In the olden days, it would have been the church and the local nobles calling the shots on the local community forum, staging a witch-hunt or a public hanging event to keep the topics within desired boundaries and squeezing money, engagement and thus community power towards certain projects and not others.

I agree with the idea of your post commenting on today's situation in capitalism, but disagree with the imo romanticised idea of how a community forum in the past would have functioned more independent and self-organising