power structures and dynamics

In the end, this quest for a moral billionaire forced me to confront my own beliefs about wealth, power, and the nature of goodness in a complex world. I finished the exercise with hope—not because I found a simple answer to the question of what it means to be both wealthy and virtuous, but because I have discovered that even among the most... See more

So philanthropy under this rubric is not about creating sanctuaries from or alternatives to the demands of capitalism. The benevolence, if you can call it that, is in giving people from the underclass a chance to succeed by its rules. With, of course, very patronizing and constraining surveillance from the funder. It’s neoliberal brainworms all the... See more

These women have thoroughly internalized the male gaze, their to-be-looked-at-ness, and arrived at a place of incredible power — as objects. Their struggle, as evidenced by the ample time we spend with those who’ve “retired,” is figuring a sense of self outside of that objecthood.

The world can feel very out of control, especially for younger people. And controlling your own body is a coping mechanism. Part of the solution, if there is one, is to educate about this. There's so much out there right now about diet culture, and no one is really talking about beauty culture in the same way.

At the same time, a lot of this would... See more

Now, the GoFundMe and DonorsChoose thing is closely related, but it gets its own throughline. These platforms emerge to seemingly supplement gaps in the public safety net for things like education and health care. But instead, they’re in a kind of enabling feedback loop: instead of your taxes ensuring that kids have desks and cancer patients can... See more

Chomsky and Robinson also acknowledge that other great powers acted in much the same way that the United States has, and these states also invented elaborate moral justifications—the “white man’s burden,” la mission civilisatrice, the need to protect socialism—to whitewash their atrocious conduct. Given that this behavior preceded the emergence of... See more

Millions of people — and white people in particular — would rather endure physical isolation, generalized loneliness, caregiving exhaustion, and financial precarity than relinquish some of their societal power. That’s a far less optimistic foundational myth than individualism. But it’s a far more honest one.

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture... See more

And here’s the hard part. You can’t just decide fuck individualism, I’m blowing it up . You have to replace it with a better, more equitable story of who we are as a country and how we organize our society. Which, for a lot of people, would mean giving up a modicum of power. Liberal white people can loathe the effects of individualism and still... See more