How Liberalism Becomes Oligarchy and Why Monero Matters More Than Zcash™ Liberalism never truly freed us – it only made us more efficiently governable. Its promise of freedom was never universal, but selective: the freedom of property has always meant the freedom to wield power over others. From this liberal dream, oligarchy inevitably arose – the enduring form in which power and wealth are concentrated in the same hands. Historically, this oligarchy wore two masks. In England and America, it appeared as a private-enterprise religion: the Calvinist spirit blessed the successful, and the market became the judge of morality. In Prussia and France, it was bureaucratic: rule by officials and experts who managed the populace with forms and seals. These systems – the cult of the pseudo-entrepreneur and the bureaucratic state – were never true opposites, but two expressions of the same principle: rule through property, control through systems. Today, they have merged – in technofeudalism. The state builds the legal infrastructure, subsidizes, regulates, and monitors. Corporations feed it with taxes, data, and lobbying, while figures like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel deploy their companies and projects to directly shape government functions. Market and state are no longer opposites – they are organs of a single body: the oligarchic megamachine. Tech billionaires are the new monarchs of this algorithmic aristocracy, envisioning a state as software they fully control: an operating system of compliant users. This new class understands that transparency (just like in Bitcoin) is necessary for control – but asymmetrically. They remain shielded behind trusts and offshore structures, while for the masses, financial sovereignty is a privilege that must be justified. That’s why Zcash is not a tool of liberation, but a Trojan horse. Its "optional anonymity" is the perfect model for technofeudal capitalism: the elite use privacy freely – CEOs, intelligence agencies, government networks, investment funds. They shield their wealth without accountability. The foot soldiers – workers, activists, dissidents – are suspected with every shielded transaction. Anonymity becomes an exception that must be explained. Maybe not for buying a coffee, but funds large enough to finance projects in parallel economies pose a real threat to the technofeudal order and must be tightly controlled. Monero, by contrast, is the opposite. It doesn’t shield optionally – it shields fundamentally. No hierarchy of the visible and invisible. No double standard where rulers keep accounts secret while the populace cannot evade regulations. It is the digital equivalent of an anonymous gathering in the forest: egalitarianism through opacity. The new oligarchy hates this. Their power depends on visibility – but only of others. The masses are meant to expose themselves, measure themselves, optimize themselves – until they perfectly match the machine. This "self-optimization" is not progress, it is conditioned obedience – the prelude to the transhuman turn. For the tech elite, domination is not enough. They want to redesign what it means to be human. When labor and consumption are no longer needed, when machines outperform us, humans become errors to be corrected. Transhumanism is the final form of liberal oligarchy: total control, extended into flesh and code. Yet we still have a way out – in the shadows, in encryption, off-grid. Our home is not the regulated market, but the agora of free individuals in black markets. Perhaps history will begin again where the light of surveillance ends – not as the progress of machines, but as the return of humans.