There was a point not that long ago when all the rulers of Europe were cousins. Maybe it's easier now but power has always been very concentrated. Think the impact the internet has is that we all know about it now.
But the increased ease of centralization in modern democracies that the Internet made possible is incontrovertible.
Which isn’t any special insight on my part.
Centralization has increased and decreased in many forms throughout history. There are many forces working in either direction.
I would also suggest that seeing more corruption in the open, is more likely to indicate more corruption out of sight as well, rather than the opposite.
An anonymous organization has collected and released the collected knowledge of humanity. Included among this, they also collected and released the entire music catalog of a major tech company. They got sued for $322M, with a default judgment levied against them, but nobody can collect because nobody knows who this organization is.
The output of this organization has then been hoovered up by not one, not two, but by roughly a dozen different AI companies. Which they used to train models so effective that the U.S. government forbid the release of them under national security concerns. And then backed down after some token concessions because these models are too important to the U.S. military to go without.
There's a rule of thumb I use, which is that organizations that loudly chest-thump about how powerful they are and make a big show about exercising that power are anything but powerful. The reason they need to broadcast it loudly is because they are insecure that it will shortly be undermined otherwise. True power whispers; it's Eisenhower saying he needs an interstate highway system for national defense purposes (oh, and civilian transit would be nice too), and it happening before the end of his presidency because he had 80%+ approval ratings.
The nation state has never been weaker. I suspect the only reason it hasn't been replaced yet is that any of the organizations that could challenge it are enjoying unprecedented wealth, and there's no sense risking that for conflict.
Economics has always played a massive role in our politics.
How did we escape kings and feudalism? International markets opening through technological innovation enabled capital to generate enormous sums of wealth that challenged the old older.
What enabled postwar democracy? The ruling empire, the American, was "democratic", coupled with the destruction of all the wealth of Europe, meaning all the old oligarchs lost a substantial amount of power. Turns out royalists have less power when they don't have the finances to enforce their views.
Political power has also always depended on economic power. And later on, post 1970s, financial power (the private bank's ability to print money for free, something that used to belong solely to the state).
Financial and economic power has totally taken over government power, in many cases in an unholy marriage (as in America). The DMCA, the US forcing its laws down other nation's throats through treaties, etc, were the economic ruling class using the American government to enact their policy decisions for their own benefit.
And now with the internet we are regressing towards feudalism. Apple and Google extract 30% rents from every single mobile software purchase. The lords of old can only dream of such wealth generation through no productive effort of their own. Amazon likewise extracts insane rents from its sellers. Sure, in small pockets, there is resistance, but on a societal scale the commons, the average person, has absolutely been beaten back.
In general, bad corruption is no surprise in an authoritarian country, as opposed to a democracy, and of course an authoritarian country has concentrated power by design.
> There was a point not that long ago when all the rulers of Europe were cousins.
This somewhat misleading. The King of England, for instance, has not been the "ruler" of England for hundreds of years.