What's most interesting to me about it is that the convergence occurs from both sides. Both autocracies and democracies converge toward an oligarchy. Democracies devolve because there are a lot of people who don't care enough about most issues, which means there are "cheap votes" that are extremely easy to sway. Access to cheap votes (control of the press, political party leadership) is not democratically distributed, but the opposite. On the other hand, even the most vicious autocrats need lieutenants who eventually learn how to take advantage of them. Either way, you get to something that looks like the "square root of N".
TechCrunch is powerful because it has a nut-hold on the cheap votes. The same goes with the prominent VCs who lead the herd.
The best you can do, often, is to create genuine competition among the oligarchs. Then there is a real market for talent, which often comes from the common people (the demos) and this means that the oligarchs can't treat them too badly, because pissing on the people is a sure way not to be able to recruit talent when you go to war against other oligarchs.
That's one thing I dislike about VC-istan. Rather than competing with each other, the VCs talk to each other about who's hot, who's not, and what kind of terms to offer. So you get vertical competition (class warfare) instead of the horizontal kind.
TechCrunch is powerful because it has a nut-hold on the cheap votes. The same goes with the prominent VCs who lead the herd.
The best you can do, often, is to create genuine competition among the oligarchs. Then there is a real market for talent, which often comes from the common people (the demos) and this means that the oligarchs can't treat them too badly, because pissing on the people is a sure way not to be able to recruit talent when you go to war against other oligarchs.
That's one thing I dislike about VC-istan. Rather than competing with each other, the VCs talk to each other about who's hot, who's not, and what kind of terms to offer. So you get vertical competition (class warfare) instead of the horizontal kind.