> But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?
One of the big ones is the calling to naively eliminate government regulation, imagining that will always make things "more free", while ignoring that corpos are perfectly willing to create private regulations on their own. This often ends up amounting to facilitating de facto government, despite some epsilon of choice.
There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".