"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production"
About this Quote
Power doesn’t just live in factories; it lives in the switchboard. Robert Anton Wilson’s line has the clean bite of a heresy aimed at orthodox Marxism: if you want to know who really runs a society, stop counting smokestacks and start tracing who controls the channels that decide what can be said, heard, and believed. The move is classic Wilson - prankster-intellectual, suspicious of any single master key, using a neat reversal to expose a blind spot in a revered framework.
The intent is less to dunk on Marx than to update the map. In late-20th-century America, production is dispersed, outsourced, and increasingly automated; ownership gets slippery. Communication, by contrast, concentrates. A few gatekeepers - publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, platform owners, regulators - can manufacture consensus without owning a single factory. Control the narrative pipeline and you can launder interests into common sense, frame opponents as cranks, and turn policy choices into “inevitabilities.” That’s the subtext: ideology is infrastructure, and “free speech” is often a brand name for privately managed distribution.
Wilson is also warning about the subtlety of modern domination. Censorship doesn’t have to look like a ban; it can look like ranking, amplification, PR, access journalism, institutional credentials, and the quiet power to make some questions sound unserious. Coming from a writer steeped in conspiracy culture, media theory, and countercultural skepticism, the line reads like an early diagnosis of our platform age: the ruling class isn’t merely who owns things, but who owns the story about who owns things.
The intent is less to dunk on Marx than to update the map. In late-20th-century America, production is dispersed, outsourced, and increasingly automated; ownership gets slippery. Communication, by contrast, concentrates. A few gatekeepers - publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, platform owners, regulators - can manufacture consensus without owning a single factory. Control the narrative pipeline and you can launder interests into common sense, frame opponents as cranks, and turn policy choices into “inevitabilities.” That’s the subtext: ideology is infrastructure, and “free speech” is often a brand name for privately managed distribution.
Wilson is also warning about the subtlety of modern domination. Censorship doesn’t have to look like a ban; it can look like ranking, amplification, PR, access journalism, institutional credentials, and the quiet power to make some questions sound unserious. Coming from a writer steeped in conspiracy culture, media theory, and countercultural skepticism, the line reads like an early diagnosis of our platform age: the ruling class isn’t merely who owns things, but who owns the story about who owns things.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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