The Constituent Assembly

From October 1789 until the fall of the monarchy, the upper-class possessors of French wealth put their efforts into keeping the lower classes at bay. In some instances they would do this themselves, using their wealth and connections to work their way into the most powerful offices. In others, they would use their wealth to back representatives in the political Assemblies and the Commune de Paris. Having seen the uprisings at the Bastille, the Women’s March on Versailles, and the various riots and insurrections across the rural countryside, the upper-class knew what the people were capable of.

Their main strategy, therefore, would be to manage the anger of the people so as to quietly retract their concessions over time. In their view, the Revolution was already in its ending stages. All they had to do was repress the violent outbursts.

On the 19th of October, the Assembly moved the location of their meetings, following the King from Versailles to Paris. To accommodate them, new seating was constructed for the representatives alongside the Tuileries garden. These were accompanied by makeshift platforms, giving a space for the public to heckle and challenge the upcoming assemblies throughout all of their meetings. As they moved away from Versailles, the seating arrangements emerged roughly according to the spectrum of their ideologies and beliefs. As Eric Hazan puts it:

“There were no parties in the modern sense of the term, but rather tendencies and personalities.”

Whereas at Versailles they had referred to the geometry of the assembling room in terms of a ‘Palais-Royal side’ and a ‘queen’s side’, these landmarks were now missing. Instead, they referred to the seating arrangements in reference to the presidential dais at the front of the room. It was here that we got our modern conception of politics as having a left and a right. Counter-revolutionaries tended towards sitting on the right side of the room, whereas moderates sat in the middle, and the most revolutionary representatives sat on the left.

Various factions popped up among this new assembly. Sitting furthest to the right, the aristocratic noirs wore the color black in support of the queen. To the left of them, the absolute monarchists who wished to see the return of the king’s power. Next to them, the Fayettists who supported a constitutional monarchy. To their left, a large group of revolutionaries gathered around Barnave, Duport, and Alexandre de Lameth. At the furthest left corner were three outcasts: François Buzot, a lawyer from Northern France, Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, an abolitionist priest, and Maximilien Robespierre, whose name would go on to become infamous throughout French society.

Social Clubs and the Democratic Press

The ideas and tendencies that arose in the Assembly brought about a demand for the development of those ideas throughout Paris. Aristocratic ideas found a home at the Salon Français, and were published in papers such as Les Actes des Apôtres and L’Ami du roi. The constitutional monarchists (Fayettists) congregated at the Société de 89 at the luxurious Palais-Royal. A high entrance fee practically restricted membership to the high society, financiers, and military figures. The ideologies of those on the left wing of the assembly were primarily represented through two separate clubs: the Jacobins and the Cordeliers.

The Jacobins

The Jacobins found their start when they were looking for meeting premises that were near the new meeting place of the Constituent Assembly. They began as the “Breton Club,” meeting at a library on the Rue Saint-Honoré.

At the beginning, the members were all representatives in the Constituent Assembly, and they used the meetings to discuss whatever was going on in the assembly. As they began to expand they changed their name to the Société des Amis de la Constitution, and moved into the Couvent de l’Annonciation, a former Dominican monastery founded in 1611 by the French witch hunter and demonologist Sébastien Michaelis.

The name “Jacobin” was formerly used as a label for French members of the Dominican order, based on their origins in the Paris-based Couvent Saint-Jacques in the year 1217. Enemies of the left-wing revolutionaries began to call the members of this society “Jacobins” as an insult, wherein the revolutionaries countered by fully embracing the title. The objectives of the Jacobins were laid out in Article 1 of their rules: they would meet every day at six o’clock unless the Assembly was still in session, where they would work towards the following goals:

While they started with the relatively modest goal of coordinating among representatives of the Assembly, they would rapidly expand by allowing entrance to anyone who was nominated by five existing members. After their membership exceeded one thousand people, they began to open their doors to the Parisian public. This led to an explosion in revolutionary thinking in Paris and inspired similar affiliated groups in other areas throughout France.

In contrast to their stereotyped image as elitist urban dictators, the Jacobins were relatively decentralized compared to other clubs and societies of the time. In August of 1790, there were 152 affiliated societies throughout the nation, and over one thousand Jacobin-affiliated societies would be formed in the years to come. This wasn’t some kind of top-down imposition of a central Jacobin doctrine. Rather, the revolutionary ideas would spread in multiple directions, both inward and outward of their center in Paris.

The Cordeliers

In 1790, another club would arise under the title Société des Amis des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. These people, generally referred to as the Cordeliers, had similar revolutionary inclinations to the Jacobins while practicing a different method of exercising power. In contrast to the Jacobin strategy of developing and spreading revolutionary ideology throughout the nation, the Cordeliers focused on direct action and the struggle for justice.

Viewing themselves as the protectors of the oppressed, they would wear an emblem depicting the ‘eye of surveillance’, wide open and pointed towards the failures and misdeeds of the powerful. Some of their primary actions included making accusations against powerful wrongdoers, investigating public inquiries, visiting and legally defending imprisoned revolutionaries, and communicating with the broader public through political posters.

While you could of course find the financially well-off intellectuals that tended to join these types of clubs among the ranks of the Cordeliers, their audience was much wider than most others at the time. For example, their membership fee was only two sous per month, allowing people of the lower and working classes to join them. This led to a mix of backgrounds and skill-sets among their ranks: lawyers, journalists, and printers discussed with and fought alongside retailers, butchers, brewers, and tradespeople. The Cordeliers were also among the earliest of the social clubs to allow women to attend their session and take part in discussions.

The Cordeliers were also closely linked to the fraternal societies, a collection of local clubs in Paris. The first of these societies was the Société Fraternelle, founded by Claude Dansard, a local boarding-house keeper. Every evening, Dansard would invite the artisans and fruit and vegetable sellers in the area into a small room in the Jacobin meeting space. There, he would read and explain the latest decrees of the Constituent Assembly to them by candle light.

Similar fraternal societies popped up in every neighborhood of Paris. For example, one society in the Enfants-Rouges area accepted the attendance of any citizen regardless of status or gender, even allowing young children to attend once they were twelve years old. Through this network of clubs and societies, the often illiterate people of Paris gained valuable access to a political education.

Newspapers and Public Readings

The increasing levels of political awareness and interest among the public led to the development of the ‘democratic’ press. The printed news-sheets were relatively expensive to produce at the time, meaning that working-class people were often unable to afford a print subscription for themselves. Despite that, the news spread like wildfire through public readings and showings. In some cases, town-criers would stand in the street and yell the contents at passersby. In others, news would be posted on the walls throughout the city (even though this practice was banned by the Paris Commune). At this time, the French café served an important political role: people would meet in cafés to share newspapers with each other, read them out loud, and discuss their contents.

The contents of these papers varied widely. Moderate papers such as Le Courrier and Les Révolutions de Paris advocated in favor of the democracy and human rights while fighting against the perceived disorder of their left-wing counterparts. One paper, the Bouche de fer, was run by a Masonic institution that ran an ‘iron mouth’ system. This allowed anyone to drop off letters, notes, and messages in a dropbox which would then be printed and published.

The most revolutionary side of democratic press was largely dominated by three figures: Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoît Desmoulins (commonly known as Camille Desmoulins), Jean-Paul Marat, and Jacques René Hébert. Each of them acted as the founders, directors, and sole writers of their papers. Each of them also acted as a journalistic enemy of the other two writers.

Desmoulins ran the Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant, which had three sections: France, Brabant, and Variétés. The first section addressed the French monarchy and his support for its abolition in favor of a republic. The second section addressed the Brabant Revolution, another revolution in modern-day Belgium that occurred at the same time as the French Revolution. This revolution took place in what was then known as the Austrian Netherlands in order to overthrow Emperor Joseph II and the control of the Habsburg Empire. The third section consisted of something like cultural criticism, where Desmoulins wrote reviews of books and theatre.

Marat started the L’Ami du peuple in September of 1789, and would go on to publish over a thousand issues under various titles. He did this despite being issued multiple arrest warrants over his years of newspaper production, and would often have to completely move his work into hiding. As the repression forced him to keep working with different printers, he was eventually forced into learning how to print the papers by himself. Each issue of the newspaper consisted of a single article, usually eight to twelve pages long. He also included letters from his readers and including them in an ongoing dialogue. Although there were a limited amounts of copies that could be printed and distributed, readers would often read them in groups as to include people who couldn’t afford or read the paper themselves.

Hébert ran Le Père Duchesne, the name of a symbolic archetype of a man. The newspaper covers depicted this through an image of an angry-looking guy in a revolutionary coat and a pipe hanging out of his mouth. The paper read more like an explicit comedy or modern-day tabloid than political news, and had short summaries at the front that were meant to be cried in the streets. Other papers, books, and pamphlets would sometimes try to use the name Le Père Duchesne as a way of counterfeiting to boost their sales. It’s specific popularity among the working class sans culottes led to some upper-class people reading it in public and loudly displaying their laughter as a way to signal their virtuousness to the masses.

Martial Law

In October of 1789, riots broke out in Paris. Recent policies of free trade in grain led to shortages and hunger. At the Halle aux Farines, women resorted to looting sacks of flour from bakers’ shops. One baker named François was (likely falsely) accused of hoarding, wherein he was hanged from a lamppost, decapitated, and paraded through the streets on the tip of a pike.

The Commune of Paris (consisting of three-hundred-person council) heard about this incident, and subsequently went to the Assembly for help. There, they asked the assembly to pass a law against all gatherings in order to contain the riots.

The Assembly overwhelmingly supported the declaration of martial law. There were only two people among them that were willing to speak up against it:

Robespierre: “Those who have followed the Revolution foresaw the point you are at now; they foresaw that terrible situations would require you to demand violent measures, with the aim of destroying at one stroke both yourselves and liberty. The demand is for bread and soldiers, in other words: the people have gathered wanting bread; give us soldiers to immolate the people. You have been told that the soldiers refuse to march … Indeed! Can they attack an unhappy people whose misfortune they share?”

Mirabeau: “Everything is silence, everything has to be silenced, everything must give way faced by a hungry people; what use would martial law be, if the people gather and shout ‘There is no bread at the bakery!’ What monster would answer this with gunshots?”

Despite their protests, the Assembly drafted a decree of martial law. According to this law, the military would display red flags at the Hôtel de Ville and throughout the streets, at which point all gatherings would immediately become criminal. The punishments were harsh: unarmed protestors could expect one year in prison, armed protestors could expect three years, and leaders/instigators/violent protestors would be sentenced to death. This included the immediate execution of the man who killed the baker François earlier that day.

One of the few newspapers to critique this law was Marat’s L’Ami du peuple:

Thanks for reading! This is part 3 in a series on the French Revolution. The next part will cover the effects of the imposition of martial law, along with the consequences of multiple national crises.

Main source: A People’s History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan.

Looking back on some of the pivotal shifts in power and social relations in history can give us a better understand of the situation we find ourselves in today, and where we might try to go in the future. In the following posts, I hope to answer the following questions:

1. What reasons, if any, did people have for turning to revolution over any other methods of political change?

2. What caused ordinary people to support political violence, such as direct action against the state or the infamous September Massacres?

3. How should we think of the French Revolution today? Should we embrace the values of the revolutionaries of that era, or do we need to consider a new approach?

On the morning of July 14th, 1789, Louis Éthis de Corny led a march on the Hôtel de Ville (the city hall of Paris since 1357). Roughly eight thousand unarmed demonstrators grouped together in front of the building, where they were confronted by a physical obstacle: a giant ditch, twelve feet wide and eight feet deep. Not letting themselves be dissuaded, they solved this problem by jumping down into the ditch and then stacking on each other’s shoulders to reach the building entrance. Those who made it in seized twelve cannon parts and a mortar, and used those weapons to threaten the governor. On behalf of the city, they ordered that all weapons be handed over to the people. They left with 40,000 muskets in hand.

Simultaneously, various delegates made their way to the Bastille where they demanded all arms within the royal fortress be handed over to the people. Discussions intensified and no compromises were made. As people continued to gather in masses around the Bastille, tensions erupted when the royal garrison began to open fire on the representatives. Crowds took over the drawbridge and stormed into the courtyard, where guards continued to shoot at them from their towers. A cannon was brought over from the victorious assault on the city hall, which was promptly used to break down the gates. At around 5 P.M., the royal garrison and Swiss Guards surrendered to the people. The conflict ended with around one hundred deaths among the attackers, and one death among the guards. De Launay and Flesselles, who were believed to have initiated the shootings against the people, were decapitated and their heads paraded around the streets of Paris on tips of pikes.

The storming of the Bastille is the most famous event of the French Revolution. It marks a point commonly seen as the culmination of the efforts of the people, striking a decisive blow against the royalist institutions. Some people have even spoken of the storming as if it was the final chapter of the revolution in its purist form; the point before a just revolution devolved into pointless violence and chaos. This viewpoint, however, misses the broader historical arc at play. For while a triumphant victory against a near-holy symbol of the monarchy makes for a satisfying story, the storming of the Bastille was just the symbolic tip of the revolutionary iceberg. The taxes, feudal rights, and class structures of the royal regime were still in place — peasants and workers were still starving in the streets. The revolution has only just begun.

The Great Fear

News of the capture of the Bastille struck fear in the hearts of royal authorities across France. People in urban centers began to organize militias to maintain order and property as riots broke out demanding the end of taxation on wheat and bread. In Paris, Foulon, the controller-general, and his son-in-law Berthier were on their way to the Abbaye prison to await a trial. A crowd of demonstrators intercepted Foulon’s transportation, proceeding to hang him from a lamppost. Upon his death, they celebrated by cutting off his head, stuffing the mouth with hay, and parading it through the streets on the tip of a pike. Berthier fell to a similar fate, being captured by a crowd and killed with a sabre. The fears among nobles brought about by these events was just one side of the story, however. For the greater population of France had their imaginations captured by what came to be known as the Great Fear.

This Great Fear consisted of multiple intersecting beliefs. First, there was a belief that aristocrats were secretly conspiring with foreign powers to call in hordes of troops against the French people. Second, there was fear of a violence from within: reports of poor beggars, drifters, and brigands violently demanding food from farmers throughout the countryside. By late July, it was clear that both of these rumors were mostly unfounded conjecture. While they might not have been real at the time, the Great Fear had a powerful effect in the way that it primed people’s minds to stay vigilant against foreign plotting and internal bloodshed.

Taking advantage of the general disorder of the time, groups of impoverished peasants then began to storm the residences of feudal lords. They would demand access to the archival documents that granted feudal rights to the lords, at which point they would throw all of those documents into a bonfire. If a lord refused to cooperate, they achieved the same ends by turning the entire château building into the bonfire. In the Mâconnais, a peasant rebellion burned down over seventy châteaux — the feudal powers reacted by killing twenty of the peasants and imprisoning sixty more.

Noble Concessions

Members of the nobility realized that they would be forced to make political concessions in order to save their own lives. The most visible privileges of the existing order were to be destroyed: seigniorial rights, clergy’s tithing, and bourgeois purchases of public offices. The National Assembly followed suit by adopting similar ideas. In the opening line of their declaration on August 4th:

News of these concessions reached the people, and joyous celebrations flooded the streets of Paris. Not all of the people of Third Estate were convinced, however. In August of 1789, a relatively unknown man was busy at work writing the first issue of a new newspaper, L’Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People). He searched throughout town for a printer who was willing to publish his article on the Assembly’s actions:

“Let us beware; they are seeking to lull us to sleep, to deceive us. The truth is that the faction of aristocrats has always dominated the National Assembly, and the deputies of the people have always blindly followed the directions it has given them.”

This man’s name was Jean-Paul Marat, and no one could have predicted the effect that his contributions would have on the revolution for years to come. His warnings were timely, as peasants began to realize that their demands were still being largely ignored. Despite the formal appearance of an abolition of feudal power, bailiffs continued to demand the payments of the same taxes and rights that led to this situation: champarts, terrages, cens, lods, and feudal tithes. In many places, peasants were forced to band together in order to collectively refuse the payments of these dues. Marat’s message was a haunting omen for the violence that would come to follow this illusory moment of peace.

The Declaration of Rights

At this point, the Declaration of Rights was in its early stages of development. Whereas we might imagine the writing of such an important document as a deliberate, slow process, the reality of its conception was characterized by contradiction and disorder. In the National Assembly’s final session on August 26th, amendments and edits were thrown around amid individual conversations and arguments. Some rights that we would expect to be central were completely missing: a right to education, a right to assembly, and a right to petition. Rather than a coherent statement, the ‘final’ product of these talks was just a snapshot of this specific period in time.

Despite these contradictions, the social power of the Declaration was undeniable. Marking the end of the royal Ancien Régime, the beliefs that sovereignty belonged to the Nation rather than the king, that the law ought to express the general will of the people, and that all citizens ought to be afforded equal access to public offices, were fundamentally revolutionary. More than just policy reforms, the people had officially expressed their desires for the end of the divine rights of kings and the beginning of the natural rights of man.

The Women’s March on Versailles

The background of an economic crisis, the Great Fear, and distrust of the aristocracy brought tensions to some of their highest levels yet. In contrast to the more well-known storming of the Bastille, the next revolutionary spark was relatively unexpected.

On October 1st of 1789, a grand dinner was held at Versailles’ hall of the Opéra to celebrate the arrival of a new royal military regiment. The king, Louis XVI, and queen, Marie Antoinette, attended the dinner to greet their guests with wine and music. In return, the soldiers thanked them with supportive cheers. Later in the evening, the soldiers tore off their tricolor ribbons (representing the French nation) from their caps, replacing them with white ribbons in support of the king. Some of the officers even chose to replace their ribbons with black ones, a color representing support for the queen. The customary welcoming dinner had been turned into an overtly counter-revolutionary demonstration.

News of the counter-revolutionary dinner reached Paris on October 3rd, where a large group of women were already protesting against rising bread prices and troop movements. These women, overwhelmingly from the poorer classes, were largely anonymous. Yet their actions spoke as loud as their words, sending a shock throughout France. As historian Eric Hazan puts it:

“In the morning, groups of angry women gathered in Paris, around the Halles and in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. They then converged outside the Hôtel de Ville, where they screamed for bread. Not getting an answer, they overwhelmed the guard, forced the doors and entered the building, making off with pikes, muskets, and four cannon. Then, taking one of the heroes of the Bastille, Stanislas Maillard, as their captain, they formed a procession and set off for Versailles. Towards five o’clock in the afternoon, there was a crowd of six or seven thousand women outside the palace railings, joined by workers and gardes-françaises whom they met along the way.”

The women continued by sending a delegation to the National Assembly, with Stanislas Maillard as their spokesperson. There, they declared their two demands of Versailles: bread, and punishments for the royal guards at the royal dinner. The Assembly agreed, sending their president, Mounier, along with a small group of deputies to confront King Louis XVI. There, they presented their formal request:

Louis XVI met with his council, where they suggested that he should flee to Rouen rather than meet the demands of the Assembly. He chose to decline the monarchists’ suggestion, and formally validated the Assembly’s demands at 10 P.M.

Two hours later, Lafayette arrived in Versailles. Right behind him, 15,000 men of the Paris National Guard were at his command. The night passed quietly, but demonstrations broke out among the people once again on the morning of October 6th. As crowds continued to gather, a new slogan formed and began to spread: ‘The king to Paris!’

One group found a way into the royal palace through a poorly guarded gate and broke into the Marble Court. One guard there fired at the crowd, killing a man, so the crowds threw themselves at the entire group of guards. They managed to kill two of the guards, giving them access to the royal apartments. As you might expect, they decapitated both of the slain guards and paraded their heads through the streets on the tips of pikes.

The crowd almost made it all the way to the queen’s bedroom, where Lafayette and the National Guard managed to hold them at bay. After clearing out the building, Lafayette and Louis XVI went out on the balcony to address the people. The queen, Marie Antoinette, and her children followed, but the crowds booed them away. Lafayette convinced the queen to come back out, at which point he decided to use his popularity to save her. He bowed deeply, kissing her hand, prompting applause from the audience. The royal family then gave into the demands of the people.

At 1 P.M., a grand procession left Versailles in order to bring the king to Paris. The National Guard led with loafs of bread on their bayonets and carried carts full of flour. The gardes soldés protected the royal bodyguards, who in turn protected the king and queen. The Flanders Regiment, the Swiss Guard, and Lafayette followed close behind them. At the end of the procession were the masses of the people, where women carried poplar branches as an icon of the French nation. At 10 P.M., the king and royal family arrived at their new home in Paris: the Tuileries palace.

Thanks for reading! This is part 2 in a series on the French Revolution. If you enjoyed it, you can support my work by liking this post, sharing it, or leaving a comment. If you didn’t enjoy it, feel free to tell me I’m wrong in the comments.

Part 1:

Main source: A People’s History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan.

Looking back on some of the pivotal shifts in power and social relations in history can give us a better understand of the situation we find ourselves in today, and where we might try to go in the future. In the following posts, I hope to answer the following questions:

1. What reasons, if any, did people have for turning to revolution over any other methods of political change?

2. What caused ordinary people to support political violence, such as direct action against the state or the infamous September Massacres?

3. How should we think of the French Revolution today? Should we embrace the values of the revolutionaries of that era, or do we need to consider a new approach?

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On the brink of revolution, the French society of the 1780s was anything but united. At the broadest level, people have spoken about three distinct groups: the nobility, the clergy, and the Third Estate.

The Third Estate

Roughly 23 million out of the 28 million inhabitants of France are lumped into the label of “Third Estate,” despite having numerous subgroups, cultures, and conflicting interests among themselves. Each group would come to play their own roles in the revolution to come, and each person had their own reasons to do so and unique visions for what was to be accomplished. So, who were these people, and what were their lives like in years leading up to the collapse of the French monarchy?

The Peasantry

The largest category within this distinction would be the peasantry. Among the peasants, we would see farmers who cultivated their land and sharecroppers in the poorest regions who would divide their produced crops between tenants and workers. Poorer peasants were often forced to seek additional incomes beyond their farm work, either working in rural industries or finding part-time work as seasonal laborers.

Despite the terrible conditions of the sharecroppers at the bottom, not all peasants were so destitute. For some who owned their land, their crops could sustainably feed their families while also generating additional income from rising prices. Here, we can already see the issues that can arise from trying to sort 28 million people into just three categories. In just one of those groups, the Third Estate, we can already find poor peasants and prosperous peasants who live vastly different lives.

Their individual differences could be overlooked, however, through one issue that afflicted the lives every peasant: taxes. These taxes even came from multiple sources, all demanding different prices on various activities or business. The taille was owed to the state, the dîme was owed to the Church, and seigniorial dues were owed to one’s lord. Furthermore, the legal rights of the upper classes were routinely used to extract ransoms from all areas of a peasant’s life. Rights over animals used for ploughing, ferries for crossing rivers, goods and stalls at markets, policing for roads, fishing in rivers, wells for extracting water, the ability to keep ferrets as pets, grain for feeding pigeons, fires and chimneys for heating, space to build houses, and a general ban on hunting for everyone outside of the nobility.

While taxes were theoretically supposed to do something to serve the people of France, peasants were still living in precarious conditions. Widespread hunger arose as a result of bad harvests out of their control. The youngest members of the peasantry were often hit the hardest: infant mortality rates were rising and children who were lucky enough to live past infanthood grew up treating shoes and clothing as luxuries.

The Artisans

In the leadup to the revolution, manufacturing was primarily based in larger cities. In May of 1776, the system of corporations in Paris was reformed away from the historical hierarchies of masters, journeymen, and apprentices. Now, all that was required to become the master of a corporation was to pay a set of taxes. This opened new opportunities for women and foreigners who were previously restricted from joining this system.

While the surface-level arrangements might have implied an expanding level of freedom for this class of workers, that expansion of opportunity was accompanied with an increase in surveillance and control capabilities from their bosses and the state. Corporations were concentrated into an increasingly small number of powerful firms, with the total number of them allowed in Paris going from around 100 down to 44 in a short span of time. The lives of laborers were intensively scrutinized, preventing them from organizing in groups, requiring them to enroll in registers controlled by their masters, and only allowing them to leave their employers with a written approval. Lenoir, a lieutenant-general of police sent roaming squads around in the night to crack down on unapproved work and the unemployed. Anyone without official papers or employment were rounded up and arrested.

Social relations between the workers and their masters began to break down. Younger workers who previously would have raised their hats in respect when their master walked into the room no longer did so. Deprived of their rights of movement and choice between corporations, they didn’t see a reason to continue on with the one-way display of respect. Instead, they began to treat their masters coldly, glaring and snickering at them behind their backs. Workers also began to assert their independence in smaller ways: working slowly, taking smoke breaks, and delaying orders as they pleased.

Solidarity between workers also put them in direct conflict with the existing business and policing institutions. As an example, we can look at the case of Durant and Hurlot, two stone-cutters who lived in Paris. Paris police archives described an incident that began at six in the evening on May 2nd, 1785:

“Florentin, sergeant of the guard at Vaugirard, having been called by monsieur Dupont, wine-seller, regarding a number of individuals who were drinking at his establishment and had caused damage, breaking earthenware jars and unwilling to pay for these or even the wine they had drunk, we proceeded there and most of those involved had escaped with the exception of Durant, a stone-cutter, who was arrested along with Hurlot, also a cutter. When we set off, some sixty other stonecutters ran behind us and attacked us to free the two arrested men, I ordered bayonets fitted and they, seeing that they could not approach any closer, took up stones and cobbles from the street and threw them at us, a certain Gateblie, a member of my squad, was struck in the legs, in the belly kidneys and in the face, and is dangerously wounded.”

The sergeant called out the Vaugirard guard to assist him, which allowed him to arrest Durant and Hurlot along with one of their sixty stonecutter defenders. The re-arresting of those three stonecutters triggered a second ambush, where the workers came back to free their allies once more. The sergeant was forced to call in the support of the military to bring the three into the nearest prison. It took the combined power of the sergeant, his bayonet-armed police squadron, two military infantry sections, and full cavalry brigade just to arrest three poor stonecutters.

The Financiers

The later half of the 18th century saw Paris grow into a sprawling, urban center of trade. The expansion of the city brought the population up over six hundred thousand people, making Paris the most populous city in Europe behind London. In Paris’ wake, other cities throughout France also began their processes of rapid growth and urbanization. Lyon, Bordeaux, and Marseille all passed the one hundred thousand population marker in the leadup to the revolution.

One of the consequences of this widespread urban growth was the creation of new financial systems and networks. A new class of financiers took the form of the fermiers généraux (farmers general): those who were responsible for collecting taxes for the state and overseeing the customs duties on all goods and commodities that entered the city. In 1785, the power of this new class was put on display as fifty-five barriers were built into a new wall surrounding Paris. The forty members of Ferme-Générale had upwards of 25,000 employees to enforce the taxes and contraband regulations. Furthermore, the members had the right to act in the name of the king, meaning they could send smugglers to be executed at the galleys or the gibbet.

The growth of banking and stock-exchanges also played a prevalent role in this period, with the fermiers généraux frequently found themselves in the company of bankers, stock traders, and arms suppliers. The members of the Ferme-Générale would use this position of power to grow wealthy as the city grew larger. While not officially classified as nobility, their close connections to nobility would later make them prime targets for the guillotine.

The Intellectuals

Some of the most well-known figures of the revolution emerge from this small group. While still considered to be a part of the vast Third Estate, the professionals and intellectuals often had more resources and education compared to the poorer peasantry. This left them in a position where their personal interests aligned with the revolution, while their financial privileges gave them the ability to broadcast their ideas to the public.

Lawyers were prominent members of this group, but other professions such as magistrates, notaries, and professors often played similar roles. Writers, journalists, and publicists also played a key role in the power of this class.

The intellectual parts of the revolution can find their roots in the philosophical and political readings that were being spread around throughout the professionals of the time. A common language could be found in the writings of the Enlightenment — a western-European philosophical tradition built around ideas of reason, liberty, and humanity. A major part of Enlightenment philosophy is the political philosophy of the social contract, a concept in which states derive their legitimacy from an agreement of rights and duties between rulers and the ruled. Writers like Locke, Hobbes, Bentham, Rousseau, and Paine can be found among the wide library of the Enlightenment, and their texts were the ideological grounds upon which the revolution would justify itself against the existing monarchy.

Grounds for Revolution

The Ancients and the Americans

Alongside philosophical ideas, new concepts and understandings of history began to take root among the people of France. One notable example was the excavations of the ancient cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Starting in 1738, the public slowly began to hear stories of the characters and legends that had previously been completely unknown to the vast majority of people. Engravings from the cities were published in newspapers, giving some words of the ancients a new voice among the French. The ruins of Pompeii even gave faces to the people of the ancient days, turning the previously hypothetical people buried among the ruins into physical displays of the lives they lived. Men, women, children, and pets were found in households, while the names of heroes and writers of the time would be revived in the political speeches of the upcoming revolution.

While the voices of the ancient Romans spread throughout the minds of the French people, other voices came from across the Atlantic Ocean. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most well-known of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, was appointed as the first official United States ambassador to France in 1776, and then appointed to return there for a second period from 1779-1785. His prestige as a scientist and American founding father instantly turned him into a star among the aristocratic and philosophical circles of France. Benjamin Franklin was succeeded at the United States embassy in France by Thomas Jefferson, known at the time for his role as principal author of the American constitution.

The influence of the Americans wasn’t just limited to the upper classes — Benjamin Franklin had the American constitution translated into French and printed in bulk to be distributed throughout all of Paris. Despite that, the Declaration of Independence wasn’t authorized by the French state. Franklin, wanting to spread the words of this text too, secretly had the declaration translated into French and distributed around France. The preamble of this translated text resonated against the background of the absolute monarchy that ruled over the French People:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Economic Struggles

In 1770, right after the end of Louis XV’s reign as king, the nation found itself faced with a crisis; the costs of the Seven Years’ War were piling up while financial growth was stagnating.

We often take it for granted that governments have some amount of money to spend, and that there are collective decision makers that create some kind of budget to follow. This wasn’t the case in France prior to the revolution.

Rather than committees, public comments, community input, or even soviet central planning groups, the financial system here was relatively simple: the king spends however much he wants on whatever he wants. After the king made a financial decision, the role of the bureaucracy was to keep the receipts.

There were no fiscal years or quarterly reports either. Instead, the accounts would just overlap and conflict over time, and the controller-general would try to guess how much money was left until they went broke. No one had the ability to check how much was left in the account, so they would only get confirmation of their estimates in the event that they completely ran out of money.

Along with the lack of organization and oversight, there were also problems on the income side of the budget. The vast majority of wealth was concentrated in the hands of the elites: the senior clergy and high nobility. Despite that, there were tax exemptions for a few groups of people. Whether through explicit laws, lack of oversight, or corruption, the small group of people who paid the least amount of taxes were those who were already rich and powerful to begin with. Some localities tried to make up for this through indirect taxes, such as raising prices on goods. This led to widely varying prices across the nation. In one instance, one pound of salt could cost anywhere from half a sou to thirteen sous. This created a thriving black market of salt smugglers, which in turn led to squads of gabelous being paid to hunt down those smugglers. The smugglers who were caught were of course sentenced to execution on the galley.

Louis XVI didn’t fare much better than his predecessor. With our historical knowledge, we know that the state’s debt would triple during his fifteen-year reign as king. In the early days of his regime, however, there was clear unrest.

When the financial crisis prompted the convening of an Estates-General, in which representatives of the people would raise new taxes, the king wasn’t willing to cooperate with the procedures. The king tried to establish a new tax on registrations for newspapers and posters, and the assembly responded by rejecting this tax and deeming it illegal. The king responded by exiling every single person in the assembly to Troyes.

The public outrage in response to this abuse of power created a popular movement in solidarity with Paris. The people revolted, and the King eventually had to give up. The new tax was withdrawn.

In 1789, demonstrators faced off against the military-police force. Protestors blocked off streets, stormed city gates, and even locally imprisoned the intendants in response to repression. Some demonstrators climbed up to the rooftops of their cities in order to throw rocks, bricks, or whatever else they felt like throwing at the military. There are even multiple reports of women seizing control over church bells in order to send warning alarms to the city.

When Is It Revolution?

Despite the unease, the crises, the disorder, and all of the conflict of this point in time, there wasn’t quite a sense of “revolution” to be found in the popular understanding. Rather than some sense of a definite start, goal, and end of a specified revolution, it makes more sense to think of the revolution as something that the revolutionaries didn’t realize they were in until they were already committed.

The Enlightenment philosophers and their ideas on liberty, social contracts, democracy, and other anti-establishment viewpoints would go on to fuel the flames of the revolution. Until that point, however, the glimpses we find of the revolution can be found in the material conditions the common French people lived within, and their reactions to the worsening of those conditions. After all, peasants didn’t need to read Rousseau to realize that their landlords were exploiting them.

Thanks for reading! This is part 1 in a series on the French Revolution.

Main source: A People’s History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan.

Looking back on some of the pivotal shifts in power and social relations in history can give us a better understand of the situation we find ourselves in today, and where we might try to go in the future. In the following posts, I hope to answer the following questions:

1. What reasons, if any, did people have for turning to revolution over any other methods of political change?

2. What caused ordinary people to support political violence, such as direct action against the state or the infamous September Massacres?

3. How should we think of the French Revolution today? Should we embrace the values of the revolutionaries of that era, or do we need to consider a new approach?

The Realm of Facts

Morality is a nebulous concept, especially so in a situation like this. If we hope to convince a plutonium-wielding villain to voluntarily choose not to subject our lovable beagles to a radioactive breakfast, there are a few ways we could go about doing so. First, we can try to rely on the objective facts we can perceive in our environment.

1. Beagles do not like eating plutonium

2. Plutonium is bad for the health of beagles

3. Most beagles do not eat plutonium

These statements can be a first line of defense because they’re things that we can assume everyone mutually agrees on. However, the downside is that they lack the power to actually change anything. Regardless of whether or not plutonium is bad for beagles, the villain has their own desires which override the raw facts of the situation. For example, take Case A: “it is both the case that plutonium is bad for beagles and that I want to feed plutonium to beagles.” Or, Case B: “it is both the case that plutonium is good for beagles and that I want to feed plutonium to beagles.” In either case, someone can only be swayed to change their behavior insofar as their personal sentiments lead them to care about the various facts of the case. Someone might have a sentiment that leads them to consider the nutritional/health value of what they feed to a dog, but that doesn’t prevent someone else from simply not caring.

The Realm of Sentiments

So, maybe we should instead appeal to the selfish desires of the plutonium-wielding villain. If it’s really just their sentiments in play, we can try to convince them that they will personally suffer in some way if they go through with their plot.

1. You’ll have to wield plutonium in order to feed it to the beagles, and wielding plutonium is always bad for your health

2. If you feed plutonium to these beagles, other beagles might take note and gang up against you in the future

3. Plutonium is really expensive, so you could choose to sell it and spend that money on something more fun

This seems to have more of a bite to it — we can see how these types of statements can persuade people. Despite that, there are a few clear flaws. First, there’s still a similar problem to the one we encountered in the earlier case: what if they just don’t care? You can say that plutonium is expensive, but what if they don’t care about money as much as they care about their nuclear plot? You can say that it’s bad for their health, but what if they don’t care about their own health?

Furthermore, there’s somewhat of a surface level problem: doesn’t it feel weird to solve a moral situation in purely self-interested terms? We, as beagle-lovers, are likely against the plutonium plot because of an intuitive sense of wrongness. While it may be pragmatic to do whatever it takes to save the beagles, even if it means appealing to the selfish nature of the villain, there’s a sense in which it feels wrong to even put the issue in terms of things like personal finances or someone’s desire to protect themselves. We might think that we shouldn’t even have to be making this argument. So, what’s left?

The Realm of Objective Morality

If we wish to truly solve the situation in a satisfying manner, the best we could hope for is appealing to an objective form of morality. In this case, we aren’t just saying that it would be unsafe, inconvenient, or so on to go through with the plutonium plot. The moral claim is stronger, saying that even if it’s the case that the villain really wants to go through with it, they should be able to rationally understand that it would be wrong to do so. There are various ways to go about this:

1. God has chosen to make it wrong to feed plutonium to beagles, and God’s moral command is absolute

2. You must not treat others in a way that you would not wish to be treated. Therefore, if you would not want a beagle to feed plutonium to you, you must not feed plutonium to the beagle

3. It is categorically wrong to treat any rational being as a mere means to your own ends. Beagles are rational, and it is therefore wrong to use them as a means in the end of your plutonium plot2

This type of statement goes beyond an appeal to emotions, circumstances, preferences, and so on. If we can establish some sort of universal moral law, then one can prove that certain acts are moral or immoral. Maybe they disagree, but if we say something is objectively wrong, we are saying that it doesn’t matter if anyone disagrees. However, we still run into the same problem we’ve seen again and again: what if they just don’t care?

We can think of this issue in terms of a spectrum. On one end you have people that don’t give any moral consideration to beagles, and on the other side you have people that give every moral consideration to them. We could imagine that there’s some point on that line where someone has just enough care for beagles that they are forced to reckon with any moral arguments. Maybe they don’t care enough to actually change their behavior, but someone with any amount of a sense of care would have to at least give the beagles some type of consideration. So the question then becomes, what do we do about everyone below the caring threshold?

I see three broad options: convincing them, ignoring them, or punishing them. The first is the most idealistic, and perhaps the least likely to happen in real life. Maybe we could show them some amount of facts, or sway their hearts with poems, or make them read Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights3. If that doesn’t work, we could be forced to try to ignore them. You might see this with the language of compromise: “let’s just agree to disagree”, “that’s just my opinion”, or “it’s okay if you choose to do that, but I won’t support it”. But if we truly think that it’s not just personally disagreeable, but wrong to feed plutonium to dogs, can we really choose to ignore them? Moral claims are strong for a reason: if we truly think something is wrong, then it would be weird to just act as if nothing is wrong.

This leaves us with one option: punishing them, or otherwise intervening ourselves to save the beagles. Maybe you build up a society and make a legal system that has laws that put people in prison if they feed plutonium to beagles. Maybe you enforce your belief through the use of cultural norms and social punishment: only weird sickos would feed plutonium to a beagle, so we should banish anyone who does so from our society. Maybe we take direct action and use force to pry the beagles away from the villain. In a way this solves the problem, but it’s still somewhat unsatisfying. Sure, we were able to save the beagles, but how do we argue that our morality is objectively true while the other person’s isn’t?

The Realm Beyond Ethics

Each of the example arguments so far exists within the realm of ethics: the study of moral phenomenon. The whole conversation about beagles and plutonium is argued through moral claims and arguments: “is it wrong to do X?”, “In what cases is it permissible to do Y?”

I’d argue that in trying to solve the issue of plutonium and dogs (or any specific moral claim), we miss a large part of the conversation entirely. This is where metaethics comes in.

Roughly speaking, we can divide the types of questions we can ask about moral debates into two camps. There are first order questions, which might ask which party is in the right and why. Then, there are second order question which ask what the parties are doing when they engage in the debate4. Here are some examples of metaethical questions:

1. Can moral statements be true or false in the same way as factual statements?

2. What type of psychological state does a moral statement express?

3. Do moral judgments necessarily require a motivation to act as that judgment prescribes?

Because these sorts of questions are so abstract, they tend to be unconsciously ignored during moral conversations. When we engage in a question of moral disagreements, we tend to jump to throwing facts at each other, hoping that if the other person just learns this one thing, they’ll realize they were in the wrong and have a change of heart. But I’d argue that this often misses a step. Before we even argue about the facts of the situation, we should ask ourselves: what does it even mean to say that something is wrong? Otherwise, we run the risk that we both agree on the statement “X is wrong” even though we mean completely different and contradictory things.

I’d argue that a large part of the confusion surrounding moral debate is because of a faulty assumption: that moral statements express beliefs. It makes intuitive sense that saying “X is wrong” expresses a belief in the fact that X is indeed wrong, and that we can evaluate such statements in terms of true and false. So why would someone possibly argue that saying “X is wrong” doesn’t express any beliefs, and that it can’t even be true or false? That question is best left for a future post.

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Knowing this, the player walks over to the cashier and the employee asks them to hand their tickets over. We know that the player benefits because of the prizes, but why does Dave and Busters even want these tickets? Aren’t they the ones that printed them? What are they even going to spend it on? If Dave really wanted 1000 tickets that badly, couldn’t he just ask Buster to print a thousand more?

Ignoring the financial aspect of attracting people to the establishment, it really doesn’t matter how many tickets they have stored away in the back rooms. The reason they require you to spend tickets is so that you need to earn more. The gifts are there to create demand for tickets, not the other way around.

The Right to Print Money

If we think of Dave and Buster’s as a government, we’d call them a monetary sovereign - an entity that issues its own currency. The United States is in that exact position: we can print as much money as we want.

One important feature of a monetary sovereign is that they have an exclusive right to create and issue their currency. For example, the United States issues the Dollar, the United Kingdom issues the Pound, and Japan issues the Yen. If anyone else tries to print their own versions of those currencies, the nations in charge will retaliate with criminal charges. (Does anyone know how Dave and Busters deals with counterfeit tickets?)

Not every nation, however, is a monetary sovereign. Any of the 21 countries in the eurozone use the euro, so no single country in that agreement can choose to print more of their own currency at will. Other nations in this group include those that peg their currency to another nation’s — for example, the U.S. dollar is used in Ecuador and Panama.

Another limiting factor is when a country decides to guarantee an exchange rate for some kind of real life object. The United States used to constrain spending through the gold standard, which allowed dollars to be redeemed for a set amount of gold. Ever since the gold standard ended in 1971 under Nixon, we no longer have that guardrail in place.

If we no longer have the gold standard limiting us, what do we really mean when we say that we “can’t afford” something?

The Government as a Household

To build an understanding of how the government budget works, I’ll present what I take to be the “common sense” view of how the United States spends money:

1. The government wants to do something

2. They figure out how much it’s going to cost

3. They raise that amount of money through taxes and borrowing

4. They use that money to do the thing they wanted

This means that the government has two ways to do anything, neither of which sounds appealing: either we (the people) have to give up more of our hard-earned cash, or we have to run the government at a deficit by borrowing money from Wall Street or China. Our spending capabilities, therefore, are just like those of a household: we have to get the money from somewhere (like a job or a credit card) and make sure our checkbook is balanced in order to keep our finances tidy and in order.

This makes sense at first glance. After all, we’ve been conditioned through decades of rhetoric surrounding “balanced budgets” and “deficit hawks” to believe that government spending (except for our military) is either irresponsible or deeply unfair. That being said, there is one crucial hole in this household analogy: households aren’t allowed to print money.

The Government as a Government

Although analogies can be useful, they can also be misleading if we don’t understand the ways they do and don’t map on to real life. In terms of budgeting, it’s more useful to view monetarily sovereign countries like the United States as something more like a bank in Monopoly or the house in a casino. Real-life households have obligations that require them to obtain dollars from someone else, whether it’s their boss or the bank. They need those dollars to pay for food at the grocery store, property taxes on their house, fees and registrations for things like driving or operating a business, among most other parts of life to some extent.

The United States doesn’t need to do any of that. If there’s some massive expense that needs paying, the government doesn’t need to run around begging people for work or a loan. The government controls the means to bring more money into existence at any time it wants (whether physical minted or digitally transferred).

So, if the government doesn’t need to actually take our money before spending, what are taxes really doing? Rather than thinking about cash moving hands from a person, to a government, to a recipient, it’s more accurate to think about taxes as not transferring money at all. Instead, the analogy fits better if we think of cash moving from one person’s hands into a giant shredder. When money is taxed away, it’s essentially taken away from the economy — each dollar taxed is a dollar not spent on groceries, hospital bills, or mega-yachts.

Beyond taxes, understanding the United States as a monetary sovereign changes our conception of government deficits and debt. Whenever the government spends more in its budget than it decides to collect in taxes, we refer to it as running a deficit. While this conjures to mind images of being deficient in something/not having enough, all that it really means is that there’s more money flowing out of the government to us than the other way around.

Furthermore, the word “deficit” is often used interchangeably with the government “debt”. While the deficit represents the total flow of spending from the public to the private sector, the debt is the running total of all of those budgets from across the years. Therefore, we can understand the debt as the result of deficits over time.

This conversation is also made more confusing when people describe government bonds in the same language as the budgetary debt. This is reflected in how people describe the process of buying bonds: we often describe this process as the government “borrowing” money from the people. The traditional logic is that the government wants to spend money, but doesn’t have enough and doesn’t want to raise taxes. Therefore, in order to spend money on social programs, the military, and so on, the government has to beg for people’s money on a promise that they’ll be paid back with interest. With the Dave and Buster’s analogy, this would be like thinking that the establishment ran out of tickets and couldn’t afford to run their games unless they could borrow tickets from the nearby players (or nefarious ticket lenders from overseas).

So, if the United States government is a monetary sovereign (it can print its own currency) why would they ever need to borrow dollars? Rather than borrowing, we should instead think of the bonds system as a service offered to promote saving money. If we’re looking at the spending process in order, it would look as such: the government budget runs a deficit, the government spends money on programs, then money enters the economy to operate those programs. Once money enters the economy, it finds itself in the hands of people who want somewhere safe to save those dollars. The government offers bonds as a way to guarantee access to one’s money in the future. The interest rates come as a result of political/fiscal goals, whether it’s slowing down spending or encouraging saving.

We Can Always Pay for Anything

One of the roadblocks familiar to anyone who’s ever been in favor of the government spending money on anything is a question so commonplace that it operates less as a question and more as a universal rebuttal: how are we going to pay for it? The common sense here is that the government has a limited amount of dollars in its vault, so we need to go find money out there. While this logic makes sense when you’re buying something expensive for yourself, we again run into the core of the problem: you can’t print your own dollars. This focus on financial constraints not only limits our political imaginations, but deflects attention from the real, material costs that government programs actually run into.

Instead of this, the question we should be asking is this: do we have the resources? This brings our attention to the real costs and deficits we need to solve. Are there enough willing workers available to run the program? Do we have the technical capacities to achieve this? Do we have the materials and expert knowledge required in this field? What’s required to make sure this program is environmentally sustainable? Money is almost inconsequential in the broader considerations required for responsible and effective spending policies. Monetary sovereigns can always print more bills or create more money with a few keystrokes on a spreadsheet. The people, material, and infrastructures have real needs and costs. We can raise all of the money we want for a government project, but that money has nowhere to go without the real, material conditions outside the financial sphere.

This, however, doesn’t mean that money can be spent infinitely on anything for no good reason. Rather than giving us a free ticket to be financially irresponsible, recognition of these facts requires us to challenge the notion that reducing government spending is always responsible. By understanding the real constraints at play, a true responsibility goes beyond the financial constraints we naively inherited from the gold standard system. If our spending isn’t constrained by how many bars of gold we have buried underground in a vault, then our spending instead needs to be constrained by our own ability to analyze and deal with the real-life consequences of government policy.

The one guardrail that we need to be worried about is inflation. If the government prints money without removing a corresponding amount from the economy, then each individual dollar will have a lesser claim to the totality of goods and services that can be purchased with dollars. This can present real challenges to people if not adequately dealt with. For example, increased prices on certain goods like housing, food, and medical care can cause severe harm and even death if not accompanied by increased wages, social safety nets, and so on.

Thankfully, we already have the perfect tool to deal with inflation: taxes. Since the U.S. government doesn’t have a limited stock of dollars, it’s misleading to describe taxation as a process of collecting money for spending. Instead, it’s more accurate to say that taxed dollars are removed from the economy. If inflation is the result of an increased supply of dollars pursuing an unchanging stock of resources, we can counter inflation by just reducing the supply of dollars. We can think of inflation as something like a speed limit: spending too much money too fast has a risk of excess inflation, so limiting inflation through taxation keeps our economy safe.

With this view, taxation is no longer a system of the government taking money from people in order to spend it. Instead, taxation is like a society-wide agreement to all throw a portion of our dollars into the giant shredder in order to create space for the government to operate without risking excessive inflation.

What Becomes Possible?

The obvious application of this is for some of the well known social-democratic policies that have been popularized by people like Bernie Sanders and the Justice Democrats. Medicare For All and a Green New Deal are good examples. Progress on these has largely been denied by Republicans and moderate Democrats under the guise of financial responsibility. They claim that we simply don’t have enough money to do these things, even if the goals are noble. I would argue that the opposite is true: we can’t afford not to spend this money. If we look from a purely financial standpoint, there are cost savings associated with both of these policies that have been empirically demonstrated for a long time, but I think these points (while important) somewhat miss the point. If we have the people required to do the labor, the time, the knowledge, and the resources, the financial price tag need not apply. The only thing required beyond that point is the political will to bring these projects from concept to reality.

Furthermore, economists in the school of thought of Modern Monetary Theory often propose a solution to the problem of unemployment: a federal jobs guarantee. Unemployment is a condition created by capitalist market systems in which a person wishes to have a job, but does not have access to one. Their solution is to guarantee a job with a livable wage to anyone who asks. Imagine being able to walk into a federal employment office and leaving the same day with a well-paying job suited to your personal abilities, desires, and interests! First, this would be a way to create jobs which are socially desirable or necessary that might not be profitable in the private market. For example, caretaking, environmental preservation, and teaching are roles in which there isn’t much short-term market value generated. However, we can still have willing people provide these valuable services if we democratically agreed that such work was worth having in our society.

A federal jobs guarantee would reduce the power that employers have to abuse their workers. Unsafe working conditions, wage theft, and low pay are all taken as givens for the majority of the American working class since it’s often seen as nearly impossible to quit one’s job without suffering a massive financial burden. If employment at a decent wage were guaranteed, employers would actually be required to treat their workers with some amount of dignity rather than relying on keeping them captive with their reliance on wages and health insurance.

Conclusion

Our political imagination has long been captured by the neoliberal compromise. Republicans like Reagan and Bush and Democrats like Clinton and Obama have operated under the same core assumptions for decades: we have a limited supply of money to spend, and spending more than we collect is therefore inherently irresponsible. In order to respond to the enormous problems we face today, we cannot continue to abide by a false understanding of our true capabilities to respond to those challenges. To be properly equipped for the future, any political movement that hopes to harness the power of the federal government will need to adapt to the realities of today’s political economy or else risk being left behind with the gold standard.

“What’s wrong with you? You want me to break your camera?”

“Get away from me with the camera. Dude, I’ll take it, I’ll get up and take it and smash it. Get away from me. Don’t make me get up.”

“Is he with you? Did you ask for permission guy? Why are you taking photographs? (…) We’ve got some mute creep, taking pictures, stalking people.”

“Can you not take pictures of us?” “Yeah, like that’s kinda stalker-ish.”

“You’re scaring my customers, they think you’re taking pictures of them.”

“We’ve got a… photographer?” “I don’t know who this guy is.” “Hello? Why don’t you answer him? Hello? Hello! Do you talk? Do. You. Talk.”

The Panopticon

In the late 18th century, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a revolutionary new type of prison. While prior models enforced the rules of the prison with patrols to periodically check on the prisoners, Bentham’s new idea would force prisoners to act on their best behavior without the need to move. Bentham’s panopticon was imagined as having a circular design, with a tall guard tower in the center and the holding cells surrounding it. Such a design would allow for an inspector in the tower to observe any inmate they wished without having to move. Furthermore, the vantage point meant that all of the inmates would constantly face the tower without being able to see the guards. His plan even included “conversation tubes” which would allow inspectors to remotely communicate with the individual inmates in any cell.

Therefore, Bentham believed, the uncertainty of always being watchable while never knowing if one is being watched would incentivize prisoners to regulate their own behaviors and ultimately improve themselves. This plan was meant to control and shape the minds of prisoners rather than just retaining physical control over their bodies. In Bentham’s mind, such a system embodied his progressive ideals for social reform — he genuinely hoped that the panopticon would allow prisoners to improve their behavior on their own without being subject to the harsh violence of traditional prisons.

While some people might have heard of the panopticon or have even witnessed the construction of similar prisons, there are a few parts of Bentham’s plan that aren’t brought up as often. First, the prisoners in his imagined building weren’t just held to some standard of good behavior or kindness. Rather, the prisoners were also to be workers. The purpose of the watchtower was to keep the prisoners working at all times. Inmates would be assigned manual labor tasks, and they knew that if they stopped working they could be spotted and punished at any time. He imagined that the constant fear of punishment would cause prisoners to self-discipline themselves into completing their tasks.

Second, the scope of the panopticon went far beyond prisoners. Bentham hoped that the success of his prison model would demonstrate the benefits of constant surveillance. Such surveillance could be done in factories, schools, and in public spaces to prevent deviancy.

Flock and the New Surveillance

In 2017, American security manufacturer Flock Group Inc. began a business of selling surveillance. Whereas security cameras weren’t anything new, Flock innovated by creating a network of automated license plate readers (ALPR). Flock opened its doors to anyone who wanted to buy into their promise of safety and security — law enforcement agencies (at all levels), neighborhood associations, business owners, or anyone willing to pay could have Flock cameras installed. Recently, U.S. Border Patrol, Customers and Border Protection, and the Drug Enforcement Agency have started putting up similar ALPR cameras near highways by the border while disguising them as traffic cones or barrels.

In addition to their claim of scanning over 20 billion vehicles each month, Flock has pushed to increase their audio surveillance capacity. Flock has integrated “gunshot detection” microphones to listen for “human distress” (particularly trained to pick up human screams).

Police officers have used the data obtained through their Flock surveillance systems for what they do best: suppressing protesters (like the No Kings rallies), prosecuting activists (as with the animal rights activists at Direct Action Everywhere), and stalking their exes (this has happened multiple times).

Surveillance Camera Man

But you don’t need to be a corporation to surveil.

Some time in the early 2010s, an anonymous man in his 20s started posting videos in which he would walk around Seattle and simply point a camera at people. He wasn’t there to interview them, he wasn’t filming for a documentary — all he did was watch. He would walk into stores, restaurants, and classrooms as if nothing was wrong or out of the ordinary and just stand there, filming silently. Reactions vary from nervous laughter to violent threats, the one-way confrontations consist of a series of increasingly explicit outbursts and confused questioning.

We often tend to mentally dismiss cameras, audio recorders, and other forms of surveillance as long as we see ourselves as being in the public. We have areas of our lives (both physical and metaphorically) that we consider to be ours. We can share our private life if we wish, but no one else has privileged access to it. By defining a realm of our private life, we leave all other aspects of our lives public. We accept some level of loss of privacy when we enter the public — in a perfect world, all for some kind of common good: safety, happiness, and so on.

The reactions in the Surveillance Camera Man videos show how volatile and subjective the private/public distinction is. Regardless of if we’re on a sidewalk, in a public park, or inside a public establishment, we’re uncomfortable at the idea of someone filming us for no clear reason. Even in public, with all of the ways we voluntarily give up our privacy, the mere presence of a man with a camera pointed at us feels like an invasion of our personal lives.

While we might have social norms that hold up this distinction between private and public life, the relentless force of capital doesn’t see a difference. These lines are distorted not just as a result of drifting over time, but are now intentionally broken down in the pursuit of profit. In the workplace, we’re pressured into spending as many hours in the office as possible — our “work-life balance” can come from the ping pong table and an occasional day off. At home, the workplace isn’t gone. Instead, we’re expected to juggle unfinished tasks and urgent emails alongside our personal responsibilities. Even if we miraculously come up with some kind of free time, market pressures push us to make more money through a second job or “side hustle” or improve our employability through some form of training or education.

If our bodies and minds are already captured, our emotions aren’t safe either. Our mental health is largely defined by how well we can function within the existing social order. Our mental state, therefore, is only considered healthy insofar as it allows us to be perceived as a productive member of society. The GDP prefers a workaholic insomniac who can work all day and night over any other person who decides to devote any amount of time in their lives to their own interests, desires, and joys.

Bentham imagined prisoners never knowing if they were being watched. The mere fear of being caught deviating from protocol would prevent the need for actual punishment. Today, we know that we’re being watched and listened to 24/7, and we act in the same way. We police ourselves, avoiding social punishment by staying productive and within the narrow boundaries of what’s acceptable. We are the guard, the prisoner, and the structure in which they’re held.

These seem like opposite strategies, but they arose under the same economic moment. Post-2008 conditions - employment stagnation, low interest rates, and surplus capital seeking higher returns - created the environment in which these companies can exist. What can their diverging paths tell us about the future of 21st century capitalism?

Companies like Uber and Google aren’t anomalies - they represent a more fundamental shift. Traditional economic categories no longer suffice, so they represent a genuinely novel development. Rather than a curiosity, this new model is becoming the dominant form of contemporary capitalism. Political theorist and economist Nick Srnicek has observed these trends and given a name to this new form: the platform.

Crisis Conditions

During times of crisis, capitalism has a tendency to restructure itself around new technologies and forms of organization. In order to continue market growth, capitalism creates demand for new technology that can increase the profitability of a given firm against its competitors. Srnicek argues that there are three moments in the recent history of capitalism that have set the stage for today’s digital economy: the global profitability crisis of the 1970s, the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, and the financial crisis of 2008.

More specifically, the governmental response to these crises created the economic conditions that were necessary for the rise of platforms as we see them today. First, low interest rates were introduced to encourage investment and growth as a means of recovery following the 2008 market crash. One major effect of this was that surplus capital from wealthy people and institutions was funneled away from government bonds and savings accounts as investors turned towards speculative investments in pursuit of higher growth. Despite any of this potential for growth, however, job growth has remained largely stagnant outside of low-paying service jobs and unstable, independently contracted “gigs.” The stagnation of wages has forced many people into self-employment, where workers can “be their own boss” while still relying on large corporations for their paychecks.

Furthermore, Congress has been unwilling to use their powers to aid economic recovery efforts. Fiscal stimulus has been politically unpopular as both Democratic and Republican strategies have been centered around neoliberal austerity and fears of inflation. This has put the job of managing the health of the economy on the Federal Reserve and Central Bank, which have largely responded with a loosening of monetary policy. We’ve seen this manifest in the forms of historically low interest rates and the implementation of quantitative easing (in which a central bank buys up government bonds and other securities to inject more money into the economy). These monetary policies created a combination of excess corporate cash holdings and low returns in savings accounts and bonds, which resulted in large investments in speculative technology start-ups as an attempt to pursue higher profit margins.

It was in this environment - hungry for growth, flush with capital, and searching for new frontiers - that a particular kind of firm began to emerge.

Platforms as a Response

Many attempts have been made in the effort to come up with a name for the newest evolution of capitalism: the gig economy, the on-demand economy, the surveillance economy, etc. Although these terms all describe distinct phenomena, they all point to the same underlying economic shifts. Srnicek opts to examine these changes by focusing on the dominant organizational forms that present-day firms take.

Platforms weren’t the result of random luck and technological breakthroughs. Rather, they emerged as a direct response to the particular internal needs of companies. As more parts of the economy started to shift into the digital realm, the amount of data that became available for analysis began to increase at a faster rate than traditional business models could handle. As the models of Fordist factories and production lines weren’t able to process data at high speeds, platforms took shape as a response to rapid influx of new data. So, what mechanics allowed platforms to keep up while other firms fell behind?

Core Mechanics

Srnicek argues that at their core, platforms are all about extracting data as a raw material. Much like the raw materials of the industrial world, such as oil and minerals, data alone isn’t of much use to anyone. In order to harness the power of oil, the infrastructure of oil rigs, pipelines, and processing plants were created. So while the behaviors of users on a digital platform might generate massive amounts of data, the real value in a platform comes in its ability to analyze and translate that data into valuable insights for their clients. For example, Google doesn’t give all of the raw data they’ve collected from users to their advertising partners. Instead, they internally process that data into insights about users’ lives. Then, advertisers pay Google knowing that the ad network will show their advertising to the most receptive potential customers possible.

In order to help them extract data at a large scale, platforms position themselves as intermediaries that facilitate interactions between users. Placing themselves in this position then gives them privileged access to every user interaction, therefore enabling them to collect, process, and analyze their data as efficiently as possible.

Another defining feature of platforms is their reliance on the network effect. This takes place when having more users on a platform makes the platform more valuable for every other user. For example, Facebook uses a proprietary algorithm to match people with other users that they are likely to know or be related to. The biggest reason that people are drawn to Facebook instead of other websites that could do a functionally identical service is simple: everyone else is already on Facebook. Combined with the increased accumulation of data that comes with new users, the network effect creates a powerful reinforcing feedback loop towards further growth of the platform. In the context of capitalism, the monopolization that we see in giant tech companies isn’t just a product of greedy CEOs and consumer choices. Rather, the tendency towards monopoly is built in to the DNA of the platform model. As platforms grow larger and larger, their dominance over user data makes it ever more impossible for business competitors to arise.

The network effect also gives rise to another behavior that’s appeared puzzling through the lens of traditional business logic. To get more users and generate more extractable data, platforms often make services free (or at least very cheap) even at a cost to their profit margins. While profitability used to be the ultimate metric of business success, we’ve seen a rise of giant companies like Uber and AirB&B that are willing to remain unprofitable for a long period of time in hopes that they’ll gain a monopoly over their respective markets in the long run. In a process known as cross-subsidization, firms will often have multiple branches that aim to generate profits to subsidize the losses of giving some of their services out for free. For example, we’ve seen companies like Amazon and Google branch out into cloud computing as a way to subsidize their unprofitable programs like Amazon Prime and Google Drive.

The Taxonomy of the Platform

Srnicek categorizes the different types of platforms by looking at what data they use and how they profit from it. According to this framework, we can identify five unique groups: advertising, products, cloud, industrial, and lean platforms.

Advertising Platforms

By their nature, these platforms tend to be the most stable and easily recognizable out of the five categories. Companies like Facebook and Google provide “free” services such as social media, email addresses, or video streaming. This positioning gives them the ability to collect data generated by user behaviors. These behaviors can take the form of anything that the company is capable of tracking and storing as data. Some examples include everything you click on, every account you interact with, and how long you spend watching a video before turning it off. Once the companies collect massive amounts of this data, they’re able to construct detailed profiles of every user. Given the quantity of data, they’re often able to predict anything about you, from your age and gender to your passions and political beliefs.

Contrary to what we might initially assume, advertising platforms tend not to profit by selling our data to advertisers. Rather, they profit by selling a promise to the advertisers themselves: that they’ll find the most receptive customer possible for every ad. We can therefore see that they are materially motivated to collect as much data about you as possible to be of the most value to the advertisers. We see this take the form of ever increasing behavioral data collection in brand new domains: smart health devices (like fitness tracking watches and Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitors), smart home devices (like 24/7 recordings from doorbell cameras and baby monitors), and smart TVs (which means that they’re allowed to remotely send images of every single thing you watch to their servers).

Product Platforms

Product platforms extract data in the form of transactions and sales. Companies like Amazon and eBay provide a digital hub where consumers can search for virtually any item they want from an endless catalogue of sellers. Being the intermediaries between the buyers and sellers, these companies can leverage their knowledge of exactly how much customers from all around the world are willing to pay for any given item.

Cloud Platforms

This type of platform extracts data through the providing of digital infrastructure to other businesses. Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure are examples of this, where they provide computation power, data storage, web hosting, and other services to anyone that’ll pay them. This is appealing to other businesses, because it means that they can pay for stable and expandable tools instead of having to build a solution to every technological need in-house. Cloud platforms profit by collecting data from all of the activity on their platforms, as well as collecting rent on the servers and processors they run.

Industrial Platforms

Industrial platforms extract data through manufacturing processes. These types of platforms aren’t as commonly recognized, since individual consumers don’t tend to interact with them as much as corporations. Examples include companies like GE and Siemens, which rent out or sell things like engines and factory parts for production and manufacturing businesses. They can then make a profit by locking those businesses into a sort of “ecosystem,” where parts from one company are incompatible with those from another company. This can also extend into providing servicing and maintenance for those industrial parts, which further incentivizes un-repairability and creates a need for platform-specialized service workers.

Lean Platforms

Lean platforms are a relatively new form that we’ve seen emerge in companies like Uber, DoorDash, and AirB&B. These types of platforms are somewhat unique among the others due to the fact that they tend to derive profits not from significant data usage, but through labor intermediation. In the case of Uber, the platform connects riders to drivers while the actual service is carried out largely without interaction from the platform. The idea of paying someone to drive you somewhere is not too different from a taxi, but the main difference is that Uber gets to decide how much each trip will cost, how much the driver will be paid for the trip, which drivers to match with each rider, and so on. These platforms are “lean” in the sense that they aim to reduce their own participation as much as possible while slashing all possible costs. Uber can label their drivers as “independent contractors” rather than employees, and can use their position of control to force drivers to pay for their own gas, repairs, cleaning costs, health insurance, car insurance, and so on.

Despite their seemingly massive rise, lean platforms have so far been largely unprofitable. Their ability to capture markets has mostly been a result of surplus capital seeking start-ups for high growth potential, and easy access to low-interest corporate debt.

Combined Platforms

We’ve also seen an increase in the number of firms willing to combine aspects of multiple types of platforms under one corporate umbrella. For example, Amazon is largely thought of along the lines of the product platform, yet a bulk of their profits tend to come from Amazon Web Services, their cloud platform wing. As the capitalist demand for profit creates a corresponding demand for increasing amounts of data, it’s natural that large firms will attempt to expand their platforms into new areas.

Srnicek’s framework gives us a powerful tool to understand the convoluted worlds of technology and capitalism. Yet, there are still some questions that I think should remain up for debate - and some ways that pushing past the framework can reveal even more about how platforms work.

What Data Tells Us About Capitalism

Data as Oil

Srnicek’s framework gives us a powerful tool to understand the convoluted worlds of technology and capitalism. Yet, there are still some questions that I think should remain up for debate.

First, we should examine Srnicek’s assertion that we should think about data as a natural resource like oil. There are a few strong points in favor of this metaphor. If we think of the capturing of data through platforms, we can draw a strong parallel to the ways in which oil and other natural resources are extracted.

In the case of digital platforms, data exists in small pockets out in the world — in the form of users. Every time a user joins a platform, a new batch of data becomes available for extraction. To make use of this data, the platform needs infrastructure that can extract, transport, and refine it into useful end-products. Much like the pumps, pipes, and plants of the oil world, user behaviors are captured, transported through fiber-optic cables, stored in server rooms, and refined through analytics into business insights.

Another similarity between data and natural resources can be found in the advantages of accumulation. Much in the same way that oil companies compete to be the first to buy (or steal) oil-rich land so that they can build their own infrastructure on it, early-movers in the digital world get their own advantages. Once they establish themselves as the dominant platform in an area, they can profit from their exclusive control over new user data. This profit then lets them reinvest into bigger databases, better algorithms, and advertising to recruit more users, which creates a natural tendency towards monopolies.

Capitalists extracting natural resources for profit will enclose and protect their territory with a threat of violence, whether it’s literal or legal. Similarly, digital platforms rely on government regulations to protect their intellectual property rights and algorithms. Furthermore, the fact that digital platforms must be run on physical servers requires a corresponding level of physical (possibly armed) security on premises.

We could even think of the natural resource status of data in terms of pollution. When the security of a platform database is compromised, we tend to see massive leaks of private user details. Things like names, addresses, financial information, and social network connections can be weaponized to harm victims of corporate data breaches, much like how oil spills and other pollution incidents cause real harm to the people nearby.

The Differences

That being said, there are clearly some ways in which data differs from natural resources. One of the most obvious is that data doesn’t deplete in the same way as a limited stock of resources. When you refine and use data, it doesn’t go away or get transformed into a new form. In fact, you can create as many copies of any dataset you want as long as you have enough digital storage.

One could argue there’s a practical limit: a finite amount of user activities can be captured, and digital storage requires Earth’s resources. But data still creates novel behaviors that finite resources don’t. You can copy a hard drive full of data to another drive — giving you two identical copies. You can’t do that with oil.

Furthermore, the massive scale of data can often create new unexpected behaviors or insights. In one form, you can combine all of the different datasets you have about one person to give you a complete picture of their life. In another, you can combine endless amounts of data in the form of books, wikis, internet posts, and so-on to create the large language models (LLMs) that power things like ChatGPT. We could say that we have a similar effect with natural resources, in that you can combine larger amounts of it to create new behaviors. While one drop of oil won’t be very useful, a huge tank of oil can power an engine that moves a vehicle. Despite that, the way that data can be extracted from so many sources and turned into a wide variety of new forms intuitively seems to be on a more complex level.

Another difference is that data doesn’t seem to be out there in the same way that some like oil or wood is. There’s a physical space where that substance would exist regardless of whether or not anyone was trying to extract it and make use of it. We can’t say the same of data. While we might have natural behaviors, those behaviors don’t get transformed into data unless there’s someone actively collecting it. In that sense we might try to conceive of behaviors as the “raw material” that must exist prior to the creation of any data. However, we run into issues when we see the ways in which data can influence and reshape our behaviors. The idea of the online trend shows this perfect: when someone is able to present data showing that a lot of people are doing the same behavior, other people might react to that data by engaging in that same thing. Data is also often collected in a motivated manner - if someone wants to prove that their thing is the best out of all of the things, they might look for reviews or focus-groups or usage rates that can enforce their narrative.

On Natural Resources

While some of the differences between data and previously existing natural resources might seem to point to the inherent properties of data being new and novel, we should also look at it from the other direction: what does data tell us about the existence and use of natural resources?

Artificial Scarcity

First, the scarcity condition of a natural resource is one of the prerequisites of being able to make a profit off of them. Just as was the case with early forms of capitalism, platforms are constructed in a way that creates scarcity artificially. Prior to capitalism, peasants controlled their means of subsistence (in the form of farm lands) until an outside force violently enforced the private ownership of that land. Once the peasants were separated from their common control over the food they grew to survive, they were forced into a state of general market dependence in which they only had two choices: wage labor or starvation. In Capital Volume One, Marx described this process of primitive accumulation as such:

The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the laborer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage laborers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.

- Capital Volume One, Part VII

In other words, capitalism needed to separate people from their means of survival — forcing them into wage labor as the only alternative to starvation. The parallel to today is clear: just as peasants were pushed off their land, users are now pushed off their own data.

Digital platforms generate their value through the extraction and processing of user data. Clicks, posts, and messages are stored in their private databases where they can then profile their users and profit however they see fit, whether their customer is a data broker, an advertiser, or a government (e.g. the data ICE and CBP use to fuel their mass deportations). Users produce the data, yet they have no control or ownership over it. Mirroring the early capitalist mythologies of virtuous accumulators and the lazy masses, digital platforms increasingly encourage an ideology that worships capital owners over everyone else. Companies like Apple and Facebook Meta make big shows of their CEOs through keynote speeches and public stunts to convince the public that the owners are visionaries, geniuses, and trail-blazers. This worship can even be imposed on us algorithmically as Elon Musk showed us when he threatened his engineers at Twitter into boosting his own posts to rank 1000 times higher than anyone else’s.

Activity Generation

As platforms have evolved, we’ve seen that pre-existing behaviors aren’t just used as data. Rather, those behaviors are actively transformed into new forms that are easier to extract from. Every social event becomes an Instagram-able “moment” to be shared. Every bad social interaction becomes a viral video on Reddit or Facebook (the amount of death threats you get from strangers on the internet will vary heavily depending on your gender and socioeconomic status). Every night out at the bars (combined with a lack of public transportation options) becomes a necessary Uber trip or a drunk driving fine - your money is funneled to capital owners either way.

Domain Expansion

Just as is the case with oil, the limits of easily available surface-level data must be eventually be overcome to keep up with the capitalist demand for growth. As oil reserves in some areas have depleted, technology evolved in order to extract from more difficult areas - fracking to extract from deep rock formations and deep-sea drilling to move off-shore. The push for research and products to create the Internet of Things parallel those evolutions. Products like smart watches, smart TVs, health-trackers, and doorbell surveillance cameras reflect this tendency. This can also take the form of new capabilities for products you already use, like smartphones. Every new data point is a new inference about your personal profile, which means it’s profitable to track you using everything your device has to offer. Every user action, no matter how obscure or how private, is seen as open space to be captured by an algorithm. In this way, the ever-increasing capitalist demand for heavier surveillance of users echoes the “discovery” rhetoric of colonialism.

Some might wonder why we should even bother with trying to categorize data as a natural resource or otherwise. While just making these connections on it’s own won’t change anything, our conceptual understandings and framings of the things in our lives shape what’s considered to be politically possible and “realistic”. For example, if we were to conceptualize data as a mere product generated by companies, we would naturally have to center our focus on the distribution and effects of data after it’s created. If we instead think of data as something that must be extracted from our lives and then refined out of its natural state, we can better understand the ways in which data extraction itself can change our lives before it’s even processed. It’s an open question as to what solutions for data ownership, usage, and privacy will produce the best outcomes. If the current situation entails the sole ownership of data under one corporate entity that can charge rent for access, we should look to imagine and construct ways in which data can be accessed and harnessed for the common good.

Convergence and Fragmentation

One of the more puzzling aspects of platform growth are the ways in which platforms try to protect their control over data while expanding into new areas. As platforms have grown, they’ve shown a tendency to occupy very similar spaces - each company can have their own versions of social media, cloud storage, and advertising networks. One possible explanation is that they’ve all identified a limited subset of platform types and data sources that can remain profitable in the long term. Unlike the horizontal and vertical integrations and mergers of traditional business models, the ways platforms expand tend to be driven by their need to occupy key positions in data flows to remain profitable against competition. Rather than combining to create larger or more efficient unified platforms, this has mostly taken the form of every company trying to do a bit of everything.

In response to this tendency towards convergence, platforms have responded by building walled “ecosystems” through enclosure. Users get locked in through dependency and the inconvenience of switching away. Where there are alternatives, platforms make it as difficult as possible by making sure that none of your data is compatible with anything else. A lack of data portability means that any of the convenience you’ve gotten at the cost of your privacy will be lost when you try to leave the platform. Think of social media or email providers - it feels impossible to “migrate” your social connections, followers, group chats, or anywhere else. We’ve also seen this in the form of operating systems and app stores. Our digital lives increasingly rely on closed-source, proprietary software. Unlike open-source programs, where you’re free to look at all of the code that runs in the background and modify it however you like, our interactions with software are increasingly dominated by subscription models, surveillance, and incompatibility.

Looking Forward

Conceptually understanding platforms as profit-seeking firms that are built to extract, refine, and use data can help us understand what’s at stake politically and what responses might be required. While this framework can’t answer everything, it can certainly give us a more clear understanding of how platforms will respond to various interventions.

The first and most obvious strategy is through regulations and antitrust enforcement. The U.S. government could implement short-term fixes like cracking down on tax avoidance and holding companies accountable for privacy violations. Local regulations could help with lean platforms like Uber and AirB&B that exploit workers and make cities less affordable. While these are desirable and likely necessary, Srnicek argues they remain unimaginative — bandaid fixes that neglect structural conditions like network effects and tendencies toward monopoly. That said, they could raise consciousness and build political capacity. An FTC that aggressively fought platform power could bring specific wrongdoings into the public eye, and organizing around short-term demands could build coalitions for more radical demands.

Another approach involves publicly owned platforms — where the state invests in platforms that serve the public rather than capital. Run as public utilities, they could enhance our lives alongside infrastructure projects like rural internet access and sustainable electricity. This way, network effects could be harnessed for the common good instead of enriching shareholders.

The most ambitious approach is developing alternatives that overturn the current status quo. If platform mechanics could give people alternatives to market dependence and wage labor, the possibilities could be endless. Decentralized networking — like Monero, Peer-to-Peer torrents, and Tor — has shown ways to transfer information anonymously without a central authority. Newer technologies like Meshtastic and Meshcore offer off-grid communication that escapes privately owned cell towers. If scaled beyond niche hobbyist projects, we could overturn reliance on corporate-controlled communication. What if platforms could be harnessed not as a means to silo off and exploit data for oneself, but instead as a way to share art, knowledge, and the other great parts of human life that have been out of reach for the vast majority of people around the world?

I believe that Srnicek gives us the right framework. The harder question is what we do with it.

1. The Dutch Dilemma

In the 1970s, a combination of oil embargoes and broadly increasing energy costs led to a widespread energy crisis across the Western world. People were forced to accept this new reality, meaning that they would have to start paying closer attention to how much energy their households were using. One particular suburb in the outskirts of Amsterdam ran into a perplexing issue. Even though all of the houses in the area were built at the same time, with the same structure and the same materials, they noticed that some households were using one-third less electricity without needing to change their own personal behaviors. All of the households got their energy from one provider that charged identical prices, and the families living in them were relatively similar. No one could come up with an explanation for this sharp divide between high-electricity and low-electricity households.

The true difference came down to one small quirk of the construction process: some houses had electric meters displayed in the front hall, whereas others had their meters displayed in the basement. The low-electricity households turned out to be the ones with meters in their front halls. Because the meter was in a spot that people had to walk past constantly, the members of these households saw the meter ticking up all day. In contrast, the households with meters in their basements rarely saw the information that could’ve reminded them about their electricity bills1.

2. One More Lane Will Solve Everything!

In the urbanized world, almost nothing can compare to the rage induced by the highway traffic of rush hour. No one likes being stuck in traffic, so we naturally look to an obvious solution: add another lane. If our roads are congested, then we can reduce that congestion by creating more space for cars to pass each other.

For an example of this fix, we can look to none other than the glorious Katy Freeway in the common-sense state of Texas, USA. In 2008 they decided to go big: who needs ‘just one more lane’ when you can instead have 26 of them? As we all know, this solution permanently fixed their traffic problems and Texans no longer need to sit stuck in traffic for hours. Right?

As it turns out, having 26 lanes doesn’t actually solve anything. Traffic jams continue to haunt these drivers just as much as anywhere else. But it’s not like anyone involved in this process is consciously choosing to make traffic worse. Individual drivers obviously don’t want this to happen, and if anything city planners are trying their best to fix it. Everyone agrees that there’s a problem here — so why is it that our so-called solutions seem to always make things worse? How is it that rational people with good intentions can produce outcomes that benefit no one?

Despite our best intentions, we see this pattern everywhere in our lives. Everyone sees the same problem, everyone agrees to implement a solution, yet the same old problems continue to persist while the problem-solution-problem cycle continues for generations. In fact, one of the great frustrations of politics is that it often seems like our most persistent issues only exist because of the failed fixes of the past. Shop inventories and prices swing wildly in response to steady demand, once-stable systems seem to collapse out of nowhere, and major pieces of legislation don’t have any effects until years down the line. We blame bad luck, disruptive events, and incompetent bureaucrats, yet dealing with these individual elements is almost never enough.

The problems aren’t the fault of bad people, bad luck, and bad actions. The true culprit is the hidden architecture of systems — the relationships between parts within systems that amplify or dampen change over time. Understanding this architecture is the difference between lasting solutions and billion-dollar highways that make traffic worse.

3. The Structure of a System

The Three Parts

Not every group of things is necessarily a system. In Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows defines a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.” We can see that the parts of every system must consist of three things: elements, interconnections, and functions2.

Elements are the visible parts of a system — trees in a forest, or cars on a highway, or even intangible things like the collective pride of a nation. Although they’re often the easiest parts to spot, they’re usually the least important. Interconnections are the relationships that connect the elements, and are oftentimes built on a flow of information. The students in a school are interconnected by social rules, rumors on social media, and the knowledge they share with each other. A system will tend not to change even if you completely replace all of the elements. The individual cells in a human body are constantly replaced, yet the interconnections keep the system intact.

Functions are often the most important part of a system, yet they’re also the hardest to spot. Almost every system has a function of ensuring its own survival and continuation into the future. Functions don’t have to be intentional — in fact, they can directly contradict the goals set out by a system’s creator. The example of Texas’ Katy Highway shows us that the functions of human-made systems aren’t necessarily as obvious as we would like them to be. As Meadows puts it:

“A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.”

Stocks and Flows

Stocks are a specific type of element within a system. Meadows defines stocks as “the elements of the system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time.” A stock can be physical (oil in a tank, items in a store), but they don’t have to be (your reserves of motivation or your self-confidence). Flows are interconnections that act to change the levels of a stock over time, whether it causes that stock to rise or fall. Because of this, a stock can act as a “present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.” We can measure these flows by keeping track of how various stock levels change over time.

Stocks can oftentimes take a long time to change because flows take time. You can’t drain a full bathtub instantly — the time it takes is dictated by how fast the water can flow down the drain. Although this can be detrimental, stocks can be harnessed in a positive way by intentionally using them as delays, buffers, and stabilizers. For example, a large stock of saved-up money can make a sudden emergency expense much less harmful.

“Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.”

Feedback Loops

A feedback loop occurs when a stock affects the flows into or out of itself. These structures are oftentimes behind the appearances of sudden spikes or falls in a stock, but they also keep stocks within a certain range despite efforts to the contrary. We can broadly categorize feedback loops into two types: balancing and reinforcing.

Balancing feedback loops counteract change by pushing a stock in the opposite direction of any external force. The thermostat is a classic example: when the temperature drops below the setpoint, heating turns on; when it rises above, heating turns off. When we add highway lanes, congestion initially drops — but the balancing loop brings more drivers onto the road until traffic returns to its previous gridlock. This is why reshaping a system’s structure matters more than pushing harder against it — balancing loops will simply absorb whatever force we throw at it.

Reinforcing feedback loops are the opposite: they amplify change rather than counteracting it. Consider compound interest: the more money in your account, the more interest you earn, which increases your balance, which earns even more interest. The rich get richer through the same mechanism that causes spiraling debt, bank runs, and melting ice caps.

Once you start to recognize both types of feedback loops your understanding of systems can be greatly enhanced. As Meadows puts it: “instead of seeing only how A causes B, you’ll begin to wonder how B may also influence A — and how A might reinforce or reverse itself.” Furthermore, multiple feedback loops can intersect and influence each other. When one feedback loop starts to have a stronger impact on the behavior of a system than another, we can describe that change as shifting dominance. Systems can change radically and rapidly once the dominance is shifted — whether those shifts result in prosperity or crisis depend on the system’s structure prior to those changes.

4. Tricks, Traps, and Tragedies

The interactions of all of the various feedback loops we find in systems can oftentimes lead us to fall into the same pitfalls over and over again. Even when we’re in seemingly distinct scenarios, there are certain structures that tend to give us trouble. There are many such traps, but here we can look at some of the most common and destructive ones.

The first structure we see is known as the tragedy of the commons. Although this problem is oftentimes framed in terms of individual greedy people, a systems lens can show us that this occurs due to rational and predictable behaviors. This trap occurs when there’s a commonly shared resource that individuals can benefit from while spreading the consequences out among everyone. For example, overfishing can occur when individual people or entities don’t see a significant consequence for extracting fish from a body of water faster than the rate at which the fish can repopulate. This results in an overuse of the shared stock until eventually the entire stock is depleted and no one can benefit from it anymore. The way out of this situation is to reduce the delay of feedback and increase the severity of punishments for taking more than one’s fair share.

The second structure is known as shifting the burden to the intervenor. This trap can also be characterized as dependence or addiction depending on the situation. This occurs when a solution is implemented to reduce the symptoms of a problem without actually addressing the underlying systemic issues. Over time, more and more of the so-called solution is needed to preserve the appearance of a fixed system. A great example of this can be found in the actions of 1950s logging companies. In parts of North America, loggers noticed that budworms were destroying valuable spruce and fir trees and therefore cutting into company profits. To combat this, they started to spray insecticides to kill those budworms. While this gave the illusion of solving the problem, the insecticides had the unintended effect of killing the natural predators of the budworm — birds, spiders, parasitic wasps, and diseases. This weakened the balancing feedback loop that kept budworms alive without letting them take over the entire forest. With no more natural predators left, the logging companies were forced to spray ever-increasing amounts of insecticides to take over the gap left by the disappearing predators. The way to escape this trap is to understand and enhance a system’s capacity to address problems on its own.

The third structure is known as the drift to low performance. This happens when we let our performance goals be influenced by our past performances. Especially in cases where there’s a negative bias in perceptions of the past, the perceived worsening of performances leads to a lowering of standards, which then leads to further declines. We often see these lowering standards expressed through comments like “this is how it’s always been” or “that’s just how things are.” Even though each small decline in performance standards seems completely reasonable, the slow erosion over time results in a reinforcing feedback loop that pushes us towards the worst possible outcomes. To solve this issue, we can keep our performance standards independent from our outcomes. Alternatively, we can set our goals based on our best historical performances rather than our worst ones.

The commonality between these three traps are that feedback loops lead to important information being missing, delayed, or distorted. In order to avoid the undesirable outcomes associated with these structures, the solutions we implement have to be focused on changing the structures underlying our systems rather than just shifting around individual elements within those systems. We can’t fix these problems by throwing more and more ‘common-sense’ solutions at the symptoms — we need to examine and reshape the underlying structures.

5. A Double-Edged Dance

Why is it that something as simple as an electric meter’s location (hallway versus basement) can produce substantial energy savings, yet a project as ambitious as a 26-lane highway can spend billions of dollars while just making a problem worse? The meter placement changed the information flow in the system—residents could see their electricity consumption in real time, creating a balancing feedback loop where high usage triggered immediate awareness and behavior adjustments. The highway solution ignored feedback entirely. Planners assumed static demand, missing the reinforcing loop where new lanes reduce travel time and attract nearby development, which attracts more drivers to fill the lanes. Accidental architectural choices can reshape behavior more effectively than billion-dollar projects — when one works with the system’s feedback structure and the other fights against it.

This pattern repeats everywhere once you start looking for it. We blame incompetent bureaucrats for policy failures, greedy individuals for tragedies of the commons, or bad luck for economic crashes—when the real culprit is often the feedback structure itself. A traffic jam isn’t caused by too many individual drivers; it’s caused by the reinforcing loop between road capacity and demand. Poverty isn’t caused by individual poor choices; it’s maintained by balancing loops that resist intervention.

When we try to rationally solve problems, we often get stuck in a linear mindset: find a cause and effect, then manipulate the cause to change the effect. Rather than asking ‘who’s to blame?’ or ‘what single fix will work?’, we need to ask different questions: What feedback structures are at play? What information is missing, delayed, or distorted? Which loops amplify harm, and which promote wellbeing? This shift in thinking becomes ever more important as we tackle climate change, global health, and wealth inequality—problems that resist simple solutions precisely because they’re systemic.

As Donella Meadows puts it:

“We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”