timelets: (Default)
timelets ([personal profile] timelets) wrote2020-10-15 01:18 pm

Sea people vs land people

..he[Themistocles] fastened the city to the Piraeus, and the land to the sea. 4 And so it was that he increased the privileges of the common people as against the nobles, and filled them with boldness, since the controlling power came now into the hands of skippers and boatswains and pilots. Therefore it was, too, that the bema in Pnyx, which had stood so as to look off toward the sea, was afterwards turned by the thirty tyrants so as to look inland, because they thought that maritime empire was the mother of democracy, and that oligarchy was less distasteful to tillers of the soil.

--- Plutarch, The Life of Themistocles.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Themistocles*.html


Even when a new highly beneficial technology-business space emerges, government power is not transferred by itself. Rather, it requires a conscious effort to redistribute it toward the new industry.