Who's in control?

And yet, most people live their lives unaware of this quiet conquest. They vote, protest, and petition, as they should—but often without grasping that the true boundary of their freedom is not the constitution, but the quarterly report. The state may still hold the symbols of power—but it is the market that holds the leash.

To understand the true extent of the market's dominion, one must leave behind the marbled halls of government and step into the ordinary lives of the governed. It is here, in the fluorescent-lit corridors of grocery stores, in the sterile offices of open-plan workspaces, in the quiet dread of monthly rent payments and student loan balances, that the architecture of power reveals its true form.

The state may issue laws, but it is the market that schedules the alarm clock. It decides when people wake, where they go, how long they stay, and how much of their life energy is worth per hour. The average citizen spends the majority of their waking hours under the rules not of civic duty or legal obligation, but of corporate time. The boss, not the senator, determines the pace of life. The algorithm, not the judge, governs attention.

The state may still hold the symbols of power—but it is the market that holds the leash

And unlike laws, which are printed, debated, and codified, the rules of the market are often invisible—embedded in software, in pricing structures, in job applications screened by AI. The unspoken imperative is simple: produce or perish. Stay valuable or be discarded. Work harder, consume faster, and always, always be optimizing.

Every decision—what to eat, what to wear, whether to have children, whether to take a sick day—is filtered through the prism of affordability. Health becomes a matter of cost-benefit analysis. Education a financial risk. Time itself, once the most democratic of all currencies, becomes unevenly distributed, hoarded by the wealthy and leased out to the rest by the hour.

Even identity bends to the needs of the market. The self is monetized, curated, branded. On social media platforms owned by trillion-dollar companies, people become content, and their attention—once the final redoubt of the private self—is bought and sold in fractions of a second. Every click is a whisper of consent, every scroll a small act of submission.

Meanwhile, the state—ostensibly the protector of the people—too often becomes an enabler of the system that subordinates them. Tax codes are rewritten to favor capital. Labor laws stagnate. Surveillance is outsourced. Welfare is hollowed out under the pretense of efficiency. Democracy, in this context, becomes a ritual: meaningful in form, but increasingly disconnected from the forces that shape real lives.

The irony is sharp: in theory, the citizen is sovereign; in practice, they are a debtor, a consumer, a data point. The state may define the rights of citizenship, but it is the market that defines the conditions of existence. And unlike the state, the market offers no appeals process. There is no courthouse for the unemployed, no referendum on eviction, no vote against inflation.

What masquerades as freedom of choice is often simply freedom within constraint—the ability to pick from preselected options, all designed to feed the same machine. The mall becomes the temple. The credit card becomes the ballot. And in this quiet submission, masked as participation, the market tightens its grip.

The mall becomes the temple. The credit card becomes the ballot. 

It does not ask for loyalty. Only obedience. Not in grand gestures—but in daily habits. In clicks. In purchases. In silence.

The cruelty of the capitalist paradigm is not merely in its dominance, but in its distribution. It is not an indifferent system—it is an unequal one, calibrated to reward those who already hold capital and to punish those without. Meritocracy, long the ideological armor of the market, reveals itself as myth. Talent without access is overlooked. Labor without leverage is exploited. The ladder of upward mobility, once central to the democratic promise, now stands not just steep, but greased.

Inequality is not an accident of capitalism—it is its engine. The accumulation of wealth by the few is structurally dependent on the stagnation of the many. Productivity rises, but wages flatten. Corporate profits soar, but housing, healthcare, and education drift further out of reach. The system is designed to extract more than it returns. People are told to work harder, innovate more, hustle longer—yet the finish line keeps moving, and the rules are rewritten mid-race by those who already own the track.

Meanwhile, the institutions of the state, which in theory exist to arbitrate fairness, increasingly stand by as spectators—or worse, collaborators. It is not that the state lacks the tools to intervene. It has the legislative power to tax wealth, to regulate corporations, to redistribute resources and ensure a baseline of human dignity. But the will has withered. Regulatory agencies are captured by the industries they are meant to oversee. Political campaigns are bankrolled by the very interests they ought to challenge. Lobbyists swarm the capitals of the world not to plead, but to dictate. The state is not dead—but in many cases, it has been domesticated.

The future is not preordained

This abdication of duty is not neutral. It allows the market to metastasize into every domain of life, unchecked and unsupervised. Public goods become privatized. Infrastructure decays while shareholder dividends rise. Social services are slashed in the name of fiscal discipline, while military budgets balloon to defend assets rather than people. The commons erode—clean air, clean water, public knowledge—replaced by toll booths and paywalls. Even crisis becomes commodity: disaster capitalism turns catastrophe into opportunity, for those positioned to profit.

And so, a grim trajectory emerges: a society governed less by democratic consensus than by economic coercion; a world where the powerful no longer need to persuade or represent, but only to purchase and surveil. It is a quiet drift toward functional oligarchy—an era where billionaires write policy, where citizenship is stratified by wealth, and where justice is a subscription service.

The warning signs are already blinking: rising authoritarianism disguised as order, climate catastrophe managed for profit rather than survival, mass disillusionment feeding conspiracy and extremism. These are not glitches. They are symptoms of a system that, left to its own devices, privileges capital over community, efficiency over empathy, and profit over planet.

The future is not preordained—but if the current trajectory holds, it leads to a world hollowed out of democracy, where the rituals of the state remain but their meaning is lost, and where the market—unregulated, unrepentant—becomes not merely the engine of the economy, but the arbiter of human worth.

Unless the state reclaims its moral and regulatory authority—unless it acts not as the handmaiden of capital but as the steward of the common good—this trajectory will not bend. And by the time it becomes intolerable to the many, it will already be irreversible to all.