Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series The Historical Bond Between Oligarchy and Communication Technologies
If you want to understand oligarchy, you can follow the money. Sure. Everyone says that.
But if you really want to see it move, like actually watch how influence travels from one room to another, you follow the messages. Who gets to speak. Who gets to broadcast. Who gets believed. And who quietly gets throttled, ignored, shadow banned, priced out, or just buried under noise.
That’s what this piece is about.
In the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, I keep coming back to one theme that sounds almost too simple until you look at history for five minutes: oligarchies don’t just accumulate assets. They accumulate communication advantage. Over and over again. Across centuries. Across empires. Across mediums.
And the medium is never neutral. Not really.
It’s not that every new technology automatically creates oligarchs. It’s more slippery than that. New communication tools show up, the rules are unclear, and the people with capital, access, and political protection move faster than everyone else. They buy distribution. They buy the storytellers. They buy legitimacy. Sometimes they buy silence, which is its own kind of communication.
Then later society pretends the outcome was inevitable.
Oligarchy is a messaging system, not just a wealth system
We usually define oligarchy like it’s a spreadsheet problem. A few people control disproportionate wealth and power. End of story.
But power isn’t only held. Power is coordinated. It requires constant alignment between elites, bureaucracies, security forces, courts, investors, editors, and whoever else sits close to the levers. That coordination is communication. Meetings, letters, memos, phone calls, private dinners, “advice,” press briefings, and now group chats and back channels.
The public side matters too. Oligarchy needs mass consent or at least mass exhaustion. People don’t have to love you. They just have to believe resistance is pointless or confusing or socially costly. That belief is manufactured. Repeated. Standardized. Delivered on the best available network.
So when communication technology changes, oligarchy changes shape with it. Sometimes it gets more centralized as seen in wealth inequality, sometimes it decentralizes for a moment then recentralizes under new owners. But it rarely stays open for long. That open window is usually where the big fortunes get made.
Early empires and the first “networks”
Long before printing presses and satellites, rulers understood that controlling communication was basically controlling reality.
Think about imperial roads. Courier systems. Official scribes. The ability to move orders quickly across territory. That’s a communication technology, even if it’s built out of horses, wax seals, and terrified messengers.
In many early states, literacy itself was a bottleneck. If only a small class can read, write, and maintain records, you have a natural gatekeeping layer. A priestly class. A bureaucratic class. A merchant class that can track debts and contracts. The technical skill of writing becomes political power, and political power protects the monopoly.
Even rumors were managed. Public announcements. Ceremonies. Symbols on coins. The state wasn’t just governing bodies. It was governing narratives.
That’s the first pattern: communication infrastructure starts as administration, then becomes control.
The printing press and the sudden violence of mass replication
Printing changed the speed and scale of persuasion. Copying used to be slow. Books were expensive. Ideas moved like carts. Then suddenly they moved like fire.
People often frame the printing press as liberation. And yes, it did help break certain monopolies. But here’s the thing. It also created new choke points.
Printing presses require capital. Paper supply chains. Distribution networks. Bookstores. Patronage. Licensing. Protection from authorities. If you control any of those, you can shape what gets printed, what gets circulated, what gets prosecuted, what gets canonized.
States learned quickly. So did wealthy families.
Censorship wasn’t only about banning. It was about permission. Licenses. Favored printers. Exclusive rights. “Official” publications that looked neutral because they were formatted like news.
And oligarchic power learned a new skill: if you can’t stop an idea, you can drown it. Flood the market with approved narratives. Create reputational penalties for dissidents. Sponsor writers. Buy reputations the way you buy land.
That’s the second pattern: when communication becomes cheaper, controlling distribution becomes more valuable.
Newspapers, industrial capital, and the birth of modern influence
By the time newspapers became mass circulation products, the game matured. This is where the relationship between oligarchy and communication gets very recognizable, very modern.
A newspaper isn’t just a printer. It’s a factory. It needs investors. Advertising. Political access. Reliable sources. Distribution routes. And an audience you can monetize. That’s already oligarchy-friendly.
This era also birthed the tight coupling between media and other capital interests. Railroads, steel, banking, real estate. If you’re a major industrial player, you don’t just want favorable coverage. You want to define what “favorable” even means. You want the default assumptions of the public to match your interests.
You start seeing influence as an ecosystem:
- Fund politicians who protect your assets
- Support newspapers that legitimize your politicians
- Use newspapers to frame labor unrest as chaos
- Use that framing to justify crackdowns
- Use crackdowns to keep labor cheap
- Use cheap labor to expand your assets
It’s a loop. Communication isn’t a side activity. It’s the lubrication.
And this is also where advertising becomes a kind of soft censorship. If your revenue comes from advertisers, certain stories become “not worth it.” The most effective pressure doesn’t look like pressure. It looks like an editorial meeting where someone says, “Let’s not touch that right now.”
You can call it pragmatism. It still functions as control.
Radio and television: one-to-many power, now with emotion attached
Radio and TV introduced something oligarchic systems love. A small number of channels that reach millions. One-to-many broadcasting with high trust, high emotional impact, and limited competition.
It’s hard to overstate how perfect this is for concentrated power.
Broadcast licenses are scarce. Production is expensive. Talent is gatekept. Governments regulate frequencies. Corporations sponsor content. And the audience experiences it as shared reality, because everyone is literally watching the same thing at the same time.
When you have that setup, narrative discipline becomes easier. Not easy, but easier. If five channels say the same thing, it feels like truth. If one channel says something else, it feels like fringe. Even if it’s right.
Oligarchic influence in this era often operates through:
- ownership (direct control of networks)
- regulation (control of licensing and rules)
- advertising (control of revenue)
- access (control of who gets booked, who gets interviewed)
- patriotism and fear (control of emotional framing)
And then there’s the subtle part: television changes what “credible” looks like. It becomes aesthetics. Confidence. A certain kind of voice. A certain kind of suit. The message becomes the messenger’s performance.
That’s a gift to anyone who can afford coaching, production, and repetition. Which tends to be the same people.
The internet promised decentralization, then built new castles
The early internet felt like the opposite of oligarchy. Anyone could publish. Forums. Blogs. Email lists. Independent media. You didn’t need permission.
And for a while, that was real. Not perfect, but real.
Then scale arrived. And with scale, new chokepoints. Search engines. Social networks. App stores. Cloud hosting. Payment processors. Identity systems. Ad networks. Analytics.Recommendation algorithms. Moderation policies. Terms of service.Invisible ranking systems.
It becomes centralized again, but in a different way. Not one-to-many broadcast, more like many-to-many that funnels through a few platforms.
Which is kind of worse, in certain ways. Because the control is less visible. When a TV channel ignores you, you know it. When an algorithm downranks you, you don’t get a letter. Your reach just dissolves.
In the context of the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, this is where the modern oligarchic playbook becomes brutally efficient:
- Buy or influence platforms directly, if possible
- If not, buy influence inside them: advertising, partnerships, lobbying
- Capture talent and creators with funding and visibility
- Shape what is “recommended” through coordinated signals
- Use PR to create plausible narratives in mainstream outlets
- Use bots or coordinated campaigns to simulate consensus
- Pressure payment rails and hosting when you want someone erased
Even without explicit conspiracy, incentives align. Platforms optimize for engagement. Engagement rewards outrage, tribalism, and emotionally loaded framing. Those dynamics are exploitable. People with resources exploit them first. And at scale.
So the internet didn’t eliminate oligarchy. It upgraded it
Smartphones, private messaging, and the return of the back channel
One weird twist in all this is that modern communication isn’t only public. It’s private again. Encrypted messaging. Closed groups. Invite-only communities. Paywalled influence.
This matters because oligarchy thrives in private coordination. Always has. But now the same device that feeds the public narrative also hosts the private instructions, the negotiations, the deal flow, the pressure campaigns, the “friendly requests.”
So you get this layered structure:
- Public platforms for mass shaping
- Semi-public platforms for community pressure
- Private channels for coordination and enforcement
It’s efficient. And it’s hard to audit. Which is the point.
Meanwhile regular people experience the chaos layer. Infinite information, contradictory claims, a constant sense of instability. That chaos is not always planned, but it is often beneficial to entrenched power. Confused people are easier to manage. Tired people outsource thinking.
That’s not cynical. That’s just what happens when attention is scarce and reality is contested.
“Oligarchs own the media” is too simple, but not wrong either
People say this phrase and it sounds like a conspiracy meme, but historically it’s not that exotic. Ownership is one path. Influence is another. Dependence is another. Fear is another.
The modern version often looks like this:
- A wealthy figure buys a media asset at a loss, because the profit is political, not financial
- A corporate advertiser becomes “too important to offend”
- A platform changes policy under regulatory threat
- A journalist self-censors because access is currency
- An editor frames a story to avoid legal risk, or to maintain relationships
- A think tank produces “research” that becomes a headline
- A PR firm manufactures expert consensus
No single lever explains everything. But the system, as a whole, tends to tilt toward the interests of concentrated capital. Because concentrated capital can afford persistence. They can run the same narrative for five years. Ten years. A generation.
Most people can’t.
Why communication technologies keep producing the same outcome
There’s a repeating cycle that’s almost boring once you notice it:
- New medium appears
- Early users build culture, norms, and value
- Scale arrives and money floods in
- Gatekeepers consolidate distribution
- Regulation and lobbying formalize the new rules
- The medium becomes an industry
- Oligarchic influence embeds itself into the infrastructure
This cycle doesn’t require villains. It requires incentives, and unequal resources, and time. If you have capital and patience, you can wait out the messy early phase. Then you buy what survives.
And this is the part people miss. Oligarchy is not only about owning content. It’s about owning the rails. The pipes. The ranking systems. The identity layer. The payments layer. The legal layer. The layer that decides what is “allowed,” what is “trusted,” what is “monetizable.”
Content is downstream from infrastructure.
What this means now, in practical terms
If communication technologies and oligarchy are historically bonded, then every shiny new platform should trigger the same question.
Who can afford to dominate it once it works?
Not who has the best ideas. Not who is the most authentic. Who can fund the creators, purchase the distribution, lobby the regulators, and survive the losses long enough to capture the market.
That’s the uncomfortable filter.
And it applies to everything people are excited about right now. AI generated media. Synthetic influencers. Automated persuasion. Hyper targeted political ads. Personalized news feeds. “Creators” with invisible sponsors. Communities that look organic but are seeded and guided.
The future might look decentralized on the surface, with millions of voices, but still be oligarchic underneath, because the coordinating layer is owned.
Closing thought, and it’s not optimistic but it’s useful
The historical bond between oligarchy and communication technologies isn’t an accident. It’s structural. Communication is leverage. Leverage attracts power. Power concentrates leverage. Repeat.
In this Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series entry, the main takeaway is simple, maybe annoyingly simple.
If you want to spot oligarchy early, don’t only watch who buys companies. Watch who buys distribution. Watch who buys credibility. Watch who quietly becomes the default narrator.
Because the moment a medium becomes essential, someone will try to own the essential parts of it. And most of the time, they succeed.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
What is oligarchy beyond just wealth accumulation?
Oligarchy is not merely about a few people controlling disproportionate wealth; it's fundamentally a messaging system. It involves coordinated communication among elites, bureaucracies, security forces, courts, investors, and media to maintain power and influence.
How does communication technology impact the shape of oligarchies?
When communication technologies evolve, oligarchies adapt by changing their structure—sometimes becoming more centralized or decentralizing temporarily before recentralizing under new owners. Control over communication channels allows oligarchs to maintain dominance and influence public perception.
Why is controlling communication considered controlling reality in early empires?
Early empires managed communication through imperial roads, courier systems, scribes, and literacy monopolies. Controlling who could read, write, and disseminate information allowed rulers to govern narratives and maintain political power effectively.
How did the printing press change the dynamics of oligarchic control?
The printing press accelerated the spread of ideas but introduced new choke points like capital for presses, paper supply chains, distribution networks, licensing, and censorship. Oligarchs controlled these aspects to shape what was printed and circulated, often drowning dissenting ideas with approved narratives.
What role did newspapers play in modern oligarchic influence?
Newspapers became mass circulation factories requiring investors, advertising, political access, reliable sources, and monetizable audiences. Industrial capitalists used newspapers to define favorable public assumptions aligning with their interests by funding politicians and supporting compliant media outlets.
How do oligarchies manufacture public consent or exhaustion?
Oligarchies create mass consent or at least mass exhaustion by manufacturing beliefs that resistance is pointless or socially costly. This is achieved through repeated standardized messaging delivered via dominant communication networks to suppress dissent and maintain social control.
