#concentrated power

[firstoccupier]

Accountability and the Architecture of Concentrated Power

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — February 27, 2026 Concentrated power that continues to produce harm without proportionate correction does not merely fail. It signals design tolerance. That statement is not an emotional outburst. It is a structural observation. When large institutions—financial, educational, political—repeatedly…

Accountability and the Architecture of Concentrated Power

[peacemore-springs]

Is Your Gayness A Gatekeeper?

Q1) So you're now saying that male actors have never involved themselves with gayness to get a job they really need?

No — and it’s important to slow this down, because the way the question is framed risks turning a very real issue (coercion and exploitation in the entertainment industry) into a blanket claim about a specific sexual orientation.

What has happened historically

There have been cases in the entertainment industry where:

People in positions of power exploited actors — male and female.

Some actors felt pressured into sexual situations to secure roles or opportunities.

These abuses were about power, not about sexual orientation.

Those situations are forms of coercion, abuse, or manipulation, and they’re condemned across the industry. They are not “gay exploits” in the sense of consensual same‑sex relationships. They are abuses of power, and they can involve any gender combination.

What you cannot conclude

You cannot generalise that “male actors do X to get jobs.”

You cannot assume that exploitation always takes a same‑sex form.

You cannot assume that every actor has been involved in anything like this.

The real pattern

When exploitation occurs, it’s driven by:

Power imbalance

Vulnerability

Gatekeeping

Predatory individuals

Not by the sexual orientation of the people involved.

There’s a long, documented history of “casting couch” dynamics — but those involve all genders, all orientations, and many different kinds of coercion. It’s a structural problem, not a sexual‑identity one.

Q2) Yes, let's delve into gatekeeping. What would a gate represent in this industrial dynamic?

In this context, a gate isn’t a physical object at all — it’s a metaphor for control. And once you see it that way, the whole dynamic becomes much clearer.

What a “gate” represents in gatekeeping

A gate is any point of access that someone must pass through to reach:

work

opportunity

visibility

resources

status

safety

In the entertainment industry, those gates can be extremely narrow, and the people who control them can wield disproportionate power.

What counts as a gate in acting and entertainment

1. Casting decisions

A small number of people decide who even gets in the room. They can open the gate or close it.

2. Agents and representation

Without an agent, many actors can’t even apply for certain roles. Agents become gatekeepers to the gatekeepers.

3. Studios, producers, financiers

They decide which projects get made, who gets hired, and who gets promoted. This is one of the most powerful gates.

4. Social networks and informal circles

Who you know often matters as much as talent. These networks can act as invisible gates that outsiders struggle to pass.

5. Reputation systems

A rumour, a label, or a single powerful person’s opinion can shut a gate permanently.

Why the metaphor matters

A gate implies:

someone controls it

someone wants to get through it

the person at the gate can demand something in exchange

That “something” might be:

loyalty

silence

favours

compliance

emotional labour

or, in abusive cases, sexual access

This is why exploitation in the industry is fundamentally about power, not sexuality. The gatekeeper uses the gate to extract something from the person who needs passage.

The deeper dynamic

When a gate is:

narrow

opaque

controlled by a few

tied to survival or livelihood

…it becomes a perfect environment for abuse. Not because actors are a certain type of person, but because systems of concentrated power create predictable vulnerabilities.

[avandelay20]

‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

"People are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens"

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Kemp uses the term Goliaths instead of Civilizations to describe kingdoms and empires - societies built on domination: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women.

Goliath states need three specific types of “Goliath fuel”. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. The final Goliath fuel “caged land”, meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants.

The three most powerful men in the world are full of dark traits: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule China by being a master Machiavellian manipulator. And we have corporations and algorithms resembling these kinds of people and reinforcing these dark traits.

As Elites (aka PARASITES) extract more wealth from the people and the land (aka HOST), they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy.

The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.

Collapses in the past were at a regional level and often beneficial for most people, but collapse today would be global and disastrous for all.

The issue is that we have small groups of people with concentrated power and wealth who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering up all the risks.

The solution is to run societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient.

In the meantime, if you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying it.

In other words: don’t be a dick.

Don’t work for big tech.

Don't work for arms manufacturers.

Don't work for the fossil fuel industry.

Don’t accept relationships based on domination.

Do share power whenever you can.

[halry1]

De-concentrate power, wherever possible. I think wherever power concentrates, it creates a dickhead.

Russell Brand

[theamericanbear]

While the Founders accepted outcome inequality, they emphasized — over and over — that its legitimacy hinged on subjecting everyone to the law’s mandates on an equal basis. Jefferson wrote that the essence of America would be that “the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.” Benjamin Franklin warned that creating a privileged legal class would produce “total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections” between rulers and those they ruled. Tom Paine repeatedly railed against “counterfeit nobles,” those whose superior status was grounded not in merit but in unearned legal privilege.

After all, one of their principal grievances against the British King was his power to exempt his cronies from legal obligations. Almost every Founder repeatedly warned that a failure to apply the law equally to the politically powerful and the rich would ensure a warped and unjust society.  In many ways, that was their definition of tyranny.

Americans understand this implicitly. If you watch a competition among sprinters, you can accept that whoever crosses the finish line first is the superior runner. But only if all the competitors are bound by the same rules: everyone begins at the same starting line, is penalized for invading the lane of another runner, is barred from making physical contact or using performance-enhancing substances, and so on.

If some of the runners start ahead of others and have relationships with the judges that enable them to receive dispensation for violating the rules as they wish, then viewers understand that the outcome can no longer be considered legitimate. Once the process is seen as not only unfair but utterly corrupted, once it’s obvious that a common set of rules no longer binds all the competitors, the winner will be resented, not heralded.

That catches the mood of America in 2011.  It may not explain the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it helps explain why it has spread like wildfire and why so many Americans seem instantly to accept and support it.  As was not true in recent decades, the American relationship with wealth inequality is in a state of rapid transformation. more