Just caught up with this excellent interview on everyone's favourite tech podcast. The point @doctorow makes in it about the urgent need to stop using private sector operators to deliver public goods is absolutely spot on.
This applies very obviously in the tech sector, where we are leaving key elements in the systems of political communication and material distribution in private hands, instead of acknowledging their constitutional significance and creating public institutions.
(Much the same can be said of the traditional media, where the state has given private sector institutions a privileged position to describe the political and they have exacted a horrendous piece for the service they provide.)
The point applies, less obviously, to the capitalist market itself, which, in Christine Desan's words, is "a matter of constitutional design, a political and legal creation ... a governance project all the way down, starting with its money."
I cannot recommend Desan's Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism highly enough btw.
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