Kevin A. Carson — The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks (2016)
Carson extends his mutualist political economy into a comprehensive analysis of how state regulatory apparatuses have been captured by incumbent industries to suppress competition, prevent market entry, and protect rent extraction — while presenting themselves as public interest institutions. The result is not a free market but a cartelized one, with regulatory compliance serving as a barrier to entry for challengers.
The second half of the book argues that networked technologies — peer-to-peer platforms, open-source development, encrypted communications, cryptoeconomics — represent a “counter-power” that routes around regulatory capture rather than trying to reform it through politics. This is not libertarian utopianism but a structural argument: when the cost of replicating key institutional functions (dispute resolution, reputation, currency, publishing) drops to near zero through open protocols, the leverage of the regulatory state diminishes.
For OM: Carson’s framework bridges the Moloch critique and the extitutional strategy. Institutions are not neutrally dysfunctional; they are actively captured. Extitutional resistance is not just culturally valuable but politically necessary.