complex has come home, expanded to everything and invaded every aspect of our lives."
For the old term "military industrial complex" we could substitute "the corporate state". The military, while being the weapon of last resort, pales into insignificance in terms of impact on our lives which the mega corporations, particularly but not only the tech giants have on how we manage our daily lives.
Standing on a hilltop in 1960 and gazing into the future, few could have imagined as Dwight Eisenhower did, what a different and perilous world would emerge, one with the potential to enslave us while convincing many what a good time they were having.
