Access vs. Governance

The distinction between access and governance is the distinction between consumer choice and democratic participation, and the conflation of the two is one of the most durable ideological operations available to the hegemonic order. The nineteenth-century factory worker had access to employment. The employment was real, and the wage was real, and the worker's material condition was often better inside the factory than outside it. But access to employment was not democratic governance of the factory. The distinction was the entire terrain of the labor movement. The Gramsci volume applies the same analytical distinction to the AI transition, revealing how the rhetoric of democratization functions as ideological substitute for the reality of platform subordination.