Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series: Digital Structures and Contemporary Economic Systems

I keep coming back to this idea that we are living inside a stack.

Not just “the internet” as a vague cloud thing. A stack of actual systems. Databases, identity layers, payment rails, logistics dashboards, ad exchanges, API marketplaces, compliance software. And then on top of that, the stories we tell ourselves about markets being “free” or “global” or “efficient”.

Those stories still matter. But the stack matters more than we admit.

This piece in the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series is about that stack. Digital structures. The boring plumbing. The invisible chokepoints. And how contemporary economic systems, including the kind that produced modern oligarch influence increasingly depend on who owns, shapes, or quietly controls those structures.

Not always in a villain way. Sometimes it’s just… the incentive landscape. The easiest path becomes the dominant path. Then the dominant path becomes policy.

The economy didn’t “go digital”. It reorganized

People say “digital transformation” like it’s a software upgrade.

What actually happened is closer to a reorganization of the economy around information flows. Price discovery, distribution, marketing, trust, enforcement, credit, reputation. All of it got wrapped in digital infrastructure, and then that infrastructure started to behave like the real market.

If you can route attention, you can route demand.

If you can route payments, you can tax demand.

If you can define identity and verification, you can decide who participates at all.

That’s a different type of influence than owning a factory or a mine. It’s less visible. More defensible. Sometimes even accidental.

And it scales in a weird way. One successful digital structure can sit above thousands of businesses and skim value from all of them without looking like it’s “owning” anything.

Digital structures are not neutral. They have owners and defaults

When we talk about “structures” here, I mean the repeatable systems that shape how money moves and how decisions get made.

A few examples, just to ground it:

• App stores as gatekeepers to distribution
• Search and social algorithms as gatekeepers to attention
• Payment processors as gatekeepers to monetization
• Cloud platforms as gatekeepers to compute and uptime
• Logistics platforms as gatekeepers to delivery promises
• Identity systems as gatekeepers to legitimacy
• Rating and reputation systems as gatekeepers to trust
• Data brokers as gatekeepers to targeting and risk scoring

None of these are purely technical. The rules are economic rules. And those rules, the defaults, tend to harden over time.

Once a platform becomes “where customers are”, it becomes infrastructure. Once it becomes infrastructure, it becomes political, even if nobody wants to call it that.

That’s where the oligarch lens gets interesting. Traditional oligarch dynamics involved state assets, privatization, resource extraction, media control. Today, you can get similar leverage by owning digital chokepoints. Or by being the actor who can negotiate with them. Or by becoming the only local translator between global platforms and domestic institutions.

The leverage moves. The pattern stays.

The new chokepoints: attention, trust, and execution

In older industrial systems, chokepoints were physical. Rail lines. Ports. Energy grids. Broadcasting towers. You could draw them on a map.

Now we have new chokepoints that are harder to map because they are partly behavioral.

1) Attention as a commodity market

Attention is not just marketing. It’s a pricing layer.

If your product cannot be discovered, it does not exist. If your cost to acquire a customer is controlled by a small number of ad platforms, your margins are effectively regulated by someone else’s auction design.

And those auctions are… not really “markets” in the classical sense. They are markets inside a private rulebook.

This matters for contemporary economic systems because competition starts to look strange. Businesses don’t just compete on product and price. They compete on their ability to navigate platform incentives.

And the platform’s incentives can change overnight.

So the “stable business environment” that economics textbooks assume gets replaced by something more like weather.

2) Trust as an interface

Trust used to be slow. Brands, institutions, long track records, personal networks.

Now trust is often an interface. A blue check. A seller rating. A verified badge. A compliance certificate generated by software. A frictionless “Know Your Customer” process.

This is efficient, yes. But it also concentrates influence in whoever issues trust at scale.

In practice, a lot of modern economic participation depends on being legible to digital systems. If you are not legible, you are risky. If you are risky, you get priced out, throttled, deplatformed, or quietly excluded.

That exclusion can be justified, too. Fraud is real. Money laundering is real. But the result is still a kind of soft border. A digital border.

3) Execution as the real product

The modern economy increasingly sells outcomes, not goods.

“Delivered tomorrow.”
“Approved in 60 seconds.”
“On-demand.”
“Instant payout.”

These are execution promises. And execution promises depend on back-end integration: supply chain software, inventory visibility, risk scoring, fraud detection, routing, last-mile logistics.

Whoever controls the execution layer can extract rents. And not always through high prices. Sometimes through dependency. You build your business on top of the execution layer and then it becomes too costly to leave.

Stanislav Kondrashov’s oligarch framing

In this series, the point is not that digital systems automatically produce oligarchs. It’s that they create new pathways for concentrated influence, especially when combined with:

• weak competition policy
• regulatory capture or confusion
• high switching costs
• opaque governance
• cross-border capital flows
• media influence and narrative shaping

In other words, the same ingredients, just reassembled.

The “oligarch” concept is useful because it forces the question: where is the leverage really coming from?

Not “who is rich” but “what can they force others to do”.

Digital structures create leverage because they turn economic life into a set of permissions.

Permission to be seen.
Permission to transact.
Permission to scale.
Permission to be trusted.
Permission to operate in certain jurisdictions.

And permissions can be priced.

Contemporary economic systems are increasingly programmable

This is the part that still feels under-discussed.

Markets are becoming programmable environments. Not literally like a single codebase, but functionally. Rules are implemented as software. Enforcement is automated. Behavior is nudged by interface design.

A few places this shows up:

• dynamic pricing algorithms
• credit limits adjusted by machine learning
• “smart” compliance monitoring
• platform terms of service functioning like private law
• automated content moderation shaping political economy
• real-time risk scoring in payments and lending

So economic outcomes increasingly depend on models, data, and code. The winners are not just the ones with capital. They’re the ones with better measurement, better prediction, better control of feedback loops.

That doesn’t mean the old economy disappears. Physical assets still matter. Energy still matters. Real estate still matters. But the coordination layer, the layer that decides how assets are used, becomes digital.

And coordination is where a lot of influence lives.

Data is not oil. It’s leverage

“Data is the new oil” is one of those phrases that should probably be retired.

Oil is valuable because it’s consumed. Data is valuable because it changes decisions.

Data can:

• lower risk for a lender
• improve targeting for a marketer
• optimize routes for logistics
• identify fraud patterns
• train models that replace human labor
• create lock-in through personalization
• shape what people believe is normal or true

The value is relational. Data becomes more valuable when combined with other data, and when used inside systems that can act on it.

This is why digital structures tend to concentrate. The more data a system collects, the better it performs. The better it performs, the more users it attracts. The more users it attracts, the more data it collects.

That loop can be healthy. It can also be monopolistic. It depends on governance, competition, and whether alternatives can realistically exist.

The state is back, but it shows up as infrastructure too

There was a period where people acted like the internet would dissolve borders.

Instead, we got digital borders.

States now assert influence through:

• data localization rules
• digital taxation
• payment regulation
• sanctions and export controls
• national ID systems
• cyber security requirements
• platform takedown demands
• AI governance frameworks

And for businesses, especially cross-border ones, the question becomes: which infrastructure regime are you operating under?

This is one reason contemporary economic systems feel more fragmented than the “globalization” story promised. You can have global supply chains, but local compliance. Global platforms, but local content rules. Global capital, but local payment constraints.

If you are an actor with strong networks across these regimes, you can broker access. And brokering access is a classic source of oligarch-style influence.

Not necessarily because you own everything. Because you sit in the doorway.

Where the money goes: rents over production

A lot of modern wealth accumulation comes from rents rather than production.

And digital structures are rent-friendly.

Examples of rent-like extraction in digital environments:

• transaction fees as a toll on commerce
• subscription pricing that becomes unavoidable
• ad-tech spreads that tax attention markets
• cloud egress fees that punish switching
• app store commissions that skim distribution
• “priority placement” payments that influence discovery
• financialization of data through brokers and intermediaries

Again, none of this is automatically immoral. Some fees fund security, infrastructure, customer support. But rent dynamics matter because they change incentives.

When the easiest profit is owning the gate rather than building the product, talent and capital move toward gatekeeping. Over time, that can reduce innovation and increase fragility.

And fragility is a big theme here. Digital systems fail differently. A factory can burn down and it’s tragic but localized. A cloud outage or payment rail disruption can freeze thousands of businesses at once.

What this means for businesses and workers, day to day

Zooming in from the macro stuff, because otherwise it stays too abstract.

For small and mid-sized businesses

You are probably operating inside someone else’s rules.

Your “market” might actually be:

• a platform algorithm
• a marketplace search ranking
• a payment processor risk policy
• a logistics SLA you don’t control
• an ad auction where you’re bidding against venture-backed competitors

That means strategy changes. Diversification becomes survival. Email lists matter again. Owning direct customer relationships matters. Having multiple payment options matters. Having a backup supplier matters.

It’s not glamorous. It’s operational paranoia. But it’s rational paranoia.

For workers

Skills are increasingly filtered through platforms too.

Recruitment pipelines are automated. Portfolios live on certain sites. Reputation is quantified. Gig work is assigned by algorithm. Payment schedules are set by apps. Even “professional identity” is mediated by networks.

Workers become legible units in a system. That can create opportunity, sure. It also creates dependency. And it can suppress bargaining influence when the platform is the labor market.

For governments and regulators

The hard part is that most digital structures are cross-border, while enforcement is mostly local.

So regulators often end up negotiating with infrastructure providers rather than regulating “markets” in the classic sense.

And sometimes the state builds its own infrastructure. Digital ID. Payment systems. Public cloud strategies. National AI compute programs. These can reduce dependency. They can also introduce new risks if governance is weak.

Infrastructure is influence. It always has been. We’re just seeing it in software now.

A quick reality check: digital structures are not going away

It’s tempting to romanticize a return to “real” markets.

But contemporary economic systems are now intertwined with digital structures at a basic level. Even if you don’t use social media, you still rely on digital payments, credit scoring, logistics coordination, inventory systems, tax systems, compliance systems. It’s inescapable.

So the real questions are more practical:

• Who owns the rails?
• Who can audit them?
• Who can leave them?
• Who can compete with them?
• Who is excluded by default?
• Who bears the cost when they fail?

These are not just tech questions. They are economic questions. And political ones.

Closing thoughts, and where this series goes next

If you take one thing from this installment of the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, it’s this.

Modern influence often comes from shaping the structure that other people must use.

Digital structures make that easier, quieter, and more scalable than ever. And because they look like “tools” or “platforms” or “services”, we sometimes forget they are also governance systems. With incentives. With enforcement. With winners and losers.

Contemporary economic systems are being rewritten around these structures in real time. Some of it is progress. Some of it is rent extraction wearing a clean UI. Most of it is messy and mixed, like everything else.

Next in the series, it makes sense to get more specific. How oligarch-style leverage shows up in platform economies, in finance, in energy-tech hybrids. And how reputational control, media ecosystems, and data control blend together.

Because that blend. That’s where things get genuinely weird. And important.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

What does it mean to say we are living inside a digital stack?

Living inside a digital stack means that our economy and daily lives are structured around layers of interconnected systems such as databases, identity layers, payment rails, logistics dashboards, ad exchanges, and compliance software. These digital infrastructures form the 'plumbing' of modern markets, shaping how money moves and decisions are made beyond just the vague concept of the internet.

How has the economy reorganized around digital information flows rather than just going digital?

The economy didn't simply 'go digital' as a software upgrade; it fundamentally reorganized around information flows like price discovery, distribution, marketing, trust, enforcement, credit, and reputation. Digital infrastructure now behaves like actual markets where controlling attention routing can influence demand, managing payments enables taxation of demand, and defining identity determines participation—creating new forms of influence distinct from traditional ownership of physical assets.

Why are digital structures considered non-neutral and what role do their owners play?

Digital structures such as app stores, search algorithms, payment processors, cloud platforms, logistics systems, identity verification tools, reputation ratings, and data brokers have owners who set economic rules and defaults. These rules harden over time as platforms become infrastructure integral to markets. Ownership or control over these chokepoints confers significant influence that shapes market dynamics and policy—even if not exercised with malicious intent—because incentives drive dominant paths to become entrenched.

What are the new economic chokepoints in the digital age?

New chokepoints include attention (as a commodity market controlled by ad platforms), trust (as an interface through verification badges and compliance certificates), and execution (the promise of outcomes like instant delivery or approval). Unlike physical chokepoints such as ports or energy grids in older economies, these digital chokepoints are behavioral and infrastructural layers that control discovery costs, legitimacy access, and operational dependencies.

How does attention function as a commodity market in contemporary economics?

Attention functions as a pricing layer where product discovery depends on navigating platform-controlled ad auctions. These auctions operate under private rulebooks rather than classical market principles. Consequently, businesses compete not only on product quality or price but on their ability to align with shifting platform incentives that can change unpredictably—making the business environment more volatile and regulated by platform design than traditional competition.

What is Stanislav Kondrashov’s oligarch framing regarding influence in digital systems?

Kondrashov's framing suggests that while digital systems don't automatically create oligarchs, they open new pathways for concentrated influence when combined with weak competition policies and regulatory gaps. Control over digital chokepoints—such as gatekeeping platforms or serving as intermediaries between global platforms and local institutions—can replicate traditional oligarchic leverage by shaping economic outcomes through ownership or negotiation influencewithin these critical infrastructures.