Steve Jobs's thoughts on the Internet in 1996

It reads more like a conspiracy theory than anything to me. It is certainly long, which makes it look "sober", but what does that have to do with being accurate?

This reminds me of a story in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams illustrating psychological denial. It's about a man who returns a borrowed kettle that had been broken to his neighbor. To explain the damage he says "It's not broken; when I borrowed it, it was already broken; I never borrowed it!" In other words, three mutually incompatible explanations for what happened to try to avoid the facts. Here, you say that Wikipedia is not an oligarchy; and also, it is an oligarchy, but it's justified. The claim against my argument is that it's both too superficial and also an elaborate conspiracy theory, a complicated mindfuck that defies logic. Are these arbitrary outbursts not evidence in themselves of a refusal to consider the facts?

This logic of "Democracy is great! But of course we have to have some standards..." has been used to conceal elite power for centuries. In the US, political participation was originally reserved for white, male property owners, because it was thought that the standard for voting is rationality, which women and lesser races don't have. The elites permit democracy, but they reserve the right to decide what the standards for participation should be. Who decides what "good-faith" means? This isn't conspiracy, it is ideological delusion: elites become corrupt because they're convinced of their own benevolence, that because they stand for Democracy and Decentralization (today's empty signifiers, replacing God, Nation), preserving their elite position is justified. It is definitely not because they cynically manipulate, pulling the strings behind the scenes while laughing at the deluded masses. It's a natural human tendency to see yourself as acting only for the greater good, and to adopt an ideology that explains why what's good for you is good for all.

As I mentioned before, my preferred solution to elite power is not some fantasy of "true democracy", which only ends up concealing real power. Nor do I think that elite control is necessarily a bad thing, only concealing elite power behind mask of democracy. Scientific knowledge is an obvious arena where we are best served by having an elite. But if they abuse their power, we should be ready with the (metaphorical) guillotine. In the case of Facebook, the real response is not a different, more decentralized system, but the guillotine of strong privacy regulations. Or government enforcement of net neutrality, and so on. The libertarian & anti-government leanings of the tech community is more evidence in favor of my argument. Is this not just another way to defend an oligarchy? I think many sincerely believe that this is the best arrangement, but avoiding the facts might cast some doubt on this.