We’ll do something a bit different next month…no specific book. I’ll be looking back at all the books I’ve read this year and building out some common themes over the course of the month. If you’re not part of book club then join to get all the posts.
After reading Autocracy Inc and looking at Anne Applebaum’s current thoughts on the American Political Climate, I can’t help but be just a bit more shocked at how far the US has fallen in it’s leadership for democracy. But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, proponents of democracy have preached a better game than they’ve played abroad.
Democracies have always been willing to inflict violence on others if it meant profit for home grown companies. In late 2023 I read The Bill Gates Problem and was struck by the statement that the ability of billionaires to turn their personal wealth into political power is a sign of a failing democracy1 and rising oligarchy.
Around the same time I came across a browser extension that turned the word billionaire into oligarch and did some preliminary work with the working title “In America we call them Billionaires not Oligarchs” because it felt like a novel idea at the time. Today Cory Doctorow talks about the shitty tech adoption curve, at the same time Applebaum highlights how democracies use the same surveillance tools of autocrats in the name of “keeping people safe”2. All it’s taken is a shift in who sits in power and the safety technology is easily transformed into a social credit monitoring system stripping people of their rights.
My once novel idea connecting oligarchy and billionaires seems more like common knowledge that kleptocracy and oligarchy has captured many political institutions across the West.
In Canada we have the Roger’s Family, who control most of our telecom structure and are led by a whiny child3 of the founder who pushes others around to get his way while claiming he’s saving the legacy of his father.
Three companies own almost the entire grocery economy in Canada. They were already caught fixing the price of bread and while everyday Canadians struggle to get by many claim grocery giants are profiting on inflation as their profit growth exceeds that of inflation. This price fixing is only possible because of consolidation.
Cory Doctorow argues, militantly but well, in Enshittification that when we have few companies competing it’s easy for them to all get on the same page and engage in price fixing. The consolidated power also means that employees of the powerful companies cycle in and out of regulators where they’re hesitant to build strong regulations to reign in the companies they want to work at again in the future4.
Just like the US, Canada is following the neoliberal economic playbook which has a key tactic, destroying the normal person’s ability to organize5. If regular people carry lots of debt, work lots of hours, or have lots of unpaid labour at home, they are experiencing scarcity which means they don’t have the time to organize. While this isn’t a direct comparison, it maps closely in theme with Applebaum’s idea that autocrats flood us with a fire hose of falsehoods. Both concepts rely on overloaded citizens, from one end it’s a barrage of information that leaves you no usable bandwidth to dig into all the corruption going on. From the other end, financial precarity means you’re more concerned about food on the table and can’t focus on anything outside of that goal.
Essentially we get pushed so much into scarcity of attention6, or finances, that we can’t spare a second to protest. We’re too busy and our circle of moral concern contracts so we view others as less like ourselves.
Should You Read Autocracy Inc by Anne Applebaum?
Yes, but it’s not an easy read because it highlights so much that’s going wrong with the world around us. I finished the book better equipped to recognize the autocrats playbook, and a bit demoralized at how far many countries have fallen from their democratic roots. The US is no longer the beacon of democracy in once was and it doesn’t seem to me that we have another country jumping into the leadership void left by the US.
If you want to recognize the tools of the autocrats so that you can combat their encroachment in your life, read this book.