It's so frustrating because even the notionally good actors look at this and think "yeah but it's not gonna corrupt me"

No you fuck, the only way to walk the good path is to give up power and never let it concentrate again.

Larry Ellison of course is one of the most anti human people on the planet and I doubt he was ever anything else.

The real question is whether the threshold before it causes irreversible corruption is before or after the point where you can make real change. The latter is obviously quite terrifying as it essentially means that democracy will always be corrupt (unless time is a factor perhaps)

I think resiliency to the corruption isn't evenly distributed among the populace, there are definitely those people who are capable of resisting it long enough to get shit done. I just think it's mostly the levels of abstraction that these people have between them and anything real.

Honestly, if you suggest surveillance state shit, you should just be mandated to livestream your life 24/7, you have nothing to hide right?

It's never irreversible. Every generation has to go through this.

I meant irreversible to the individual, ie they can't be shown they're corrupt and change their ways