The straw man of Cognitive Mercantilism

I was reading Ben Thompson’s “The End of the Internet” and he referenced off to Venkatesh Rao’s “Cognitive Mercantilism”

I think the overall optimism of the essay is warranted, but I think it’s framed against a straw man that doesn’t exist. Maybe I’m being overly semantic, but using “mercantilism” implied some aspect of state power. Even if extending the concept of mercantilism to any kind of centralized authority (i.e. a guild or society) I struggled to see the world he was describing. One line that stood out to me was:

“The entire intellectual economy has been organized around the assumption that intelligence is expensive to produce and therefore must be carefully rationed.”

Maybe I’m not catching what’s meant by “intellectual economy” but rationing implies a deliberate limit imposed by a central authority which isn’t how I see things working. Anyone can learn and gather intelligence through a variety of means. However, we DO have incentive structures that are aligned to gate the deployment of intelligence primarily via credentialism and regulation and IP laws. Some of it for good reasons, some of it for bad reasons. But I’m not seeing intelligence being “carefully rationed” anywhere. I think the rest of the essay glances at some interesting notions of new opportunity