On: French stars are rightly worried by billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Here’s how to r

Diary Entry

I read today of a billionaire’s tightening grip on the media, a story framed as a battle for democracy. The proposed remedy is a fund, a perpetual institution to act as a bulwark. This brought to mind a passage from the apocryphal Encyclopaedia of Perpetual Remedies (Cairo, 1937), which defines such an institution as “a fortress whose sole purpose is to defend against the existence of fortresses.” The structure is familiar: to counter a concentration of power, one proposes a counter-concentration, a mirror held up to the original threat. The new entity, in its founding charter, must inevitably define the very powers it seeks to limit, and in that definition, it becomes their cartographer. It does not erase the labyrinth; it publishes its most authoritative map.

The article speaks of “protecting democracy in perpetuity.” The phrase is a perfect circle, a sentence that seeks to contain its own future. But a thing protected in perpetuity is no longer a practice; it is a museum piece, a sacred text under glass. The fund, in its eternal vigilance, would become the thing it guards against: a centralised authority deciding what constitutes a threat, curating the acceptable narratives. It would be a Ministry of Democracy, and its first act would be to file away its own blueprint as the definitive example of democratic salvation.

They fear the tycoon’s narrative. Yet the true labyrinth is not his control of the story, but our belief that a story can be controlled. Every narrative contains the seeds of its own counter-narrative; every library of approved thought secretly shelves the books that argue for its burning. The fund, I suspect, would eventually need a sub-fund to monitor the fund’s own influence, and so on, in an infinite regress of guardianship. The path not taken - to let the narratives clash in the open square, without a permanent referee - is now the phantom path, the one that haunts the architecture of the proposed solution. The solution is a mirror, and in it, the problem stares back, wearing different clothes.