Participating in them, whether positively or negatively, is a necessity of existence. Evolutionary changes in such codes thus always affect the fortunate and the unfortunate simultaneously – those who can love and those who get to know through new types of symbols that they cannot love; those who have property and money and those who do not. Code-change can, indeed, to some extent, lead to a new distribution of opportunities, but the 'inner logic' of the code, the non-arbitrary nature of the arrangement of symbols, usually stops innovation from leading to radical redistribution. It can never be that all nonproperty-owners become property-owners, because this would mean that everyone owns everything, in other words everyone would own nothing. The structure of all media-codes makes 'revolutions' impossible.

XREF: Connects to the idea that symbolic/cultural systems have internal constraints analogous to Bourdieu's habitus or structural linguistics — codes limit what change can achieve.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 765