… And Nobody Asks the Question
The West won the Cold War. Communism was defeated. Capitalism prevailed. That was the story we told ourselves in 1989 — and for a while, it felt true. Open markets, free trade, democracy and prosperity spreading hand in hand. Francis Fukuyama even declared it the end of history – he said that democracy and capitalism had proven themselves as the final form of human government.
History, as it turns out, had other plans.
What we did not anticipate — or perhaps did not want to see — is the form capitalism would take once it had no serious competitor. Today we have companies whose market capitalisation exceeds the GDP of entire nations. Nvidia, a single chip company, briefly surpassed the economic output of Japan, India and the United Kingdom in 2025. Apple and Microsoft are each worth more than four trillion dollars. Three companies — Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft — alone make up roughly 18% of the entire S&P 500. These are not nations. They have no citizens, no elections, no obligations to a public, no accountability to anyone but their shareholders.
And yet they shape what we see, what we think, what we can say, how we work, how we learn, and increasingly — how we are governed.
This is the question nobody in mainstream politics seems willing to ask:
what happens when a company becomes more powerful than a state?
We have entire frameworks for managing relations between nations — international law, treaties, the United Nations, the WTO. We have constitutions, courts, democratic processes. We have hard-won concepts for holding power accountable to people. But we have almost nothing — no concepts, no institutions, no language even — for the situation we are now in, where a handful of private companies exercise power that dwarfs most governments.
I spent years inside the early internet, believing — genuinely believing — that it would make the world more democratic. More participatory. More open. What I watched instead was the gradual concentration of that openness into the hands of a few. The platforms that were supposed to give everyone a voice became the mechanisms through which a small number of people and companies could shape the voice of everyone.
This is not a conspiracy. It is the logic of capitalism operating without constraint, without competition, and without anyone seriously asking where it leads.
I am not arguing against markets. I am arguing for honesty about what markets have become — and what we have failed to build alongside them. Every political system needs countervailing forces. Democracy was built as a counterweight to the concentration of political power. Labour movements were built as a counterweight to the concentration of economic power. What is the counterweight to the concentration of algorithmic, infrastructural, planetary power that these companies now exercise?
We do not yet have one. And our politicians — captured by the very system they are supposed to oversee, funded by the interests they are supposed to regulate — are not asking the question.
So we must.
This is not someone else’s problem. The conditioning that makes us accept this situation without question — the assumption that this is simply how the world works, that there is no alternative, that the market knows best — is itself something we have absorbed without choosing. Seeing it clearly is the first step. Demanding something different is the next.
And yet — history shows that people have always had more power than they think.
When Elon Musk began using his platform to support far-right political parties across Europe, Tesla’s European sales dropped by 28% in 2025 — in the same year that the broader European electric car market grew by 30%. In Germany alone, where Musk had most aggressively intervened in the political debate, the EV market grew by 43%. Tesla’s decline was not an accident. It was a choice, made by hundreds of thousands of individual people who decided that their purchase was also a vote. No regulator did that. No politician ordered it. Consumers did.
When Spotify ran recruitment ads for the US immigration enforcement agency ICE in 2025 — ads that activists argued normalised fear and intimidation — a sustained campaign of subscription cancellations and public pressure forced the platform to stop running them. Not perfectly, not permanently. But enough to demonstrate that the relationship between a platform and its users is not one-sided.
When Nike was exposed in the early 1990s for its use of sweatshop labour in developing countries, years of consumer boycotts, campus protests and sustained public pressure forced the then-CEO to publicly commit to raising labour standards. Not because a government made him. Because customers refused to look away.
These are not small victories. They are proof of something important: that the power these companies hold is not absolute. It is conditional. It depends on us — on our attention, our money, our willingness to participate. The moment we withdraw any of those, the equation shifts.
We are not powerless. We have simply been conditioned to believe we are.
The first act of resistance is not a boycott. It is seeing clearly — seeing what we are participating in when we open an app, make a purchase, accept a term and condition without reading it. Seeing, as I have come to understand through my own long process of unlearning, is itself an act of power. And from seeing, everything else becomes possible.
See around minute 9:50 🙂