Patronage Networks versus The Internet

If you look on census zip code maps, you'll find communities of super monied people in cities all around the United States. Some of those people are corporate executives or lawyers, some of them are old money families who have been stacking cheddar since the 17th century and have ancestors who helped found states like Ohio or who owned shipping and industrial enterprises at the dawn of the Industrial Age. They're the people who sit on boards of directors of corporations, or make up the governing bodies of park systems and planning commissions.

They're really "the establishment". Networks of friendships and relationships of various sorts connect them to people throughout a region of influence or through industries or institutions like colleges or universities. Their influence moves at the speed of a handshake at a glad-handing party, or at the rate a rich old man in Orvis Madras Pants can get a bottle of gin from his patio bar so a group of alcoholic wives can decide which style of garbage can the park should have.

Those networks attract creative people like artists and writers that often, surprisingly, promote and foster ideas that seem opposed to their interests. Far left ideologies like communism, or identity politics, or promotion of mass immigration seem at odds with a stable nation, and steadily growing economy, but they permeate institutions and media outfitis that are tied into oligarch patronage networks in cities like New York and San Francisco.

The mode of influence and idea spreading via the Internet is the converse of the glad handing, money club. In fact, the two groups of people probably couldn't even understand eachother and would probably have a fight if they were in the same room. The oafish, self-deprecating, "offensive" counterculture of memes and jokes of the internet probably has no appeal to the prosaic, pretty banal mindset of the generational cheddar stacker who's "hard work" is trying to decide if they should raise the rent on the carriage house on the other side of their estate by $50 or $75 a month in the next fiscal year.

The internet has no institutional influence, yet it might destroy them all for that very reason. The establishment really is like the nervous system of the meta-anmial of society, but it's outmoded. As the establishment organize NGOs and committees of lawyers to "fight back" against the alt-media, it'll be really interesting to see how quickly the Internet flows around their efforts.