Superconcentration

The Technical Foundations of the Post-Market Order

Construction underway on a Project Stargate AI infrastructure site (wired.com).

Introduction

In the mid-20th century, several astute observers began pointing out what they saw as a critical evolution within capitalism away from the classical markets and firms of economics textbooks. John Kenneth Galbraith’s “technostructure,” Ralph Andreano’s “supercorporation,” Alfred Chandler’s accounts of managerial revolution—these all set out to describe qualitative changes brought about by the needs of planning, scale, public-private partnership and the modern techno-industrial state. With the distance of more than half a century, it is now clear that they were documenting something far larger and more important than an evolution within capitalism; they were, in effect, recording the opening stage of a deeper substitution, in which markets, politics, and national economies were being displaced by technical systems whose operations have detached almost completely from the categories and theoretical frameworks used to describe them—frameworks we continue to invoke out of habit rather than accuracy even to this day.

The “supercorporation” was never just a very large company, but the earliest visible expression of a much deeper structural transition: the rise of institutions so vast, internally planned, and fundamentally entangled with the state and technological infrastructure that traditional economic terminology, like competition, price, supply and demand, simply ceased to describe their behavior. What appeared to be the competitive triumph of scale over rivals was in fact the erasure of rivalry as a meaningful organizing principle. The real drivers of this shift were not entrepreneurial genius or competitive selection in the market, but the autonomous logic of coordination, prediction, and continuity that large technical systems demanded.

We are still pretending to live in a market society long after the market stopped being a meaningful governing mechanism at all; whether because this is just a useful fiction to justify and reproduce existing structures of power, or simply because we don’t have viable models to understand the real, more subtle world order, much of the public discourse around the organization of contemporary society is best understood as a performance rather than a description.

From Conglomerates to Platforms

The industrial conglomerates of the mid-twentieth century like GM, ITT and Standard Oil were popularly imagined to be the winners of classical competitive markets, but this was largely an illusion maintained by sophisticated public relations, and perhaps a deeper cultural need to believe that markets were still operating as advertised. As Galbraith explained in his seminal work The New Industrial State, the internal reality of these giant firms looked nothing like the textbook model of businesses reacting to price signals. In actuality, they were much more like planned economies in miniature: multi-layered administrative bureaucracies that predicted their own needs years in advance and then stabilized their inputs, labor supply, and product demand (with large purchases from the state when necessary). Rather than reacting to the market, they were disciplining the external environment when it failed to align with their internal plans and doing so through durable, often informal channels of coordination with government and regulatory bodies.

As industrial complexity intensified, the external world adapted more and more to the plans of the supercorporations; legislatures, regulators, and foreign governments no longer meaningfully operated independently in the face of their imperatives. Instead, the old institutions oriented themselves around the needs of the planning structures because these structures were the only entities still capable of maintaining the new order at the scale that industrial society demanded.

Contrary to popular narratives and economic ideologies, the platform supercorporations of the twenty-first century did not “disrupt” this arrangement at all. They have evolved and intensified it to a new level of super-concentration. Where the old conglomerates like GE organized production at scale, the platforms organize mass perception. In the process, they dissolve entire sectors into their digital infrastructure, orchestrating the full spectrum of consumer choices and behaviors that occur inside them. Rival firms end up “competing” on stages their “competitors” built, upending the very idea of self-contained competitive entities. Even governments and regulators must operate entirely within the very networks they are supposedly policing, which reduces oversight to ritual while leaving the substance of power untouched.

The Algorithmic Technostructure

Galbraith located the power centers of the technostructure in human engineers and managers, but today it resides largely in machine learning models, AI, and other black boxes that monitor human behavior, predict its trajectories, and adjust environments in response. The engineers and managers of the present are one step removed from the planners of the mid-20th century, less engaged with the substance of production and far more preoccupied with maintaining the stability of optimization systems whose internal workings they often understand only partially.

In this manner, the corporation no longer explicitly decides how to allocate resources; instead, managers ratify outputs produced by forecasting systems, behavioral models, and machine-learning algorithms, and what once counted as leadership is increasingly reduced to supervising the interfaces through which these systems synthesize data. The discretionary space of leadership thus largely collapses to the monitoring and interpretation of dashboards.

As a result, concentration in the 21st century takes on a different character: it is no longer only about controlling factories or oil fields; it is increasingly about controlling the channels through which the world becomes legible. Systems like AWS, Azure, Android, iOS, Google Search, YouTube, global payment rails—even the state depends on these systems for its basic operations, which means that the power to shape experience now belongs to those who maintain the infrastructure through which experience is routed.

The Corporation–State Fusion

The old concept of the “military-industrial complex” suggested two institutions locked in symbiosis, but today the distinction dissolves completely, as state and corporation now operate inside the same technical field; they draw on the same data, are organized through the same software architectures, hosted in the same clouds, and shaped by the same automated risk-management regimes. The sphere that once separated public authority from private enterprise has thinned to the point of irrelevance, not because either side intended such an outcome, but because the technical requirements of modern administration have irresistibly forced them into alignment.

The state administers welfare, taxation, immigration, and surveillance almost entirely through corporate platforms, and corporations in turn depend on the state for legal protection, strategic contracts, and geopolitical stability. The two institutions increasingly behave like components within a single administrative machine, each responsible for functions the other cannot execute alone. This fusion has nothing to do with a conspiracy; it is merely a logical technical convergence.

Thus, real regulation is increasingly toothless and major reform becomes unthinkable. These concepts still have symbolic meaning, and public debate continues to revolve around them, but in practice they have little structural effect, because uprooting the deeper infrastructure would dissolve the state itself. What passes for oversight now occurs entirely within the technical environments that require coordination rather than constraint, leaving the traditional language of governance stranded above a world it no longer directs.

Post-Sovereign Architecture

The multinationals of Andreano’s time expanded across borders, but today’s platforms operate above them. Their data circulates through jurisdictions that pretend to regulate it, but in reality these computational centers create new spheres of influence that obey no territorial logic. Even the most hardline publicly declared geopolitical “rivals” are deeply interlinked in this meshwork with few exceptions. Here, one can see the realization of what Walter Wriston foresaw in The Twilight of Sovereignty: the erosion of territorial authority not through political upheaval, but through information systems that recognize no borders at all.

This new form of platform power flows through networks, not geography. Nations depend on the platforms to administer core functions, but platforms depend on nations only insofar as nations protect the infrastructure on which the platforms rely, and because the basic organs of the state are now implemented within those very infrastructures, they have little choice in the matter.

For individuals, this creates a new kind of dependency. Work, communication, memory, and even identity pass through a small set of digital gateways, which determine what can appear and how it appears. These gateways act not as markets but as totalizing environments, and the old language of competition is useless for describing them. This is why the platforms simply cannot be said to compete with one another in any classical sense. Instead, they divide responsibility for shaping this ecosystem, and each becomes irreplaceable in the particular domain that anchors the larger environment.

This underscores the qualitative shift from the old mid-20th-century technostructure: the earlier industrial multinationals sought to dominate supply chains, but the platforms shape the cognitive and perceptual terrain in which any concept of an economy (or a society) can even be formulated.

The Ideology of Benevolence

In the twentieth century, large firms defended their power by appealing to efficiency or scientific management. Today’s platforms prefer the gentler, therapeutic language of connection, empowerment, creativity, safety—a vocabulary that recasts technical control as a form of emotional care.

But the central driving motivation of the corporation remains the same: the platforms seek regularity and predictability at scale. A population that behaves predictably is easier to integrate into automated systems, and individual autonomy becomes a point of friction that the system quietly works to compress. Personalization, which outwardly promises to liberate the user from the mass society of the past, actually produces the inverse effect by narrowing experience to what has already been modeled and classified in the vast databases of algorithmic systems.

Galbraith wrote that the autonomy of the consumer in the mid-20th-century industrial state was a fiction, but the contemporary version of that fiction carries a different danger, because most users no longer experience the gap between their own desires and the algorithmic structures that pre-shape them. It has become natural to live inside an environment that knows what we want before we articulate it.

This corporate ideology of benevolence serves a structural purpose: it makes the technical order appear to be a service rather than a regime, while its deeper function is to render dependence indistinguishable from normal life.

Capitalism After Competition

The modern firm no longer competes in any meaningful way. The rituals of competition continue, but their outcomes are bounded by the architecture in which they occur. Seemingly dynamic, market-competitive actors like venture capital simply circulate inside a closed loop, where new firms either fit into the existing system and are acquired or they vanish. This consolidation is not even a conscious strategy, but the predictable result of a networked environment in which scale is self-reinforcing and deviation is quickly eliminated.

Financial markets reinforce this drift by treating predictability as the highest virtue, and firms that become essential to the global infrastructure enjoy financial protection that has nothing to do with product quality or innovation. Such firms simply become institutions, not market actors.

Through the rise of digital platforms and algorithmically driven markets, both production and finance have merged into a single field of automated signals, as data and capital flow together, reinforcing the same gravitational centers. A handful of entities like BlackRock now guide the majority of global investment, not because they won a contest, but because the technical system converged toward them. As Galbraith had already realized over fifty years ago, competition in this system has become a mere narrative we tell to give shape to this world, a story maintained for public consumption even though the system no longer behaves according to its logic.

The Human Condition Under The Supercorporation

The supercorporation alters not only institutions but inner life, as work, communication, and emotion are filtered through channels designed for monitoring and prediction. In this system, a person becomes a pattern; the system watches this pattern and adjusts itself around it. But increasingly, people adjust themselves to the patterns on offer by the platforms, and participation and self-subjectification become difficult to distinguish as users internalize the expectations embedded in the systems they inhabit.

In this environment, dissent, outrage, and political engagement all become content and data used to further tune the platforms. The political sphere largely loses its substance and becomes a spectacle layered on top of automated processes. Although elections and debates continue, they do not disturb the underlying machinery, which treats political expression as another behavioral signal to be managed rather than a force capable of redirecting the system.

Through mass participation, people self-adapt to these conditions without needing to be asked, synchronizing their attention to the rhythms of the platforms. As a result, their sense of possibility contracts and their expectations shift toward what can be delivered by the system, narrowing the horizon of imagination to what the technical environment already contains.

Andreano feared the mid-20th-century supercorporation would trigger a collapse of democratic accountability, but the deeper transformation of the 21st century is psychological, because as we self-adjust to the automated world, we eventually forget that any other kind of world was possible, and the erosion of agency occurs not through coercion but through habituation.

Why No Escape Is Forthcoming

Reformers continue to attempt to regulate the platforms using the old models of antitrust and competition, treating the platforms as firms that can be broken apart. But these institutions are not firms in the classical sense; rather, they are like layers of an ecosystem, a total environment, whose functions interlock so thoroughly with contemporary life that dismantling them would entail dismantling the society that depends upon them.

Open-source movements and decentralized protocols like crypto offer alternatives in theory, but they rest on the same technical foundations. Their development and survival rely on the same cloud infrastructures and financial systems that support the platforms they seek to escape, which leaves them structurally subordinate even when they appear ideologically independent.

Although this system massively rewards its managers and reproduces systemic inequality, the underlying formative logic of concentration does not fundamentally arise from greed or conspiracy. It arises from the mathematics of networks, where systems that depend on prediction gravitate toward singularities. They do not disperse unless forced, and there is no existing political or economic force capable of dispersing them without simultaneously collapsing the world built around them. Furthermore, no one remotely understands the full system or its interlocking parts; although we constantly react to breakdowns and failures after the fact, and constantly augment the system, we possess only a fragmentary grasp of its total operation, and our interventions tend to deepen its complexity rather than clarify it.

The Completed Cycle

Andreano believed he was documenting a mutation in capitalism, something perhaps capable of reform and democratic (or, ironically, technocratic) accountability. What he was really seeing was the beginning of the post-capitalist, post-political, post-market world order built on technical infrastructures that now govern both perception and production.

Markets, politics, and sovereignty all persist as performance, but they paper over a much more inscrutable underlying reality that we lack the tools to properly describe. Whether because of inherited intellectual habits, reluctance to confront uncomfortable implications, or the familiar impulse to defend existing systems of authority, public discourse rarely acknowledges the extent to which these categories no longer track the forces shaping contemporary life. No one seems willing to look beneath the façade and understand what is actually occurring.

These real operations, occurring below, inside automated systems that have absorbed the prerogatives once associated with states and the dynamism once associated with markets—Galbraith’s technostructure—have matured into something vaster: a global environment whose primary drive is stability, prediction, and continuity, and whose logic now defines the boundaries of institutional behavior across the entire political and economic landscape.

Conclusion

The world that Galbraith and his contemporaries attempted to diagnose has now reached a form that their vocabulary could only partially capture. They believed that the rise of the supercorporation signaled a shift within capitalism, a redirection of economic life from markets to planning. What we can see more clearly, with the benefit of the intervening decades, is that the supercorporation marked the point at which capitalism, as a system governed by exchange and competition, gave way to something far more encompassing and far less intelligible through the limited lenses of the legal, political, and economic frameworks we inherited from earlier centuries.

The institutions that dominate the present age do not act like firms, and they do not belong to the structure of the state, yet they have absorbed the functions and prerogatives of both, not through conquest or conspiracy but because the technical environment rewards the capacity to coordinate, predict, and stabilize at scales far beyond the reach of traditional political or economic actors. Markets still exist in name and form, and democratic institutions still perform their rituals, but the outcomes that matter are shaped within technical systems that move independently of those surface arrangements, largely indifferent to the vocabulary that once claimed to describe them.

The doctrines that once helped societies make sense of themselves—competition, sovereignty, regulation, national interest—retain their rhetorical power, but they no longer explain the order of causation that governs events. They survive as public language while the real forces operate below them, in infrastructures that sort behavior, allocate attention, and maintain the conditions upon which both states and corporations depend. What Galbraith called the technostructure, and what Andreano framed as superconcentration, has matured into a background environment that does not merely influence institutions but sets the boundaries of what any institution is capable of doing.

If the twentieth century mistook this process for a problem of monopoly or industrial excess, the twenty-first century reveals it as a deeper structural shift in the nature of organized life, one that places human agency within systems that can draw upon data, prediction, and automation in ways that overwhelm the older forms of deliberation and contestation. The question is no longer whether this order is desirable, or even whether it can be reformed, but whether any of the intellectual tools we inherited, like markets, politics, and law, retain enough descriptive force to allow us to see it clearly at all.

The supercorporation is not one actor among others. It is the environment in which the modern world takes shape. And once we recognize that our established categories have been progressively hollowed out by forces they were never built to describe, we are left with the task of understanding a civilization that continues to function with remarkable stability while the concepts that once explained it have lost their meaning, and with the further task of deciding what it means to live inside an order that no longer acknowledges the terms by which we once understood ourselves.