(Up to: Society And Control Scratchpad )

...aka. the third space, in between the state and personal responsibility.

[to be (heavily) refined]

The arrival of Capitalism has, it must be admitted, brought with it new found freedom for many.

Before, everything was run by the state because that's all there was - a natural gathering of people to run the place. And so the only alternative to personal responsibility, on a national scale, was the government.

But now we have a contender - business. In many ways, companies have taken the place of traditional government in terms of maintenance of many aspects of our society, and have also created many many new areas not usually considered part of governance, too.

So we are now split between personal responsibility, letting the state take responsibility, and letting companies take responsibility.

It is worth noting at this point that due to the "freedoms" offered to companies, we actually have far less control over them than we do government. However, to contrast that, we have choice over which company we do business with. Supposedly.

So we have moved from an influential position to a position of choosing. Both require the "public" to be informed to work though. And both suffer from scale - state controls scale UP badly if one state is running many people, whereas competition and choice scales DOWN badly, as there is less choice and thus less control.

Unfortunately now, we do not /understand/ the choices we can make, as much as we do not understand the /influence/ we have. We have slipped between the gap of the state and the companies to a point where we are at both of their bidding.