I’m not sure how far back it goes. Certainly the Vatican was one of the early players in exerting control over rulers of nations. And then came the financiers like the Medici family. And then the whole Jekyll Island situation.
Once small groups or individuals gain control of the money, they have powerful leverage over how rulers rule. And when someone has that much power, rulers aren’t really ruling anything anymore. They’re simply carrying out marching orders.
Eisenhower warned against the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Then corporations started gaining more and more power. Technology and platforms started gaining even more power. And now, in the pyramid of control, presidents and kings and popes have increasingly low standing in that power and control hierarchy.
Let’s look closer.
Power has always had a way of concentrating. And it rarely stays where we think it is. Over time, things shifted and finance got bigger. More complex. More centralized. And once you influence the money… you influence the decisions. You influence everything. Leaders don’t have to be told what to do if the cost of doing otherwise is obvious.
Then came scale.
Industry grew. Corporations spread across borders. Supply chains stretched out across the world. At some point, the biggest companies stopped feeling like companies and started feeling like systems. Maybe it started with the East India Company or the West India Company. But wherever it started, corporations quickly learned how to exert power over rulers.
And with that came a different kind of power. Not elected. Not always visible. But very real indeed.
By the time Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, it wasn’t some distant threat. It was already there. Already forming. Defense. Industry. Policy. All starting to overlap. And once something like that takes hold, it doesn’t unwind easily.
Then things sped up. Corporations got bigger. Finance got more abstract. And then technology showed up and changed the game again. Now it’s not just money or policy. It’s information. Attention. Behavior. And that might be the most powerful layer yet.
So where does that leave the nation-state?
Still here. Still visible. With their flags and elections and militaries. But is that where the real decisions are being made? Or are those decisions shaped somewhere upstream — and what we see is just the final version? Because if finance, institutions, corporations, and platforms are setting the boundaries, then leadership starts to look very different.
Which leads to a more philosophical idea: The nation-state never really collapsed… it just got crowded out? Not replaced. Not overthrown. Just surrounded. Layer by layer. Until it became one player among many. Still important. Just not what it used to be.
Maybe the old idea of nation-states is gone forever. Maybe the shape of power will continue to evolve. But for now, the power structure no longer seems to be a linear line of authority, but rather more like a pile of basketballs held within some invisible set of constraints. The gravity of power struggles pulling them down onto each other… each ball trying to find its resting place. All the while, new balls keep getting added to the top of the pile.
And those of us at the bottom? We just keep getting pressed down harder and harder until eventually… we start popping from the pressure.