Works through existing institutions — courts, media, elections — dismantling them from inside while maintaining the appearance of legitimacy. Nothing looks illegal until it's too late because legality is being redefined in real time. The democratic forms remain. The democratic function is hollowed out. Requires patience, bureaucratic precision, and a population that mistakes procedure for protection.

Doesn't build the conditions — reads them correctly and moves. Genuine institutional failure, genuine economic grievance, genuine cultural anxiety — all real, all pre-existing. The disruptor didn't create the kindling. They brought the match. Faster and louder than the consolidator. Potentially less structurally durable because the institutions haven't been fully captured. But durability isn't the point. The window is.

Zero-accountability architecture from birth. No path to power meant no friction, no testing, no corrective moment where the system could have said no. The pathology has no origin story because there was never a point it could have been stopped. What the others had to dismantle — checks, oversight, dissent — never existed here. The question is not how they got this way. The question is what a human being becomes when no one has ever said no to them.

Genuinely new. No historical precedent fits because the mechanism didn't exist before. Private capital accumulation reaching the scale of state power, then purchasing proximity to that power without election or inheritance. Satellite internet. AI frontier. Global public discourse infrastructure. The formal democratic process wasn't circumvented — it was made irrelevant by operating in the spaces between it. One private citizen with zero democratic oversight and more direct leverage over daily life than most elected governments.