The Conspicuous Elite

Peter Ayolov, Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’, 2026

Abstract

By 2026, the institutional power elite described by C. Wright Mills has not dissolved but reappeared as a conspicuous platform elite, whose authority depends on continuous visibility, biographical myth, and algorithmic amplification. Power is exercised less through discrete command and deliberation than through spectacle, attention, and the conversion of domination into an aspirational life-model. Rereading The Power Elite from the standpoint of 2026, the article foregrounds Mills’s 1956 warning about ‘higher immorality’: a structural condition in which decision-makers at the summits of corporate, political, and military power are insulated from the moral consequences of their actions by distance, scale, bureaucracy, and abstraction. The article argues that higher immorality was never a period detail of mid-century America but an early diagnosis of a durable logic of modern power that has since intensified under platform capitalism. In the contemporary environment of celebrity governance, technical delegation, and algorithmic mediation, higher immorality operates less through secrecy and denial than through public performance and normalisation. In this sense, elite rule culminates in what this article calls ‘The Conspicuous Elite’ or ‘Platform Elite’, where authority is no longer concealed by institutions but performed openly through visibility, narrative, and attention.

Keywords

Higher immorality; C. Wright Mills; power elite; conspicuous elite; platform elite; sociological imagination; platform capitalism; authority and visibility; organised irresponsibility; democratic accountability.

Introduction: When Power Became a Life Model

Mills wrote The Power Elite against the reassuring myth that modern power was dispersed and democratically answerable. From 2026, his diagnosis looks less exaggerated than unfinished. The elites he mapped have not vanished; they have learned to present themselves as moral and cultural protagonists, converting authority into a continuous public narrative. In the platform era, elite biographies no longer sit behind offices and procedures but circulate as spectacle, offered as proof of competence, destiny, and superiority. Visibility becomes a mode of rule: power not only decides, but performs deciding, and the performance becomes part of its legitimacy.

From Institutional Authority to Conspicuous Rule

In Mills’s time, elite power was anchored in corporate, political, and military command posts, and prestige depended increasingly on ‘publicity machines’. By 2026, the image of rule has migrated from the command post to the feed. The elite does not merely inhabit institutions; it inhabits attention. Wealth, influence, and exemption are displayed rather than disguised, while responsibility is dispersed into procedure, expertise, and technical necessity. The decisive shift is not that structure has been replaced by image, but that institutional domination and media performance have fused, making rule appear as success and inequality as destiny.

The Warning of ‘Higher Immorality’

Mills’s concept of higher immorality names a form of organised irresponsibility produced by scale, distance, and bureaucratic insulation. In 2026, this condition is amplified by platform infrastructures that fragment publics, outsource judgment, and reframe power as optimisation. Moral language proliferates—security, resilience, innovation—while moral consequence becomes structurally irrelevant. The result is a political culture in which domination does not need to justify itself as right; it only needs to remain visible, admired, and narratively convincing.

Conclusion: When Power No Longer Needs to Hide

Reread from 2026, Mills’s work is less a Cold War artefact than a sociological warning that has matured into a new cultural form. Authority has learned to survive through conspicuousness: it presents itself as exemplary life while embedding responsibility in systems that diffuse accountability. The central democratic problem is no longer only hidden rule, but the seduction of rule in plain sight—power that is watched, followed, and internalised as aspiration. Mills’s warning about ‘higher immorality’ therefore returns as a present diagnosis: when elites are insulated from consequence, immorality stops appearing immoral and becomes normality, with decay recoded as disruption and antinomian exemption recoded as virtue. Smirnenski’s Stairs to Power remains the final image: ascent is purchased step by step through surrendered hearing, borrowed sight, and finally the loss of heart and memory—until the climber reaches the summit convinced that domination is destiny and the suffering below has, conveniently, ‘nothing to do with me’.

Bibliography

Mills, C.W. (1956) The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mills, C.W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wolfe, A. (2020) ‘Afterword’. In: Mills, C.W. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.