How does one buy consent for a worldview? Buying and selling require two parties - the party who is selling their viewpoint to the highest bidder isn't blameless.

Traditionally, through personal networks in media and industry — placing talking heads and op-ed’s and editorial direction to repeat your message.

More recently, purchasing a social network and then flooding it with your worldview.

The party who accepts the bid generally wins the election.

When you say “these days,” you mean the past 10,000 years, right?

Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies.

Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures. More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.

If you have bought consent, you have power.