In the U.S., we evaluate corporations as investment vehicles, not as institutions whose existence can be morally contested. ESG data, sustainability disclosures, and impact reports have been used to reinforce that frame. Ideas of pragmatism, objectivity, and the tyranny of metrics have sidelined personal judgment and enabled the powerful to continue their pursuits of accumulation by exploitation. To spend any time considering the merits of emissions reductions being performed by companies that knowingly cause 25% of all cancers and kill over 8 million people each year is to abandon any potential for critical thinking.

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In 2026, we are in a different moment. The pretense of the “good corporation” is thinning. DEI initiatives have been rolled back. ESG departments are being downsized. Layoffs and stock buybacks continue even as executives receive record compensation. The theater of responsibility is giving way to a more naked display of greed.

This offers an opportunity. The exposure of the true nature of corporations and a peek at the men behind the curtain (see the Epstein files) is galvanizing people all over the world. No longer obfuscated behind statements of equity and impact, the public is becoming more aware that wealth is being extracted upward by powerful actors and that awareness is creating intense resentment, especially when people compare their own worsening conditions to the visible gains of those at the top.

We are in the middle of an awakening to the failure of our economic system. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans give capitalism the lowest rating ever recorded, and favorable views of big business have collapsed to 37%. There is also broad recognition about the growing wealth inequality in the U.S., and economic anxiety is turning into systemic grievance, according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Survey.

The efficacy of morality-washing efforts is waning, and there is proof of a social tipping point. Right now, changes are occurring:

• Corporate boycotts are being normalized

• Legislation advancing community wealth building is being passed

• And there are local and regional efforts to decrease the power of big corporations. For instance, across the country, cities are looking at creating public banks to put public dollars back into community development.

The accumulation of these efforts produces a fundamental transformation in our social system. Research on social tipping points suggests that when a committed minority reaches a critical threshold, institutional change can happen. Once people begin to question the legitimacy of the systems they’ve lost faith in, the legitimacy of those systems degrades, and abandonment accelerates.

This is the moment we’re in. At an individual level, your actions may seem small. But taken together—brand boycotts, protests, and everyday demands for accountability from friends, family, and community—these are the building blocks of a movement. Three years ago, it may have felt reasonable to make a case for big tobacco, or excuse companies like Target because they had a DEI policy in place, or overlook Starbucks’ union-busting because they “ethically source” their coffee. Today, those justifications are harder to sustain.

As my favorite thinker, Jenny Odell, tells us in her book How to Do Nothing,

“Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility … what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.”

A new economy, focused on people and place, is becoming possible right now because we are noticing. Let’s keep it up.

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On Sunday, I ran with hundreds of people through the streets, tracing a route that, on a map, shared how we all feel. These actions, and countless others across the country, did more than generate media attention or political pressure. They reminded me and many others of something deeply important: I am not alone. I am scared. I am grieving. And so are so many others, and we are choosing to respond together.

Recently, in a conversation about the murder and demonstrations in response to the killing of Renee Good, a friend told me that protests don’t matter. I almost jumped out of my seat. Yes, they do. Collective action matters. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t see armed men trying to intimidate protestors, criminalize dissent, or suppress organizing. Power does not fear irrelevance.

History backs this up. As the Brookings Institution notes, the United States has seen numerous successful protest movements across the political spectrum, the environmental movement, women’s rights, and civil rights, all of which followed a similar pattern: clear goals, mass mobilization, political pressure, and eventual policy change. Protest works not because it produces instant results, but because it builds the conditions for transformation.

And that’s the part Americans struggle with. Protest is slow. It demands patience, strategy, coalition-building, candidate recruitment, fundraising, and sustained participation. This clashes with a culture trained for immediacy and individual gratification. We are conditioned to act in our own self-interest. Single-family homes, solo commutes, consumption as fulfillment, “personal responsibility” as moral doctrine — these norms weaken our capacity to act collectively. They atrophy the muscles required for solidarity.

We see the consequences everywhere: the erosion of labor unions, declining civic participation, and the democratic backsliding now unfolding in real time. This erosion has made way for an extreme concentration of power and wealth. When we expect things to change immediately but have limited power, we come to believe our actions don’t make a difference, and when people no longer think they can make a difference, they disengage. In that vacuum, oligarchs and autocrats rush in.

Researchers studying democratic erosion across countries found that economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of democratic decline. As wealth concentrates at the top, trust in institutions collapses. Participation drops. Polarization deepens. Democracy weakens.

The inverse is also true. The more economic resources held by the bottom half of the population, the stronger the democracy. Researchers illustrate this by comparing Sweden and the United States. Sweden, with a far more equitable distribution of income (a Gini coefficient of 0.264)*, faces a predicted democratic erosion risk of just 4 percent. The U.S., with far greater inequality (0.384), faces more than double that risk.

Sweden didn’t arrive there by accident. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was deeply unequal, ruled by a small elite. It became one of the world’s most resilient democracies through collective action: progressive taxation, strong labor rights, and expansive social welfare. The result was higher voter turnout, greater trust, political stability, and a democracy far more durable than ours.

If we want to reclaim democracy, we have to relearn how to act together. And by acting together, we can lift up the whole and rebalance power and wealth. But to do that, we have to resist the constant pull toward immediate satisfaction and self-interest and instead orient ourselves toward the whole: our communities, our neighbors, our shared future. Collective action is not optional. It is the price of a livable, democratic society.

And it starts when we show up for each other. The next time you hear about a protest, don’t sit out, show up. When you’re there, be kind, be safe, and support the collective.

_______

* The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality, ranging from 0 to 1, where 0 represents perfect equality (everyone has the same income) and 1 represents extreme inequality (one person holds all the wealth).

The United States is being run by a collection of Scrooge McDucks wearing MAGA hats. I imagine them bathing together in their gold coins as they send federally employed mercenaries out to kill and kidnap people. All this is to say: my ambition to redistribute power and wealth feels constrained right now, given the accelerating power of billionaires and the escalating attacks on civil rights.

Instead, the focus that feels most crucial in this moment is strengthening the knots in our social fabric—watching out for each other and building networks of care. We’re seeing this in Minneapolis: people organizing to ensure that they and their neighbors stay safe, sheltered, and resourced. We also have to combat the misinformation designed to fracture collective action, especially the narrative about the “violence of immigrants,” which conveniently distracts from the ways this administration is plundering the economy. Grace Blakeley describes this clearly:

“The migrant-blaming story has no end point—because it will never deliver the safety and prosperity people crave. Americans’ lives will keep getting worse and, in response, the state’s list of enemies will continue to expand. Like a medieval doctor trying to excise a disease he has misdiagnosed, Trump will keep slicing away at the American body politic until there is nothing left.”

So what do we do in this moment of violence, economic collapse, and fear? We acknowledge what’s happening and we act.

A friend posted over the weekend about the murder of Alex Pretti’s murder, and someone commented, imploring him to “keep politics off of LinkedIn.” It is critical that we are clear about this: the murder of people in the street for exercising their First Amendment rights is not “political.” It is a necessary naming of state violence—violence that threatens lives, civil rights, our economy, and even business interests.

Do not ignore what’s happening to get through your day. Speak about it. Bring it up in meetings. Acknowledge the pain with your neighbors and your coworkers. Don’t push it down, lift up the lives that have been taken and the fear spreading across the country.

Because here’s the deal: if we ignore what’s happening in Minneapolis, we will have less power and less collective support when they come for us. And they will, unless we treat this for what it is, a violation of our rights, and a country’s leadership sanctioning the murder of its own people.

As M. Gessen says on entering the logic of state terror:

“If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency. But that’s not how state terror works.”

What to Do

The information below is copied from Leona Waller’s 5 Things Every American Should Do article. I highly recommend that you read the full post.

1. Call your Senators (cost: 2-5 min)

Do it now, because this specific action is only applicable until January 30th. The House already passed the DHS funding bill, so we focus on the Senate now.

A landslide of calls to our lawmakers will register on the Richter scale. Lawmakers bow to Trump when they think that’s the only way of keeping their power. They need to be reminded that the people’s ability to cost them their seat at the table is greater.

So we’re going to call them EVERY DAY UNTIL JANUARY 30TH. Jamming phone lines has been shown to be an effective way to get our reps to pay attention. (If your senators’ inboxes are full, that’s a good sign! Call back the next day.)

Find the name and number of your senators simply by going to 5calls.org and putting in your zip code. You’ll be given a script.

2. Donate to legal funds that are supporting immigrants and ICE detainees (cost: whatever $ you can spare each month)

• National Immigrant Justice Center

• Immigrant Defense Project

• Impact Fund

• Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee

3. Divest from the companies that support ICE (cost: first-world convenience and comforts)

According to Ice Out of My Wallet and the Save America Movement, these are the brands we should be boycotting:

1. Home Depot - They literally allow ICE agents to patrol their stores and parking lots without warrants. Luckily, Lowe’s and Ace have everything anyway, minus the fascist aftertaste.

2. Target - They’ve rolled over to Trump’s racist nonsense and have set a standard for corporations going along with the right-wing playbook. If you need new sheets, go to Marshalls.

3. Hilton Hotels - They house ICE agents, and punish their branches that don’t. No prob, there are a million cheaper hotels.

4. Amazon - Their web services (AWS) is the digital backbone of ICE’s machinery. Yes. It is time to cancel Prime. It’s been time to cancel Prime, but now it’s actually time.

5. Whole Foods - They’re part of Amazon so they’re dead to us. Just get a Thrive Market subscription instead, its got the same stuff for cheaper.

4. Prepare for ICE coming to your neighborhood (cost: 2-6 hours)

Having a strong network of local whistleblowers can quite literally save people from being detained and deported, keep families together, and potentially save lives.

On your own, or even better with friends and neighbors, work your way through these slides, provided by Minneapolis Area Synod, and identify a group of community members who are ready to go.

5. Do a lit drop (cost: $10-20 and 1-2 hours)

People are upset, afraid, and yet, still busy with everyday life. Bring easy action to them.

Here’s a PDF version of Leona’s post. Print 100 copies of it, and then:

• hand them out at your local grocery store

• put them on cars

• slip them under your neighbors’ doors.

And, most of all, take care of each other out there. Please post in the comments what you are doing, how you are feeling, and any other great resources for people who want to act now.

She has a sharp sensibility, a clear self-awareness, and since I’ve known her, she’s been in charge of marketing at three different companies. I’ve watched her evolve from an enthusiastic employee to a depressed and cynical leader. And the degradation of her spirit is entirely due to the nature of work in the United States. In one especially emotional call, she lamented its absurdity,

“It doesn’t matter how high you climb, the ridiculousness of business remains. Everything is so urgent and then meaningless at the same time. And what I’ve discovered is, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive assistant or a VP; it’s that way all the time. We’re told it’s normal to be thrashing around like this. But I think it’s ridiculous.”

Thrashing is the perfect way to describe what it’s like to spend the days of your life sprinting from task to task, in an asymmetric relationship where your sole purpose is to make someone else rich. The absence of meaning weighs heavy. For Julia, the weight caused anxiety that activated an autoimmune disease. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and had weekly migraines. She had no choice but to keep working,

“We have a board that we have to satisfy. So much of my well-being, because I need money, is reliant on rooms full of mostly men who have no interest in my well-being. Yet, I have to show up here and sacrifice some of my well-being in order to achieve my well-being. And that’s the nature of work.”

Specifically, this is the nature of work in a system where shareholder primacy rules and workers are considered “human capital”—a resource to extract energy from.

After working in this system, I burned out and went to graduate school in search of a solution that could change the conditions for workers. As part of a Master’s in Cultural Anthropology, I conducted a study on businesses that consider themselves part of the “business for good” movement. These are companies that received a B Corp Certification, a stamp that indicates that the business operates in socially and environmentally responsible ways. What I uncovered was that the companies that truly transformed workers’ lives weren’t the ones with the best DEI strategies or sustainability reports. They were the ones where employees shared ownership.

Good jobs and economic security are structurally impossible if workers don’t have ownership.

Ownership that is shared rebalances resources and the distribution of power; this creates better work environments, stronger businesses, and a more resilient economy. People can only escape wage labor when they are owners, and our country can only escape the current situation of concentration and scarcity by making ownership more accessible. Lucky for us, there are great examples of how to do that across the United States and internationally.

Shared ownership is not a utopian or experimental idea; it is a proven business model that has existed for decades—and in some cases, more than a century. Today, nearly 7,000 U.S. companies operate with employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), including widely-recognized brands like Bob’s Red Mill, King Arthur Baking Company, and Publix Super Markets. In addition, there are close to 1,000 worker cooperatives across the country. These are businesses that share ownership, profits, and governance power with the people who do the work.

One employee-owner I spoke with at StoneAge Manufacturing, an ESOP, recently said of her experience, “It is vastly different than any other job that I’ve had, where you go in, clock in, do your crap, go home, don’t think about it,” instead, “we are owners—we see what we do and how it affects the bottom line and how that affects us, which is amazing.” The control she has as an owner is meaningful: “We’re not beholden to this nebulous group of people who are calling the shots in the background. We have agency.”

At StoneAge, employee ownership delivers real financial benefits. Workers receive profit-sharing distributions twice per year, often equivalent to an entire paycheck, that they use for practical needs like debt repayment, home repairs, or car maintenance. Beyond immediate cash, employees automatically receive shares through the ESOP at no cost to them, building wealth tax-free over time. Long-tenured employees have accumulated big balances, with some using their ESOP funds to retire early or change lifestyles entirely. The ownership structure also creates unusual growth potential: employees report pay increases of $15,000 over just three years through role development. This form of business transforms work from pure wage labor into genuine wealth-building, where employees benefit directly from the company’s success rather than simply exchanging time for a wage.

Work, as it is currently organized, controlled by a few, is inhumane. Many people exist in jobs where they feel terrible and assume it’s a “them problem.” It’s not. This is a systems problem. The incentives for standard businesses prioritize capital accumulation, and that creates terrible conditions for people and the environment. So what are we all supposed to do? Here are a few ideas:

• Find a new job in an employee-owned company. You can find roles listed on employee ownership job boards or search for specific positions within ESOP and worker cooperatives by identifying companies that you want to work for.

• If your leadership is warm to new ideas, suggest starting small with open book management and basic wealth-sharing activities like profit sharing, phantom stock, shared equity, etc.

• Get involved in the employee ownership ecosystem. Learn more about the state support centers, or reach out to me, and I can point you in the right direction, depending on your interest.

The current state of work is a choice, not a law of nature. Thousands of employee-owned companies already exist—they're not experiments, they're proof. The question isn't whether shared ownership works; it's why we tolerate a system where people like Julia have to wreck their health to earn a living. We can expand what works, or we can keep asking workers to choose between their lives and their livelihoods. I know which future I'm fighting for.

On a Wednesday in early October, I stood in the TSA line at LaGuardia Airport, anxious. I was in New York for a conference and planned to return home to Colorado on Thursday, but worried that if I waited, I would never get home, so that morning I moved my flight up. My travel coincided with the government shutdown and the subsequent delays due to staffing shortages. We were on day eight, and the unpaid “essential workers” at the airport seemed to share my vibe.

After having my face scanned by a computer and mechanically ushered through a gate, I placed my bags in the trays on the conveyor belt and followed them until they entered the dome of assessment. I stood alongside the metal frame, watching the TSA agent, sitting in his chair, reviewing objects in neon hues of blue, green, pink, and purple. A female agent stood next to him and, in a hushed tone, said, “You have a voice, you need to use it.” He stared straight ahead.

Because Congress didn’t reach a funding agreement, the government shut down on October 1 and remained that way until November 12. It was the longest closure in U.S. history. When a shutdown happens, “essential workers” like the people working at airports, working for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Air Traffic Control (ATC), have to continue showing up to work anyway, unpaid. The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 guarantees back pay for federal employees, but in the meantime, they can expect missed paychecks. A week into the shutdown, the Administration was threatening that there would be no back pay for workers during the closure.

Again, his colleague pressed, “God gave you a voice, you’re not going to use it?”

Amidst the promise of no pay, workers had begun calling in sick, resulting in short-staffed airports. Those that were still showing up, like the folks I encountered, were potentially considering a strike.

“Use it.” I wanted to say. But that divide—the one between me, a member of the public, and a federal employee—didn’t feel like mine to cross, and I needed to get home. I needed these people to work, so that I could get on a plane and back to my family, paid for their labor or not.

The longest government shutdown before the one in 2025 was in 2019 and lasted for 35 days. It ended when not enough ATC staff showed up to work. Many predicted this would be how the Congressional impasse would end this time. The conversation I overheard validated my concerns about getting home and made me uneasy about the risks of flying in such a tense environment.

Under conditions like those in a government closure, safety is compromised. TSA agents find, on average, 7,000 guns every year. With increased stress and strained staffing under the realities of the shutdown, attention to detail is likely to wane. Similarly, the primary purpose of ATC is to prevent collisions and organize the flow of air traffic. ATCs have already been complaining about staffing levels before the shutdown, so even a minor labor dispute could have a lasting impact, with pilots flying blind.

With these workers under intense job, personal, and financial stress, everyone’s safety is at risk. And yet, we all carry on, on separate planes.

***

I made it through security, but my flight was late. After the third delay, when the departure time moved from thirty minutes late to forty-five, I decided to get a snack. I walked to the nearest newsstand and grabbed a package of Starburst. There were a couple of people staffing the store, but no cashier stand, only self-checkouts. I feel guilty any time I use self-checkout. I worry that the attendants are watching me as I do their work for them, and we’re both deprived of the social interaction that might smooth over the experience through a shared connection.

Self-checkout is everywhere. As of 2024, 96% of grocery stores offer self-checkout options, with an estimated 10,000 global retailers having installed self-checkout systems. Adoption is expected to more than double by 2030. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, self-checkout and online sales have been the main drivers in the declining number of cashier jobs, and according to Labor Department data, there were about 1.2 million people working as cashiers in 2023, compared to 1.4 million in 2019. The BLS expects the number to fall by another 10% over the next decade.

I smiled at the attendant standing nearby as I approached the computer. I scanned my Starburst and looked at the total when one of the staff, a small, swift man, came toward me and scanned his badge at my computer. For a moment, I was confused. I hadn’t pushed a call button, and there didn’t seem to be any error that would have drawn him over, but then I looked at the screen; an employee discount had been applied to my purchase. It was small, but still, an offering—perhaps even an act of resistance. I looked to him with a wide grin, which he returned on his way to scan his badge for another customer. A corporate man might look at this situation with scorn, as a theft, but considering the full picture, it’s worth asking, “Who is stealing from whom?”

In addition to whittling down an entire category of jobs, under a self-checkout paradigm, customers are now unpaid “workers.” This free consumer labor has executives frothing at the ways they can further cut labor costs by maximizing the self-scan concept, all the while eliminating our opportunities to connect, automating our lives, and surveilling everyone. What made this interaction so meaningful to me was this sweet man’s generosity and courage to go out on a limb and cross social boundaries to insist on creating a connection.

Usually, when I travel, I am on autopilot, just moving through the actions, not paying much attention to the workers making it happen. But in the context of the shutdown, I was piqued, my attention honed on the people responsible for getting me home. It has long been shown that in times of disaster or high stress, pro-social behaviors prevail, and human connection becomes more possible. In the chaos of this travel experience, boundaries between customer and employee were blurred, and we were just humans.

In this situation, on this travel day, it became clear to me how dignity is stolen from all of us. The workers, whether employed by the government or corporations, are forced to labor for free or a low wage, and their customers, separated by years of isolation and transactional relationships, are forced to support the exploitation just to get on a plane. How much patience can the public have for a failing government that pushes policies that serve the 1% and leave the rest of us living our lives in service of the capital that they hoard?

In the U.S., we are separated by social roles, often defined by class, frequently in retail-related experiences. Customer vs. employee. But class is a construct that, if interrogated, could dismantle the barriers between us that serve as the scaffolding for the powerful. As America has become more stratified through infrastructure that prioritizes the individual in the form of cars and single-family homes and the loss of shared spaces, interactions between people of different socio-economic statuses have declined. We are victims of the same overlords, but kept separate. This isolation is the fuel that capitalism feeds on. Some people serve the food, and others eat it. Some people create the trash, and others take it out.

I’ve been on both sides of this divide. I’ve been both the server and the patron—the person paid minimum wage, grateful for the times when the customer shows an interest in my personhood, and the consumer on the other side of the transaction, going through the motions without so much as a nod to the human on the other end. This separation is not new, but it is stark in the current moment, amplified by automation and the concentration of wealth.

Those with more economic power determine the lives of those with less, and this creates a moat. The introduction of machines into our daily lives, like self-checkouts and facial recognition, interrupts the possibility of interacting with others, which makes it less likely that we’ll ever relate, understand one another, and organize. Without opportunities for connection, we remain isolated and unable to act in concert, toward collective benefit. As a result, the influence of those in power gets stronger.

***

Buoyed by the gift of my discounted Starburst, I approached my gate to find that my plane had pulled up and we were about to board. I hustled into line and, once on the plane, I chose a seat near the front between two women. The cabin buzzed with nervous chatter. Passengers were anxious for the plane to take off, and our guide, the Southwest Airlines flight attendant, graciously lightened the mood with a punchy safety demonstration with lines like, “There are 50 ways to leave your lover, but there’s only six ways to leave the airplane.”

I giggled with the passenger on my right, an English woman, now living in Colorado, in her fifties, with two adult kids and a feverish enthusiasm for ABBA music. We chatted about everything from children to comedy to pets. Once we were airborne, she put her headphones on and danced, confined by her seat against the window for over two hours. Towards the end of the flight, she took a break from her party, and we got to chatting again. I learned that she’d just lost her job at a health insurance company. As she shared her experience, the woman on my left chimed in, saying that her daughter, a long-time employee of USAID, had just been forced to lay off 200 people at the organization.

“Horrible...how awful,” the three of us muttered. What else is there to say? Precarity is the norm.

Recently, Amazon announced that it is laying off 30,000 engineers, product managers, and professionals who have built the company. In the same week, Target announced layoffs of 1,800 people. Roughly 4,100 federal workers have been laid off across seven agencies in 2025 under Trump.

Each person who loses their job supports an average of 2.5 people, and every one of them sits at the center of roughly 150 relationships. Over the course of a week, nearly 32,000 people lost their livelihoods because corporations prioritize profit over people. The U.S. has a President who seeks to operate like those corporations, and as a result, the combined impact of Amazon, Target, and government layoffs will touch over 5 million people. These ripples of hardship are felt across the United States. Increasingly, the group of “marginalized” people is expanding to represent everyone but billionaires.

Many say we’re in a New Gilded Age. As of the fall of 2025, America’s richest 10% control 60% of the nation’s wealth. And, because of the nature of exponential growth, billionaires’ wealth is growing at a rapid pace. Consider the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars; 1 million seconds is 11.5 days, but 1 billion seconds is almost 32 days. As billionaire wealth builds with compound interest, an extreme concentration of capital is created. For example, in 2024, the world’s billionaires gained $2 trillion, a rate three times faster than in 2023.

For everyone else, wages are stagnant, the job market is shrinking, and economic insecurity is the norm. Despite the promise of job creation, most “good jobs” remain out of reach, and the systems meant to support workers are crumbling. And just as in the late-1800s Gilded Age, workers today are fed up. While the first labor unions were established around the turn of the nineteenth century, they gained momentum during the Gilded Age, as the number of unsatisfied workers increased.

Against our current backdrop of inequality, workers are organizing more vehemently than they have in decades. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Interest in union organizing is surging in the United States. Since 2021, petitions for union elections at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have more than doubled. And public support for unions is near 60-year highs—at 70%.” Just as stark inequalities generated energy for labor organizing in the early 1900s, similar dynamics are beginning to agitate today’s workers. In the spring of 2025, REI members rejected company board picks after the union conducted a successful campaign encouraging action. In November, Starbucks Workers United’s ‘Red Cup Rebellion’ enlisted both workers and customers in a strike over unfair labor practices, with 95 stores across 65 cities participating in the strike.

I feel something shifting.

***

Once my flight landed in Denver, I walked with my ABBA-loving seatmate through the concourse until we went our separate ways as I got on the train to baggage claim. It was nearing midnight, and my train car was mostly empty. Flight staff from two different airlines loaded in, closing out their shifts. There was a trio from Southwest and a pair from United. I listened as they chatted about their uniforms. The United staff had been issued new uniforms made by the Brooks Brothers brand. One of them complained of its poor quality, “the shirts wrinkle immediately and start to break down after a few washes. When I complain, they [management] ask me how often I’m cleaning it and if I’m storing it properly.” The conversation shifted to contracts and which airline is more favorable (answer: Southwest). As we approached the final stop, the United flight attendant brought the conversation back to the uniforms, “They are going to have to replace them. They are losing money. We have to order new ones all the time.”

The public acknowledgment that the reason an employer would change something, not because of employees’ feedback, but because they are losing money, felt revealing. It’s not a surprising claim, but the blatant calling out of United Airlines felt new and also illustrated an awareness among everyone in that train car that the jig is up.

A core component of American Exceptionalism—capitalism is showing its ass. Ordinary people are questioning its value. In a recent Gallup poll of 1,100 Americans, when asked, “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of capitalism?” 54% voted “favorable.” But 54% is actually a 7-point decline from when Gallup first asked this question in 2010. It’s not that people are suddenly discovering capitalism’s flaws; it’s that this awareness has become common knowledge. But what do we do with this awareness?

In her book, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet And How We Fight Back, Kate Aronoff clarifies why it feels difficult for all of us to organize more effectively right now; “In positing all of human existence as an endless striving toward market society, neoliberals had to erase not just the possibility of a future but all memory of a past when humans managed to organize themselves in other ways. The kinds of tools needed to navigate out of the climate crisis—things like public ownership, full employment, or even just tough regulations—have receded into memory.”

This is the water we swim in, and yet, the bounded self is an illusion. We shape each other’s experiences of life every day, every minute, every second. My encounters over a travel day reminded me how connected we are and that, if we pay attention and choose to engage with each other, we could change things together. “People and things are alive when we become alive to one another,” Jenny Odell says.

What if we made a practice of acknowledging each other when we’re out in the world? We might reclaim the dignity stolen from us through forced isolation in the service of capital. Instead of moving through the world as individuals, we could nourish our connectedness, and in doing so, create the possibility for a better, more equitable existence for everyone.

You can read the primary findings here and worker stories here and here.

One participant I spoke with, Stas, is a co-owner of the cooperatively run organization, SpringUp. In our conversation, I asked them a question I was struggling to answer in my research: “What role do cooperatives play in the current economy?”

As of 2025, there are an estimated 1300 worker co-ops in the United States, a small fraction of the total number of companies in the U.S. economy. Given the small number and size of worker cooperatives, they have been slow to scale. So when I posed my question to Stas, their answer helped me to see the possibilities that employee ownership, and worker cooperatives more specifically, offer us:

“What we’re doing [as a worker co-operative] is prefigurative organizing. We’re pre-embodying the kinds of structures that we believe will be more normalized in a future iteration of the economy.”

In a recent essay, The Art of Paradigm Shift, Bert Wander discusses the importance of alternatives in cultural change and calls on us, saying, “Don’t just critique the current paradigm, change it.” But if we’re going to change it, we must be able to see and name the assumptions and myths that uphold the existing paradigm—myths of meritocracy, efficiency, concentration of control, and growth—and then transcend these myths doing what Stas and their fellow owners are doing, building new ways of organizing ourselves, so that the rest of us can see what’s possible.

Our existing paradigm, and its theories, principles, and techniques, are not compatible with reality. To be more specific, our economic system is organized around constant accumulation and finding new ways to acquire wealth, requiring the extraction of profits at the cost of humans and the planet. This paradigm has become so deeply ingrained in our collective imagination that it can feel nearly impossible to envision anything outside the structures that shape today’s economy and the businesses that operate within it.

An example I think of often is when I took a graduate business course in 2023 titled, The Socially Responsible Enterprise. At the time, I was conducting a study that looked at whether or not the conditions created and rewarded by the B Corp certification created more equitable and sustainable environments for workers (TLDR: the answer is no.)

Before class one day, I was talking to the professor about my research, and the theory he laid out for me was that B Corps expand the Overton window of what business might be, existing at the edge of the range of policies or ideas considered acceptable. In other words, he viewed B Corps as a kind of pre-figuring. While I listened to him talk, I thought to myself, “Good god, I hope B Corps aren’t the most radical form of business we have.”

Having earned a certification from the non-profit B Lab for their commitment to balancing profit with social and environmental accountability, B Corps are often touted as an ethical alternative to corporations that chase only profits, but these companies still operate like standard businesses. Companies like Nespresso and Gap’s Athleta brand are B Corp certified. These are not the businesses that will transform our economy. Instead, they are tweaks to the existing paradigm. That a professor teaching a class focused on socially responsible enterprises thinks B Corps are at the edge of the Overton window tells me how much work there is to do to expand our imaginations.

The good news is that there are lots of people out there making it happen. I see it in the work that Stas and others, like the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Democracy Collaborative, the Economic Security Project, Impact Charitable, Transform Finance, and so many more, are doing. These future-makers are designing and building alternatives for us to point to, to show that another paradigm is possible. These forms dispel the myths that are propping up our current Potemkin economy.

Shared ownership models demonstrate that collective decision-making can be efficient, that wealth can be distributed more fairly, and that businesses can prioritize long-term wellbeing over short-term gains. They make visible what the dominant paradigm obscures: that cooperation, not competition, has long been a foundation of human societies. As political economist Karl Polanyi documented, most civilizations operated through reciprocity and redistribution, a lineage echoed today in worker co-ops, ESOPs, community trusts, energy and housing cooperatives, solidarity farming, and even the open-source movement.

These models don’t just offer alternatives; they expand our sense of what an economy can be. And once we can see that, the old myths start to lose their power.

Last week, three businesses I love in my community closed (Breadworks), announced a closure (Sanitas Brewing), or were sold (Upslope). Three, in only seven days. The reasons vary, and many of them will never be fully known except to the owners themselves. But the impacts are already felt. Workers are facing unemployment, nonprofit organizations are losing sources of food and donations, and residents are losing third places that anchored their weeks and shaped relationships. With each closure, Boulder’s social fabric weakens.

What’s striking is how little we talk about these ripple effects. It’s wild, really, how quietly we accept that economic decisions made in isolation can destabilize entire networks of people, families, and community life. These closures aren’t simply the end of individual businesses. They’re signals that our economic system, here in Boulder and across the country, is working against us. They are the inevitable outcomes of an economy organized around extraction rather than resilience. That might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true. Some of these businesses scaled too quickly, trying to satisfy investor demands or social expectations. Some of them were likely hit by the high costs that our federal legislators are creating as they plunder the country’s public goods.

Local officials are considering how to strengthen our economy, but they are relying on approaches of the past—waiting for a winning football season to buoy tax revenue or for innovation to miraculously repair everything that’s fraying. With this approach, we will keep recreating the same conditions that brought us here: historic inequality, ecological collapse, and fragile communities.

Boulder prides itself on innovation. But we need a new kind of innovation. Not a new marketing campaign to attract tourists, or a corporate monopoly to move into our town, or an incubator pumping out more companies benefiting a few shareholders.

We need economic transformation.

A framework for Boulder: Doughnut economics and shared ownership

Imagine if Boulder became one of the first U.S. cities to fundamentally reimagine how its economy works—not as a machine for producing wealth for a few, but as a living system designed to meet human needs while staying within the limits of the planet.

The Doughnut Economics framework, created by Kate Raworth, gives us a map. It asks communities to design economies that allow everyone to thrive (the “social foundation”) without overshooting ecological limits (the “ecological ceiling”). More and more cities—from Amsterdam to Portland—are adopting this model.

Boulder is uniquely positioned to do the same. We already have the values, the research institutions, the civic infrastructure, and the entrepreneurial drive. What we lack is a unified vision.

A doughnut-aligned Boulder would:

• Measure success not through GDP or job quantity but through wellbeing, equity, emissions reduction, and regenerative development.

• Prioritize circular systems, local production, and climate resilience.

• Shift business development incentives away from extraction and toward models that generate community value.

And, it would expand shared ownership.

Worker cooperatives, employee ownership trusts, ESOPs, and community-owned businesses are not fringe ideas. They’re proven pathways to more stable businesses, higher job satisfaction, stronger communities, and the distribution of wealth. In fact, the Boulderado, which was sold to an outside buyer earlier this year, was originally community-owned.

In Boulder, despite interest, very few businesses have taken this step. Namaste Solar stands as an iconic exception—a nationally respected cooperative modeling a different approach. But one example is not enough. Boulder needs hundreds of these.

A future Boulder economy, resilient, distributed, participatory, must bake in shared ownership as a core strategy, not an afterthought.

Why this matters now

Boulder is facing a demographic and economic cliff. We have a rapidly aging business owner population. Many owners want to retire. Many don’t have succession plans. And right now, the default path is either closure or sale to private equity—both of which usually lead to layoffs, loss of local control, and the disappearance of community institutions.

Just last week’s closures make visible that without intervention, without new models, we will lose more beloved businesses, more community anchors, and more opportunities for workers to build stable lives here.

We need a vision that meets this moment.

Here’s my crack at a five-year vision for Boulder’s economic transformation

A cultural shift toward community stewardship

In five years, it should be normal, expected even, for Boulder residents to talk about transitioning business ownership to employees or community members. We should see it as a civic value: keeping businesses rooted here, owned here, and benefiting the people who work in and are served by them.

A citywide response to the aging owner crisis

Boulder should have a publicly supported, well-known program that helps business owners explore employee ownership or mission-aligned community succession—not at the last minute, but well in advance. This is economic preservation.

A whole ecosystem approach

We already have the infrastructure:

• CU’s world-class entrepreneurship and business programs

• An active Chamber of Commerce

• The Downtown Boulder Partnership

• A strong network of professional service providers

• A deeply mission-driven nonprofit and climate community

Now we need them all aligned around regenerative, shared-ownership, doughnut-informed goals.

A new scorecard for success

At the Chamber’s annual economic forecast event, we should be talking about shared ownership, regenerative practices, supply chain justice, and ecological health.

Imagine an economic outlook presentation that includes:

• Number of employee-owned businesses

• Wealth retained locally

• Emissions avoided

• Community wellbeing metrics

• Supply chain transformation progress

This is how Boulder becomes a model for future economies.

Accessible on-ramps for everyone

Interest is not the issue. In May, I moderated a panel on shared ownership at Boulder Startup Week; nearly 50 people attended, but they left with nowhere to go.

We need:

• A centralized resource hub

• Local financing mechanisms

• Peer learning groups

• Technical assistance programs

• Pathways for youth and students to participate

People are hungry for this. We just have to build the entry points.

Reimagining local production and resilience

Resilience is more than an economic term; it’s a survival strategy. If everything falls apart, the local communities are all that’s left.

We need to design as if that’s true.

This means investing in:

• Local food systems—like our own local farmers or models like Vertical Harvest in Jackson, WY, which grows organic produce year-round in repurposed warehouse space.

• Circular supply chains that reduce environmental harm and strengthen local business networks.

• Climate-adaptive infrastructure and community-owned energy.

These aren’t niche ideas; they’re the foundation of resilient cities worldwide.

A call to build what comes next

Cities across the globe are in crisis: aging populations, collapsing small businesses, housing shortages, ecological degradation, and widening inequality. Boulder is not exempt. But unlike many communities, Boulder has the capacity and creativity to respond with boldness rather than resignation.

This is our opening.

We can become a city that chooses community over extraction, resilience over fragility, and shared prosperity over concentrated wealth.

We can build an economy where every business closure isn’t another blow to the social fabric, but instead an opportunity for reinvention, one where workers, residents, and the environment all have a stake in the future we’re shaping together.

This shift won’t happen through luck. It won’t come from a winning football season or the next tech breakthrough.

• It will come from changing our mental models.

• From designing new systems with intention.

• From organizing ourselves in ways that honor our interdependence.

• From choosing collectively, to build an economy capable of sustaining people and the planet.

Boulder can lead the way. But only if we start now.

Do you ever feel like the scaffolding of your worldview limits your ideas of what’s possible? That tension is something I grapple with a lot and I find myself wondering:

• What grooves in my thinking are limiting my imagination?

• What societal norms baked into me make it impossible to see new ways of being?

In this moment of technological and societal upheaval, a dread sits heavy in my chest — a recognition that the motivations of those in power and the existing systemic structures not only limit the possibility of innovations, like artificial intelligence (A.I.), but they are directing us down extinction-level paths.

Note: I use the phrase “A.I.” or “artificial intelligence” to represent forms of artificial intelligence, automation, and generative A.I.

As an alternative to current approaches, I wonder, how can we reframe our collective mind to leverage new forms of intelligence for the betterment of all life? The ways we transform ourselves shapes the ways we transform the systems around us. This question isn’t just about technology or policy. It’s about how we, as individuals and as a species, learn to reimagine what’s possible.

I received an opening to an answer at the EPIC People conference in Helsinki, when, in a discussion titled, “Ethnography in the age of automation and AI,” one of the presenters, Cato Hunt, asked the question, “What are we creating the conditions for?”

Within our current structures, new intelligences are being used to accelerate and strengthen approaches that have proven to create deadly conditions for most of the world. And the latest technological innovations are amplifying global capitalism’s ability to exploit people and nature to convert love, natural resources, and human life into capital.

The issue is that business interests are leading the application and adoption of new technology. Therefore, A.I.’s innovations, which could be used to support human thriving and address climate change, are being used to accelerate the concentration of power and wealth.

If there’s any possibility that we’ll apply A.I. in support of all of society, and not just improve the lives of a few rich guys, we have to transform our intelligence to create the conditions we want for our future.

***

We find ourselves in a moment of incredible uncertainty. While some might suggest that they know what the future of A.I. will bring, they don’t. No one does. In fact, at this point, our application of the technology is wildly limited. For the most part, artifical intelligence is being used as a tool to increase productivity and efficiency to increase the profitability of corporations — an illustration of the limited imagination of capitalism.

Peter Sarlin, of SiloAI, an artificial intelligence lab based in Finland, suggests that we need to rethink everything when considering the implications of A.I.. Speaking at EPIC, he shared his sense that “we’re approaching value creation in the wrong way.” Sarlin asserts that it’s difficult to transform traditional companies using artificial intelligence, and that “to enable true innovation, we must rethink the structure of institutions altogether.” To set out this new technology in truly innovative ways, we cannot rely on the past or present to inform our future.

The philosopher L.A. Paul has useful insights for our situation. In her book, Transformative Experience, she addresses the conundrum of embarking on unfamiliar futures. She starts the book my examining the choice to become a vampire. As a human, no matter how much research you do, one simply cannot make an informed choice to become a vampire, because we’ve never been one. Just as we, as a society, have never lived in a world with generative A.I. and so using our historic frameworks and knowledge is not only insufficient but it crudely limits the possibilities for the integration of a technology of this nature into our lives.

As she says,

“In cases of transformative choice, the rationality of the approach to life where we authoritatively control our choices by attempting to subjectively project ourselves forward and consider possible futures is undermined by our epistemic limitation on knowing what our future experiences and preferences will be like.”

We must transform our intelligence.

***

Present, Western intelligence is shaped by the growth imperative and organized by categorization, classification, and borders. These constraints significantly limit our imagination on how we organize ourselves, how we move, and the activities and behaviors we participate in. We need to expand our conceptual frameworks.

Approaches to look to are indigenous practices and some of the work already being done to consider and prioritize the other-than-human life that surrounds us. For instance, mycelial networks or lives of water. Taking inspiration from these forms of life could expand our minds to allow for a move from the growth and classification mindset to an expansive and collaborative mindset.

In her ethnography of the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms, Anna Tsing suggests that non-linear mushroom networks offer inspiration for an agnostic point of view about where we are going or what the future holds. This opens up the possibility of seeing what has been ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative of progress or serve the needs of capital. With this mindset, we might be open to ideas like handing power over to nature.

In Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is a River Alive?, he discusses the community leader and legal pioneer in Australia, Anne Poelina, a Nyikina Warrwa scholar activist, leading the recognition of the rights of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River in Australia. Quoted in the book, she says, “The law is being used creatively to train human beings to listen, pay attention to, and learn from rivers.” The idea of rivers as lawmakers, as well as imagination shapers, affords them power and allows us to expand our future to include the natural world in a new way.

Broadening our imaginations in this way can transform our thinking about the future and our ideas of how we bring artificial intelligence into the world to benefit all living things, not just the centralized and concentrated powers of corporations and the state. If we designed and applied A.I. guided by ecological intelligence, we might have communities that can better understand and work with the natural world for the betterment of all life. Systems that prioritize the redistribution of abundance, and algorithms that value reciprocity and diversity might become possible.

In the face of the unknown, how can we move forward in favor of life?

***

Paul uses a common experience to illustrate what it is to not know or be able to predict the future: becoming a parent. If you haven’t been a parent, it’s impossible to know what it will be like. Therefore, you can’t rationalize becoming one. Me and millions of other people can relate to this.

When I decided that I wanted to have a kid, I knew that it wasn’t a rational choice. I was about to embark on an experience that was going to change my life in ways that I couldn’t predict. My understanding of time, relationships, money, and who I am would be irrelevant once I brought a child into the world. My approach was to try and release my attachment to the conceptual understandings of these things and instead focus on the conditions that my husband and I wanted to create as we embarked on this journey — conditions of love, human thriving, and space for flexibility and evolution.

For example, I had no idea what the first few months of motherhood were going to be like, but I knew that work and social commitments would conflict with the experience, and so I eliminated all work and social commitments for four months. No Christmas celebrations (my son was born on December 16), no work email, meetings, or other commitments for the entire four months. I also understood that my past career, as the CEO of a marketing services firm, was not going to be sustainable as I became a mother, and so I stepped away with plans to embark on a new career. Years before becoming parents, my husband and I also strategized to ensure that we had the resources required to support another human in our lives. All of these moves created space, support, and established a more sustainable environment for becoming a parent.

In hindsight, what we were doing was redesigning the conditions of our lives — creating the space for something new to emerge without knowing exactly what it would be. That kind of preparation, not prediction, feels like the kind of thinking we need as we navigate the era of artificial intelligence.

I suggest a similar approach to futures-thinkers, civic designers, policymakers, and the broader public. Release your understanding and the constraints of the world as we know it. As we enter this new era, shift the focus to the conditions we want to create so that we can shape the innovations in front of us, not with the purpose of profit, but instead in pursuit of ecological and human flourishing so that advances can be shaped in service of life instead of capital.

Just as we might create the conditions to bring new life into the world, we must create the conditions for technologies to evolve in the service of all life. Our task is not to predict the future of A.I., but to prepare the soil for it to grow into something that enhances life. If we can transform our understanding of the world, we can transform what our technologies can understand, and together, we expand the horizon of what’s possible.

We live in a time when our choices matter; we are staring at a moral dilemma, says Robin Wall Kimmerer in her recent book, Serviceberry. "Our patterns of gross overconsumption have brought us to the brink of disaster."

Many of us recognize this, and as individuals, we're not quite sure what we can do about it, especially with a federal administration that understands the earth and all its living things as commodities to profit from. And so we are faced with the understanding that our lives are contingent on the lives of others, and forced to participate in an economy that annihilates the earth and its people.

Novelist and theorist Daisy Hildyard refers to the personal environmental impact that we all have as the “second body.” The “first body” is the physical self, and the “second body” is a version of the body—the body’s externalities.

You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach. You probably don't feel your body in those places: it is as if you have two distinct bodies. You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep, and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body, which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.

Hildyard asserts that all of us walk around with a sense that our everyday actions are felt on the other side of the world. I feel this every time I throw something in the trash or get on a plane. There is a lingering sadness in the back of my mind, knowing that I am a participant in the destruction of our earth.

The desire to counteract these negative impacts is strong for many of us. Climate change implicates all of us, and that is a big anxiety to try to quiet, it creates a dissonance in our lives. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz acknowledges the impact,

Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it.

Attempting to orient yourself in the chaos of climate change is a challenge.

My husband and I have set out three principles that guide our lives. One of them is to "Be Good Ancestors," and I spend a lot of time asking myself, Can we truly be good ancestors? What choices can we make that support that aspiration? What can we look toward for inspiration?

For those of you who struggle with the same questions and are still harnessed to this destructive economy, here's inspiration I can share.

***

I know a woman who changed her career. The change was partly inspired by the fact that her father got sick and died after years of exposure in his job working for a large agricultural biotechnology company. The name rhymes with "ponpanto." She shared her thoughts about the decision to move from interior design in the healthcare industry to sustainable construction services, "I think we all have a little voice inside of us. Sometimes we turn it down really low, sometimes we're not as in touch with it, but there was a voice that just kept saying that all of these materials that you're specifying are no good for the planet, and they might be making people more sick or they're not contributing to their health, and you don't even know what they're doing to the environment."

Her change wasn't a huge swing; she took the skills she had and applied them in a company that is committed to sustainable building practices.

But not all of us can do that. So what do the rest of us do?

We can change our individual behaviors. Even if they seem small, at scale, they make a big difference. This is what The Denver Climate Project is banking on. Their work nudges consumers toward more environmentally responsible choices. One of their campaigns involved a partnership with Goodwill, where they sold a line of upcycled clothing with proceeds supporting electric vehicle technician training. By providing the opportunity for consumers to buy products that reduce waste and benefit the renewable energy transition, the project offers people consumption choices that are in the best interest of the whole.

But the reality is that we need to rethink how our entire economy works if we want the Earth to be around for our children and their children. This is where examples of creative destruction offer us a way to rethink goods, services, and how we interact with nature and one another.

Ideas of mutual aid, reciprocity, and new ways of thinking about our economy, in more ecological and holistic ways, are abundant if you know where to look. Like that of Kate Raworth's Donut Economics model. The Donut is a model for sustainable development that envisions a safe and just space for humanity. Shaped like a donut: the inner ring represents the social foundations needed for well-being (like food, health, and education), while the outer ring marks the ecological ceiling humanity must not overshoot (such as climate stability and biodiversity). The goal is to thrive in the space between these boundaries, ensuring no one falls short on life’s essentials while collectively living within the planet’s limits. These kinds of macro ideas have tremendous potential.

But what about our day-to-day choices? Our current economy has grown so large that it has seemingly extinguished opportunities for investing in community well-being. But if you look around, gift economies and investments in the commons exist. For instance, Free Little Libraries, Buy Nothing groups, and makerspaces. These non-market market activities, where sharing and gifting are at the core, serve as incremental moves toward a more just economy. There's one example of this that I absolutely love.

Fallen Fruit is an art collective that brings together community, public space, and everyday life through fruit. Their projects range from creating maps of fruit trees and organizing nocturnal fruit forages to collaborating with cities to install public fruit gardens. They use fruit as both a material and a symbol. Their thesis is that fruit dissolves class boundaries—everyone can share in it. The result of the project is art that is participatory, democratic, and rooted in shared abundance. The idea that you could grab a friend and go out foraging for fruit with one of their maps (find yours here) is liberating and a great way to build resistance and community.

Our economy, as it exists, has no remedy for climate change. And so, we must get creative, together. And, in the meantime, marvel at the magic of nature, and as one of my favorite thinkers, Robert Macfarlane suggests,

"Be out, get out, look up, walk where and when you can. Be curious and be astonished by the world."

I have never been a big fan of Halloween. The holiday, as it exists in the U.S., doesn't seem to have much of a purpose. People dress up and get candy. It's mostly a marketing event, like nearly all of the holidays in the United States, potentially rooted in some Christian story, which absorbed and rebranded a pagan celebration.

Halloween traditions were influenced by Celtic harvest festivals, specifically Samhain, and Christianized as All Hallows Eve. At this point, as a mostly secular holiday, Halloween makes a nod toward honoring the dead, but it's mostly in service of commercializing the idea of spooky. The result of this evolution is that practices that once honored the dead (All Hallows Eve) or celebrated the passage of time (Samhain) are overlooked, and our culture has no container for grief and memory.

In a Search Engine episode titled, "What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?" PJ Vogt summarizes our grief problem perfectly:

"America's way of death is put it away and come back to work."

In a culture that is so capital and future-oriented, we become alienated from our own memories, the people we love who are gone, and from ourselves. We are left with a longing and no space to process it.

How do we make the space to reckon with our grief? How can ritual support our connection to ourselves, to others, and to memory?

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***

I recently attended a performance of Sweet & Lucky ECHO, an immersive production in Denver, Colorado. The show, mostly staged in one large space, guided an audience of nearly 100 people through the experience of reckoning with memory and grief.

I entered the performance space as part of the whole group and was quickly divided into one of four parts. The first instruction I received was to help organize boxes. The space was filled with them. A room of strangers, all game, organized together to move dozens of boxes from one side of the room to another. After completing the task, I found myself facing a small stage where an actor stood, with a box in her arms. "Will you help me remember?" she asked. The group answered "Yes" aloud or through nods. She began going through the boxes and holding up items: a picture board, a broken model sailboat. "Do you remember?"

My group was tasked with reassembling our corner of the larger space, and in moments, an empty stage with a few boxes was transformed into a home, complete with a kitchen, dining room, and reading nook. A man took a stage in the center of the room and began leading all 100 people in a song. We were told it was a song that the couple at the center of the story, who had died, loved. And so we sang, together and remembered.

The show went on like this, beautifully calling on song, recipes, food, games, pictures, music, and art-making to create a collective remembrance, through ritual and story. The plot at the center of the show was vague enough for all of us to write our own remembrance into each part. I was transformed.

This is exactly what ritual does. Rituals are formalized actions, behaviors, and practices that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Season rituals mark the passage of time, and funeral ceremonies honor a person or animal. These ritualized actions create social cohesion. I stood in a room, singing a song with a group of strangers, and we were bound. Without connection, we splinter from ourselves and others.

***

Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, describes how societies that are full of values tend to be resistant to the total takeover of capital. Consider places that were colonized by the Spanish, a culture grounded in Catholicism, versus places established by Puritan settlers. Mexico versus the United States. For Mexico, the move into capitalism was blocked by a god-filled world made up of sacredness, rituals, and spirits. For the U.S., capitalism was embraced, and it became core to the culture.

This calls to mind a recent visit to Mexico. I was in San Miguel de Allende during the Independence Day celebrations. People were in the streets gathered to dance, play music, or parade for the entirety of the three days that I was there. People of all ages came together to remember, participate in ritual, celebrate, and connect. This kind of social cohesion isn't common in American culture. Capitalism has gobbled up our rituals and spit them back out as a reason to buy stuff and celebrate our individualism.

In reflecting on this difference, there's an opportunity to reclaim ritual and reimagine holidays. By taking back our right to ritual, we might find a way to think beyond candy and the Spirit Halloween stores — to find tools for connection and remembrance. What if this year, Halloween were recognized as a chance to actually honor our grief? There's so much that we're grieving. It might make way to mourn the horror of the war in Gaza, the attacks on our communities, and all of the people and things we've loved and lost.

What if we gathered together and created a container for memory through the power of art, music, prose, photography, food … and we remembered and supported one another? When we create, we connect, and through connection, we build resistance. The more ways we find to come together, the harder it will be to tear us apart.

In times like these, when the internet feels overrun with noise and cruelty, and the rise of AI makes me wonder whether we’re losing our capacity for real thought, I find relief returning to writers who remind me otherwise. The thinkers I turn to, push back against power, invite deeper connection, and model thoughtful ways of living.

Today, I want to share some of my favorites. These are the people I love thinking alongside — whether they’re unpacking how we make meaning or showing how something as unexpected as weightlifting can challenge the patriarchy. Their words and their lives are a gift that should be shared. Enjoy!

On life and meaning

Maria Popova at The Marginalian. I started following The Marginalian (then Brain Pickings) in the mid-2010s. Each week, in her newsletter, she explores what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually. She puts to words, contextualizes, and historicizes so much of what is happening in the world. In 2024, in the ongoing pain of the war in Gaza, she brought her readers insights from George Saunders, which I wrote down and keep within reach at all times:

"It (war, in response to a Kurt Vonnegut quote) is the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of a handful of men." - George Saunders, quoted from The Braindead Megaphone

Her work has shaped how I think about meaning and relationships, offering me new ways of framing the stuff of life. I recommend starting with this interview with Popova in the OnBeing podcast to get the vibe and understand what a "cartographer of meaning" is.

Cooking, how to do it well, and make it joyous

Samin Nosrat is my cooking go-to. Her book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, taught me techniques that have helped me become a better cook. She has a podcast with Hrishikesh Hirway, a Netflix series, and now a Substack: A Grain of Salt. Her taste is impeccable, inclusive, and novel, and she's great at breaking down cooking rules to make them accessible, like this recent post on “What ‘use whatever herbs’ actually means.”

Managing climate grief

Lauren Markham is a remarkable writer and teacher. Her recent book Immemorial asks a powerful question: how do we memorialize the nature we’re losing? Through art, monuments, and language, she explores how we might honor our collective climate grief while tracing her own search for ways to live with the pain of vanishing landscapes — burning, washing away, melting. The result is a beautifully written salve for our time.

Politics and culture

The Diabolical Lies Pod is my all-time favorite discovery of 2025. As host, Katie Gatti Tassin states at the beginning of the episode on “Why America Can't See Gaza,” this podcast is about "deconstructing fundamental American mythologies." This is the only podcast where I listen to every single new episode. Katie and Caro Claire Burke offer the most well-researched discussions I've ever heard in a podcast form. They cover topics like the porn industry, capitalism, and SkinnyTok. Education is the key to empowering and mobilizing people, and this podcast does that in incredible ways. Their member chat is active with people liberated from the collective fictions that govern our lives. I suggest starting with “Hot Chicks, Wings, and the Liquidation Sale of America.”

Art as resistance

Wendy Macnaughton and her DrawTogether online studio make drawing accessible and fun. I have long been working to learn how to draw. I'm still not very good, but Wendy makes the process both educational and community-oriented. She incorporates different art forms to create a dynamic set of lessons that are always interesting, and the exercises she offers take 10 minutes. It takes about twenty minutes to read one of the posts, and you're drawing for ten minutes, which gives you a beautiful art lesson in only 30 minutes. She also ties her lessons to relevant issues, like her latest “Making Art During Fascism”.

Good fitness

Casey Johnston is the writer behind She’s A Beast and the Ask a Swole Woman column, and she recently released her second book, A Physical Education. The book is excellent, but you can also start with a free subscription to She’s A Beast for sharp satire, fitness guidance, and feminist takes on strength. Unlike the typical fitness influencer model, built on fat phobia, food obsession, and buying gadgets you don’t need, Casey offers an approachable path to getting strong and nourishing your body and mind.

Who are your favorite thinkers?

I recently reported an article for The Colorado Sun that asked the question, "If there is so much vacant office space in Boulder, why isn't rent going down?"

My reporting brought a question I've wondered while covering the economy into clearer focus: What happens when owners of businesses and property aren't part of a place?

Last year, I wrote an article about private equity investment in childcare centers. During the reporting, I couldn't get a single person from a private equity-owned child care center to respond to me. I found that there are people running businesses in my community who aren't accountable to the individuals living here.

Similarly, while investigating the state of the retail industry in Boulder, I couldn't get a comment from several of the big brands that line the Pearl Street Mall. Any interaction had to go through PR and media relations teams, which resulted in long waits for replies and flattened, promotion-language-laden responses.

When a business isn't of a place, it's easier for its owners to operate in anti-social ways. If they can't be reached, what should they care if their choices hurt the people in the communities where they operate?

Proximity and pro-social behaviors are understood to be well-connected. In fact, “in behavioral economics literature, social proximity has been found to be an important determinant of prosocial behavior and cooperation in various contexts.”

Anti-social behaviors in the context of corporate power are even more concerning because of shareholder primacy — the principle that most for-profit entities operate according to, requiring them to make the most profits possible for their shareholders. The demands of shareholder primacy and public interest are often misaligned.

***

I once worked as an executive for a software company that made products for the financial industry — mostly private equity and venture capital firms. I was in a marketing leadership role and so I spent a lot of time trying to understand the motivations and interests of the customers, the general managers who used the product to make decisions and coordinate their "deal making," which essentially meant the buying and selling of businesses. What I discovered was that the analysis these general managers performed to make their decisions reduced entire companies — thousands of people who contributed to communities all over the world — to a row on a spreadsheet.

These general managers worked for firms that would buy up these companies for the purpose of making a profit for their investors. Once acquired, business decisions were made by people who might never visit the company, but would maximize its value by firing employees and disinvesting from the community (e.g., reduce volunteer time, sponsorships, replace local vendors with the firm's preferred vendors, lower pay, reduce employee benefits, etc.) For them, they were doing their job at the expense of people and local economies they would never see.

***

Distance enables behaviors that negatively affect the public's interest. Yet, many cities and property owners work hard to attract big corporations that are usually headquartered somewhere else. There are many reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that banks prefer the larger companies, which are considered "credit tenants." The term refers to the fact that these tenants have a credit rating. They are usually publicly traded companies and financial institutions. For these companies, breaking a contract or lease agreement hurts their credit rating, limiting their ability to borrow money and do business. So a credit tenant will likely keep paying rent within the lease term even if they vacate the property.

This makes leasing to a credit tenant less risky and makes it more likely that these groups will get a commercial lease over a small business, a business connected to the place. When you see small downtowns, like Boulder, full of global brand names, this is one of the reasons why.

***

One of the unintended consequences of this is that, in a post-pandemic world, there are large swaths of commercial real estate sitting empty in places like Boulder, Denver, Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco, and others. Credit tenants are waiting out their lease, property owners are looking to turn a profit on empty buildings (as detailed in my article in the Sun), and empty spaces are filling up with banks no one needs.

Frustratingly, there's no one to be held accountable for the empty downtowns and struggling local businesses, other than city officials who have no leverage over out-of-state business interests. When companies aren't rooted in place, they don't experience the wreckage they cause. And so communities are being ruined by people who sit in offices somewhere else who don't have to answer for their impacts.

Right now, our communities are dominated by financial interests and are highly unstable. I find many economic development efforts by policy-makers and community groups like Chambers of Commerce lacking in imagination and focused on things they've done in the past that have gotten us to where we are, such as:

• incentivizing large corporations to move into towns

• lobbying/voting against regulations that protect workers (detailed in this recent New Yorker article that focuses on the “no tax on tips” policy and minimum wage in Colorado)

• failing to adapt to changing economic and technological realities.

A real-time example of financial influence and slow reaction time to technological realities is the plans that Colorado's Governor has to pause legislation that seeks to regulate AI in the state. Covered by Politico:

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed first-in-the-nation legislation to regulate artificial intelligence last year.

Now the Democrat is calling state lawmakers back to Denver next week to ask them to delay for a year the law’s implementation, currently scheduled for February. The big issue: the cost of implementation.

But Polis is also having second thoughts about states independently regulating AI. Earlier this year, he backed a plan by Republican lawmakers in Washington to place a moratorium on new state AI laws.

The Colorado legislation will bolster consumer protections when AI is used to make key health care-related decisions, and require developers and deployers to address algorithmic bias based on reproductive health, genetic information and other data. Developers must also make disclosures about AI systems that make high-risk decisions.

Our communities, cities, and states are being shaped by financial interests that operate in opposition to public interests. Legislators and local businesses want to create vibrant economies, but you can’t do that without inverting the current priorities — people & place over profit.

When my husband, Jonathan, and I are driving and we end up at an intersection with another car whose desired action doesn't interfere with ours — say we're facing each other but both turning right — he says enthusiastically, "Same Team!"

The sense of alignment I get in these silly moments often feels out of reach in a world, and specifically in a country that seems to be in constant disagreement. It's easier to feel alone. There are so many shared values that are apparently up for debate. It turns out beliefs in due process, kindness, free and independent media, equality, and democracy are not ideas we all share. I find myself wondering who in this country believes in the same things that I thought we all used to believe in, or at least tried to believe in.*

It's nice to be reminded that many, if not most of us, are still on the same team, and sometimes, if I’m paying attention, experiences and encounters help me remember that I'm not alone.

***

I often run, pushing my toddler in a jogging stroller. Almost every time I'm out, I come across another parent running with a kid, also in a stroller. I always try to catch their eye and wave. Same Team, I whisper to myself. I see these other runners as kindred spirits who are working to both take care of themselves and provide care for others.

The U.S. is an outlier among Western countries in its lack of affordable and accessible care and support for families. Other high-income countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for toddlers' care, compared with $500 in the U.S. Currently, the administration is dismantling the Department of Education and attempting to cut supports for public schools, reducing the already limited supports that American families receive.

When I see others out in the world making time for their health while also supporting a child, I see an ally — someone who likely understands the value of childcare and knows how difficult it is to access. They are a member of a care team, and probably agree that more support for families is a good thing. They know the expense of time and money childcare takes, and when they smile and wave back, they know that I do too.

***

I attended journalism school and work part-time as a freelance reporter. I believe that free and fair media and the ability to hold powerful people and organizations accountable are vital for a democracy. When I'm working from a coffee shop and look over someone's shoulder to see them reading a local paper or spot someone walking around with an NPR tote bag, I think to myself, Same Team.

One third of the counties in the U.S. don't have the equivalent of even one full-time journalist. The Republican-led Congress just took away public funding for NPR and PBS. Independent media, a diversity of thought, and adherence to shared ethics and facts are at risk.

These sightings provide me solace — there are others like me — people who value truth and fairness. If there are enough of us, maybe all is not lost.

***

While sitting and working at my local library's cafe last week, I watched as a guy came in carrying several bags of what seemed to be his personal belongings. He stopped to get a coffee at the cafe counter and then sat down at my table. Striking up a conversation, he asked me, "What do you do?" I told him about the research project I was working on and returned the question, "I'm having trouble with employment right now," he answered. Same Team.

So many of us are on his team, either out of work, underemployed, or in a job that sucks. We didn't need the dire jobs report to know how bad the job market is, and no matter how the executive branch decides to propagandize economic data, we will still know. You can't gaslight workers into believing that the economy is strong. Layoffs and downsizing are the norm, good jobs are impossible to find, and there is a growing base of workers who are fed up. We're on the same team, and that team will rise and fight for our rights.

There are more of us on the Same Team than we think. As Maria Popova said so beautifully in her recent musings on the courage of tenderness, "There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else." It's easy to feel helpless and alone right now, but by attuning to those who are on our team, we might find that we are unified. And, by helping one another, we have the chance to help the whole team.

*The U.S. government has never represented all peoples in the United States, and much of the story of the country is a set of myths. I don’t want to perpetuate the myth of a perfectly harmonized and humane country. Yet, there have been points in our history and in the making of America where values that support a productive democracy were shared in ways that are being dismantled today, and that feels important.

On a recent afternoon, I sat in my doctor’s office. They were running late, so late that I was able to read an entire New Yorker article. I pulled up an article that had been in my queue for a couple of weeks. I'd learned about it from its author over breakfast at a writer's residency. Being from Boulder, I'd piqued the interest of Rachel Monroe, one of the faculty members at the residency. She wanted to talk about Outside Magazine, a publisher she'd recently reported on. She was fascinated with the tech guys who are taking over businesses outside of the tech industry. She summarized her story for me: a rich guy in Boulder sold a software company and bought Outside Magazine to revive it; instead, he tanks it, directing money away from journalists to failed initiatives like the “Outerverse,” an attempt to embrace Web3 and NFTs. The results are a series of layoffs that leave a skeleton crew of professionals to write the stories that Outside built its legacy on.

The tale was familiar, not just from the recent stories of arrogant, rich men dismantling government services under the auspices of efficiency, but also because I'd worked in tech throughout the 2010s. During that decade, I watched founders and investors optimize workers into husks of themselves so that they could turn a profit. I wasn't surprised, but yet, as I sat in the waiting room and read Rachel's account of the dismantling of Outside Magazine, hot tears burned my eyes.

Outside is an institution, a journalistic celebration of humanity in all of its wild, ambitious interactions with the natural world. The stories covered over the history of the publisher were beautiful and perilous, and compelling as hell. Yet, its flame after being acquired by fitness tech millionaire Robin Thurston has been extinguished. It's a shell of its former self.

The stories featured in the magazine before Thurston’s tenure focused on remarkable human achievements. These were not driven by today’s commonly celebrated traits like optimization, efficiency, or technology, but by the strength of the human spirit. The book Into Thin Air started as an article Jon Krakauer wrote for the magazine. An article published by Susan Orlean called "Life's Swell" was the inspiration for the film Blue Crush. These stories weren't written to go viral or become books and films. They became books and films because they were great. The best things in life follow an organic journey—they come by surprise. These were interesting stories that became something bigger because the writers had time and space to explore and write them well.

Humans’ insistence on controlling everything is our demise. We're not only destroying the earth with our efforts to manage it, but we are suffocating the human spirit out of ourselves in the service of capital. Those who figure out how to eradicate the messy human elements from business to increase profit are often celebrated. Thurston was recently given the Business School Distinguished Alumni Award by my alma mater, the University of Colorado. This award was given one month before the release of The New Yorker article that revealed his poor leadership.

Turns out, as long as you make money, it doesn't matter what you ruin. Conquering is the objective. The problem is that when our lives are conquered and shaped in service of profit, the majority of people lose.

That's what I'm experiencing in this moment—loss. Congress recently voted to defund NPR and PBS. These two public broadcasting groups are primary sources of stories, information, and connection for millions of people. They also provide jobs to talented journalists. Private owners are not good purveyors of public information. Similar to what is happening at Outside, the acquisition of news groups by private owners has resulted in a severe shortage of local journalists and thousands of news sites that are essentially parked domains for hosted advertisements. We cannot afford to lose public media. In the ever-increasing privatization of news, access to information and commitment to deep human stories are at risk.

Early in my career, I worked for The Denver Post. We shared a building with The Rocky Mountain News. The two papers had different styles. The Rocky was more magazine and tabloid style journalism, and The Post was more traditional broadsheet format. They served different audiences. The Rocky wrote for a more working-class, conservative audience, and The Post wrote for a more elite, business-oriented audience. What this provided was news for everyone, grounded in a commitment to journalistic ethics, editing, and in service to an informed citizenry.

Today, it’s impossible to find information sources that aren't optimized for clicks, shills for consumption, and/or capital generators for investors. I'm grieving for the time when we could consider human stories for the sake of it, and I'm frightened by the fact that most people, especially in rural areas, get their news from platforms like Facebook.

Information has been corrupted by enshittification—a term coined by Cory Doctorow to characterize the declining service and products made by platform monopolies. Most people can’t get news from actual news sources, so they are forced to find it through places like Facebook and Twitter. When I try to find news on social media platforms, I mostly find hyperbolic opinions, not fact-checked, and poorly written. The information shared with me via social media is curated to encourage the worst version of me because that’s what makes money. Our reliance on these sources, in the wake of gutted journalistic outlets, is making us dumber and angrier so that a few people can get very rich. A government that prioritizes the rich is accelerating the effects, and the attack on media as a public service will only speed up our journey to an uninformed public willingly adjudicating our rights to a violent administration.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which prompted the closure of The Rocky Mountain News, I was job searching and attended an information session at a public relations firm about open roles. There were 20 people there, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, and one man. He was middle-aged and an accomplished reporter who had lost his job when The Rocky was closed. With few options for continuing to report and write stories about Denver and the community, he was turning to PR, where he'd have to leverage his decades of storytelling experience in a sales and marketing job. This is what so many other journalists have had to do. Instead of working in the service of the public, unemployed journalists have had to leverage their skills for corporations to sell stuff.

Is this what we want? Everything in service of consumption? To what end? Facts aren't always sellable, the truth isn't always sexy, but it's important.

We must maintain our right to accurate information, covered ethically, by people who know how to report, and who have editors. All media should not be for corporate interests. We have to keep good journalists employed, like those at the Boulder Weekly who were just abruptly laid off by owner Stewart Sallo. One thing to do is to financially support public media, which you can do here and here. Another option is to support independent nonprofit news groups.

A public denied information is a public denied power—and that's when rights are most easily taken. Protect independent news; our freedom depends on it.

I recently moderated a panel at Boulder Startup Week, titled Reimagining Capital: How Innovative Funding Models Strengthen Communities and Businesses. The panel discussion aligns directly with the purpose of Community Returns, considering how our local economies can organize themselves in ways that are regenerative and support the people in their communities.

Given this alignment, I thought I’d post a recap of the panel. The speakers offered a refreshing and grounded exploration of what it means to finance a business in a way that supports long-term resilience, worker well-being, and community impact, rather than chasing quick returns or unsustainable growth.

The panel convened an incredible lineup of experts and entrepreneurs who are actively building, funding, and supporting businesses outside the dominant venture capital model:

• Cindy Willard, Senior Director of Capital Activation at Impact Capital

• Alan Ramirez, Director of Lending at the Colorado Enterprise Fund

• Verity Noble, Co-founder of Nude Foods Market

• Suzanne Prendergast, Executive Vice President at SOIL Boulder

• Matt Licina, Technical Content Manager at the National Center for Employee Ownership

The conversation centered around a core question: How can founders access capital that aligns with their values, sustains their mission, and strengthens their communities?

Alternative Paths to Capital

Panelists discussed a range of funding models that are often overlooked in mainstream startup ecosystems:

• Debt financing, when structured thoughtfully, can provide growth capital without sacrificing ownership.

• Customer-funded models, like crowdfunding or pre-selling products, enable businesses to grow with the support and investment of their future customers. Specifically, Verity shared Nude Foods' success in raising capital using WeFunder.

• Revenue-based financing and mission-aligned capital provide flexible terms for values-driven businesses.

• Employee ownership offers a transformative strategy for succession planning, wealth building, and deepening employee engagement.

A consistent theme throughout was the need for entrepreneurs to understand their own business models and to be strategic about choosing funding that supports, rather than undermines, their long-term goals.

"Raising money is hard," said Cindy Willard. "Let’s acknowledge that. But the power relationship between you and your investors is far more equal than you think it is."

Aligning Capital with Mission

The panel also pushed back on the idea that all capital is neutral. Suzanne Prendergast described SOIL Boulder's mission-aligned approach, explaining that they intentionally prioritize community benefit over profit, by providing zero-interest loans to local food producers and farmers. “We’re not in the business to make money off this,” she said, highlighting the need to make capital more accessible to small producers and entrepreneurs.

“It's a completely different approach to staying in the community and actually bolstering it; we don't want equity, I don't want your plow, I want your success. I want to see you thrive. For our loan recipients, the question becomes, who's going to lend you the money, and what is the journey that you want to take?”

Verity Noble has raised money through various forms to sustain and grow Nude Foods. In the early days, they relied on customer pre-sales to fund operations. Going this route requires trust, and she emphasized the role transparency plays in building trust: “Transparency is key—and then becoming a hub for the community.”

The conversation also explored how employee ownership can shift both the culture and trajectory of a company. Matt Licina reminded attendees that shared equity isn't just an idealistic dream: “If you include employees, share the profits, and share the equity, it does actually work.”

The Bigger Picture: Capital as a Tool for Equity and Belonging

Beyond funding mechanics, the panel touched on something deeper: the opportunity to reimagine capital itself, not just how to access it, but how to redefine what it's for.

"The most successful businesses I’ve seen are the ones keeping their eye on the problem they’re trying to solve," said Cindy Willard, "and not just focused on generating profit."

Each panelist brought forward practical strategies and real-world examples, offering entrepreneurs in the audience a broader set of tools and the encouragement to seek capital on their own terms.

Some Key Takeaways for Entrepreneurs:

• Be clear on your business model and funding needs before pursuing capital.

• Look for funders whose values align with your mission.

• Consider customer-funded models, debt, and revenue-based financing as viable alternatives to equity.

• Explore employee ownership as a long-term strategy for sustainability, succession, and equity.

• Remember: capital should work for your business, not the other way around.

I loved this discussion and the panelists' prompting to reframe our minds around how to fund a business and the role of business in a community.

In my opinion, a business has a responsibility to the communities they exist within and the money it takes to sustain and grow that business can either be extractive and take more from the community than it returns, or it can be additive or even regenerative, strengthening the places where they operate and supporting their employees, partners, and customers in meaningful ways.

Business owners have a choice, and I’m grateful to the folks who sat on this panel for sharing how entrepreneurs can approach that choice with wide eyes and a generous heart.

Resources and information about the presenters can be found here.

I don’t know about you, but I am so bored by the hyperbolic A.I. discussions that seem to be everywhere. Things I’ve read or heard the past few days: the new technology is making all students dumb. A.I. will be the downfall of higher education. Anyone who is using A.I. is garbage. Alternatively, anyone who isn’t using it is a fool. I find these messages to be misguided.

No one knows what A.I. means.

The new technology isn’t a solution for everything, but it is helpful in lots of ways. It could cause the collapse of our environment, and it might have the answer to humanity’s biggest crises. It won’t take away all jobs, but it could take away many.

The good and bad possibilities are overwhelming. A reality that includes generative A.I. is weird and bumpy, and we don’t actually know what’s going to happen.

What I can say and see for certain is that our current world, where workers have very little power, creates a more terrifying future than one where workers have a voice and the ability to shape how A.I. is implemented and adopted.

A.I. offers new opportunities for exploitation

I’ve worked in software for over a decade as a marketer. My experience in this industry taught me that software engineers rule the world. The companies I worked for or consulted paid their software engineers incredibly well and did everything they could to protect their time and make sure they were satisfied employees. The world revolved around software engineers. A.I. has stopped that revolution in its tracks.

What Doctorow points to is the scariest part of the A.I. boom for me—the new opportunities for the most wealthy to exploit everyone else.

An article came out last week titled, Everyone I know is worried about work. It was a hit…for good reason. In it, the author considered the experience of job seekers posting desperately on LinkedIn.

What I hear in so many people’s anguished LinkedIn posts is a disconnect between the world they thought they were in versus the one they actually are. They sound aghast that the jobs, companies, and industries that were supposed to provide both meaning and security haven’t kept up their end of the bargain.

They thought they were working in companies with values, morals, and ethics. Turns out, the logic of the market prevails every single time. And as we reach the upper limits of this system, it’s all becoming more brazen, the bottom line less obscured. Welcome to collapse.

The outcomes of A.I. in an economy like America’s, where power is so concentrated, are terrifying for everyone who isn’t the 1%. No one is protected, not even the primarily white, male group of engineers that used to be the only well-paid people left with good jobs.

The zero-sum approach that some workers are taking will end badly

The commentary that makes me the most annoyed is from the workers who are telling other workers to get on board. I see a lot of this on LinkedIn from marketers who are desperate to figure out how to make themselves valued in a world that has always undervalued them.

The post usually goes something like “Marketing jobs are DEAD. Here’s how to succeed in an A.I. world.”

What upsets me about this narrative is the illusion that adopting the new technology will protect you. It won’t. In a world where workers don’t have power and have to contort themselves to feign competency about a new technology that no one knows the outcomes of, no one is safe.

The worker’s voice has to shape the implementation

Technological revolutions are not linear, and they are shaped by humans. There are periods of explosive innovation and uncertainty, and slower periods of establishing processes and deployment. There is time for us to figure out what we want from A.I., but workers’ voices have to be part of the conversation.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper showed how the deployment of A.I. technology in Denmark didn’t require negative impacts on the labor market. It highlighted that A.I.’s impacts are determined by firm implementation.

There are no inevitabilities. A.I. doesn’t have to be the end of everything good. However, the nature of the current U.S. job market does not favor workers. My sense is that large companies and employers are cutting jobs before they even fully know which skills they are replacing with A.I., just to “get ahead of the competition.” Whatever that means…

To ward against A.I.’s worst potential, workers must collaborate, not succumb to the alienation that the ownership class is hoping for. We need to recognize that we are connected to one another.

For example…

If my husband, an engineer, loses his job to a robot, not only will my family be impacted, but:

• Our childcare center and its workers will be impacted when we take our child out of their care because we can’t afford it.

• The local businesses that we shop at are impacted because of our tightened budget.

• The barista at the coffee shop is impacted by my grumpiness caused by the stress of economic precarity.

• The land that I live on, this little patch of earth that I love and care for, is impacted if we have to sell our house, and I can no longer care for the hazelnut tree, lavender plants, tulips, and on and on.

• The farmers that we get our CSA from are impacted when we don’t renew our membership.

• These impacts have ripple effects on the other people who interact with these businesses, caregivers, and farmers in my ecosystem.

There are significant economic and environmental impacts of an adoption path for A.I. if workers don’t coordinate and make their voices heard.

We should not be operating with a “ship up or ship out” mentality that only works to serve the most powerful. Instead, we need to adopt a collaborative imagination. How might we together decide what A.I. is and isn’t for? How can we use our collective power to ensure that those with the fewest resources don’t get replaced but instead are buoyed by fellow workers…fellow humans? How can we account for and lift one another up to collectively protect all workers from the exploitative desires of a few?

A few approaches to consider:

• Broaden ownership. Greater adoption of employee ownership has several economic benefits, but it also wards against some of the worst outcomes that A.I. promises because workers share ownership.

  “Automation tends to spark fear because it threatens livelihoods. It’s a faceless process that makes workers feel disposable, as if they are no more valuable than the machines poised to replace them. Offering striking workers an ownership stake changes the equation entirely. Equity transforms the perception of automation from a force to be resisted into a tool that can benefit everyone. Workers become partners, not mere employees. When technology improves productivity, they stand to gain from the success, rather than worry about obsolescence,” shares Colin Birkhead in The Hill.

• Strike. I’m not suggesting that workers strike over A.I. adoption generally, but instead that action be taken when adoption is irresponsible and doesn’t involve worker voice.

• Advocate. In the last legislative session, Colorado considered but ultimately didn’t pass a bill that would have more closely regulated the use of A.I. by businesses. There will be more of these and I suggest all of us help shape and pass smart A.I. legislation.

How else might we strengthen worker voices in concert with A.I.? We aren’t going to resist adoption…but what can we do to make sure that adoption isn’t at the cost of human livelihoods?

This article was adapted from an OpEd that was published in the Boulder Weekly.

The policies that the Trump administration is pursuing — illegal layoffs of federal workers, mass deportations, constant threats and retractions of broad-based tariffs, and Medicaid spending cuts — are bad for the economy. These policies are also being pursued with maximum levels of chaos, creating unprecedented levels of economic uncertainty.

In Colorado, where business leaders have historically had high levels of confidence, we’ve seen their sentiment tank. According to researchers at CU Boulder, “Business confidence took the second-steepest dive ahead of Q2 2025, resting at the third-lowest level in the 23-year history of the Leeds Business Confidence Index,” mostly on account of “uncertainty surrounding new federal policies.”

The new administration is hurting our economy. We have to shore up our local economies to build resilience and sustain ourselves for the next four years and beyond.

Strengthening our economy through collective action requires collaboration and imagination. But we don’t have to create solutions out of whole cloth: There are historic and present-day examples that we can draw on to take back control. Instead of being at the whims of the global supply chain, corporate monopolies, and DOGE’s chaos, we can create a system of reciprocity rooted in place.

The food system is an excellent example. In the pandemic, we experienced a huge disruption to food access as the supply chain broke down. It’s possible that this will happen again, but we can prepare. There are local farmers and ranchers across the country who need community support and patronage. Advocating for more state support for them and investing in our food source through local CSAs are ways that we as individuals can strengthen our food system in Boulder County and the state.

Another example is how we can address disaster preparedness. The Trump administration’s disinvestment in emergency preparedness is shocking in the face of the increasing risk of natural disasters. But there’s a lot of potential for creative solutions.

For instance, the creative partnership in Colorado between Grama Grass and Livestock and cities widens the aperture on the collaborations that are possible. Ranchers at Grama Grass move their herd around the state to graze and provide wildfire mitigation. It’s an excellent example of how our communities can come together, across industries, to address big issues through mutual care and action.

Strengthening the small businesses in our community through our patronage is another powerful action. I talked about this in my last post, but it’s worth reiterating.

For every $100 spent at a locally-owned business, roughly $68 to $73 stays in the community, according to Amy Hartzler, director of communications at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. Local businesses are more likely to hire employees from the community, purchase goods and services from other local businesses, and reinvest profits within the community. Alternatively, only about $43 remains local when spending at a national chain because a large portion of the revenue from chain stores goes to corporate HQ and shareholders.

Markets and the economy have power. Boycotts of big corporations like Amazon, Target and Tesla have an impact. Shopping local keeps more money in our local economy and strengthens the fabric of the community.

Finally, to fortify our economy, we need to be together. Get out of your house, go to the coffee shop, talk to your neighbor, join a group, volunteer. Being together is what is going to create the connections that provide the possibility of revolutionary change and a helping hand, which we’ll all need over the next four years.

Maybe you don’t care about the actions of the Trump administration, but you will care when the infrastructure and institutions of your city and state start to crumble. You don’t have to become part of the resistance, but you can contribute to civil society. In our daily actions and connections, we can work together to strengthen our communities and improve the resilience of the places where we live.

When it comes to our spending habits, most of us default to what's easiest and cheapest. We click "buy now" without a second thought and prioritize convenience above all else. But what if this everyday decision-making is quietly undermining the places we call home? By shifting our consumption philosophy from one focused solely on affordability and convenience to one that prioritizes place and people, we can create extraordinary positive ripple effects throughout our local economies. The power to transform our communities isn't just in the hands of policymakers or business leaders—it's in the choices you make every day.

The power of consumer choice

Our economy is at a turning point. Many small businesses are struggling, and we're still experiencing the fallout of the pandemic. Altered behaviors like remote work, isolation, online shopping, and food delivery continue to have a foothold, hurting local establishments—the businesses and institutions that make it worth living somewhere.

Economic uncertainty seems to be the new normal, but it doesn't have to be. The power to strengthen our communities lies in our everyday choices. By reframing how, what, and why we spend our money, we have the opportunity to build resilience into our local economies.

What you buy and where you buy it has a profound impact. Most of us prioritize affordability and convenience in our spending decisions. While this approach makes sense on the surface, it unfortunately has negative consequences for the places we call home.

The hidden costs of convenience and low prices

Big box stores offer convenience and competitive prices, but they come with hidden costs that affect our local economies, reduce the financial productivity of our communities, and rely on vulnerable supply chains that often cause global damage.

Consider research conducted by Charles Marohn, author of "Escaping the Housing Trap," in Kansas City. His findings revealed that city investments in retailers like Costco and Home Depot actually reduced the financial productivity of the area.

When cities invest in big box developments, they displace land that was—or could be—used for living units or neighborhood-scale commercial space. This physically and financially crowds out small businesses, reducing opportunities for local entrepreneurs and jobs.

As Marohn explains in an article from strongtowns.org, "When one notes that big box stores are cheaply-built structures that aren't expected to last a generation, that's a substantial amount of long-term public investment supporting a pretty fragile and unproductive private investment."

These large retailers also generate less tax revenue for cities. A single-story big box store can occupy the same footprint as a multi-level building while generating significantly less property tax.

Amazon’s impact on local communities

E-commerce giants like Amazon present their own set of challenges. Beyond environmental impacts and labor concerns, Amazon's entry into local markets harms communities economically.

Multiple analyses have found that when an Amazon warehouse enters a community, retail worker pay drops by 2.4%—affecting wages up to 100 miles away from the facility. The local retail sector also loses jobs, which aren't fully replaced by positions within the warehouse itself.

The post-pandemic spending shift

Since the pandemic, when e-commerce grew by 29% in the United States, online shopping has become the default for many of us. A 2022 study found that consumers continue to prefer e-commerce post-pandemic due to convenience and efficiency. This shift has significantly harmed small businesses.

Nearly 43% of small businesses closed during the pandemic, struggling with uncertainty about lockdown durations. Despite the passage of time, small businesses continue to grapple with these effects, facing challenges due to limited resources and competition from dominant online marketplaces.

In Boulder, we've seen a 70% increase in sales tax revenue from online sales while local business revenue has remained stagnant or decreased. This stress on small businesses hollows out local economies and damages the very communities we call home.

The multiplier effect of local spending

What if you took on a community-centered approach to shopping? Instead of defaulting to online retailers or big box stores, you can buy your food, clothes, and home goods locally. For every $100 you spend at a locally-owned business, roughly $68 to $73 stays in your community.

Local businesses are more likely to hire employees from the community, purchase goods and services from other local businesses, and reinvest profits within the area. By contrast, only about $43 remains local when you spend at a national chain because a large portion of the revenue flows to corporate headquarters and shareholders.

The additional cash from local consumption results in more sales tax revenue for your city to spend on amenities, infrastructure, and services. It also represents more jobs and stronger ties between residents and the institutions that exist in their communities. The result is not just more financial capital, but more social capital.

Rebuilding social connections through local engagement

Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone" and "The Upswing," defines social capital as the

"connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." This social capital is a key component of a thriving community, economy, and democracy.

Our habits have changed since the pandemic—we don't go out as much. According to The Atlantic, "The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years."

The National Restaurant Association reports that 74% of restaurant traffic in 2023 came from "off-premises" customers (takeout and delivery), up from 61% before COVID.

These statistics illustrate the impact of decreased social activity on our economy. The less we gather together, the less we go out, and the less money local businesses make. This results in strained budgets for cities and weaker infrastructure for everyone.

What you can do

Each of us is responsible for the health of the places where we live. Creating that health means getting out in the community, developing relationships, and spending our money intentionally.

We all have a part to play in creating a resilient economy. To do that, we need to direct our spending closer to the source and connect with the producers and creators who make the things we need.

Here's how you can make a difference:

• Connect with local food sources: Get to know your farmers and invest in community-supported agriculture programs.

• Bank locally: Move your money to a local bank or credit union, which is typically less risky and more community-oriented.

• Build neighborhood relationships: Get to know your neighbors and explore opportunities to share resources.

• Shop at independent retailers: Make a conscious effort to shop at locally-owned stores for gifts, clothing, and household needs.

• Dine at local restaurants: Choose independent eateries over chains and eat in-person rather than ordering delivery when possible.

Where you spend your money makes a difference. Think about the kind of place you want to live in and how you can work together with your neighbors to create thriving communities that strengthen both the social fabric and local economy of the place you call home.

Notes

• The pursuit of perfection can undermine progress. It’s nearly impossible not to buy things at big corporate stores or Amazon. Any shift, no matter how small, makes a difference. Choose one thing you buy at Amazon and find it at a local store. Instead of ordering delivery on DoorDash, go out to dinner. Do what you can with the time and resources you have.

• If you want to experiment with breaking up with Amazon, here is a great resource that offers a whole bevy of alternatives to shopping with Amazon.

That’s what this revived version of Community Returns will focus on—how each of us can sharpen our attention and take action to improve the places where we live and work. To kick off, I’ve called on the wisdom of Marshall McLuhan to encourage reflection about what might be possible if we assumed control over our attention. The origin of Community Returns was a focus on improving our ability to notice the world around us, so it seems only appropriate.

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan illuminated the power of media to shape and restrict our imaginations, often in service of consumption. Today, media shapes polarizing ideas of life in America and, in many ways, reduces people to consumers in service to platforms and shareholders. The more we recognize what is happening, the more power we have to resist it.

Cultivating our attention

In an era where media saturates every corner of our lives, Marshall McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message” remains strikingly relevant. McLuhan argued that each form of communication influences society more deeply than its content. Under capitalism, this reality has profound implications. Media technologies not only transmit information but also reinforce structures that serve the interests of capitalists, often transforming audiences into passive consumers rather than engaged participants.

It’s not just the information shared through media that shapes us, but the purpose of that information. Most often, the purpose is not to engage deeply with others or improve our understanding of the world but instead to encourage you to buy or click something, which is encouraged through fear, agitation, and shame. To resist, we must cultivate our attention and develop an awareness of the media’s purpose and how each form impacts us.

Commodifying attention

The infrastructure of today’s media is designed to commodify our attention. Traditional broadcast models like television, with their one-to-many communication style, align seamlessly with mass consumer culture. As McLuhan described, the medium fosters passivity, positioning audiences as mere recipients of messages that often support consumerist agendas.

Social media takes this dynamic even further, blurring the lines between content, entertainment, and advertising. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok optimize for engagement—often through agitation and superficial interaction—shaping not just our thoughts but also our patterns of attention and mental states.

As Ezra Klein observed in this New York Times OpEd, we frequently focus on what media express rather than how they express it, but the medium shapes not only the message but also what messages are possible. Character count restrictions, text-based communication, feeds, threads, and other formats all restrain what can be communicated, and through these constraints, entertainment is prioritized. As a result, the dominance of entertaining, bite-size formats and the growing expectation that everything should be entertaining have contributed to the rise of celebrity politicians, where spectacle often overshadows substance.

Media, with its built-in constraints, such as character limits or algorithms favoring controversy, alters our mental states. Observe how you feel after engaging with different media: Are you angry, entertained, or enriched? Media act as environments, subtly altering our perceptions and ultimately shaping who we become. When media change our environments, they change us, often in ways we don’t notice.

How to Resist

To resist, we can develop media literacy and intentionality. As Jenny Odell argues in How to Do Nothing, resistance involves reclaiming our attention and creating spaces for genuine engagement. Similarly, Nathan Schneider, a media studies scholar at the University of Colorado, advocates for building alternative infrastructures that defy commodification. Instead of merely seeking alternative content, we should explore alternative forms of communication that foster meaningful, less transactional interactions.

I’ve found myself seeking in-person interactions, opting for coffee instead of asynchronous communication through email and Slack. I’m reading more books and long-form, well-considered journalism. Instead of poking in on social media, I get most of my news through newsletters, where I have the agency to decide whether or not I want to open the message or simply delete it. And, I’ve tried to find more space for no media, to rest my mind and nervous system.

We can challenge the commodification of our attention by intentionally choosing media that contribute positively to our mental and emotional states. Critical questions can guide us: How do I feel after using this medium? Am I more informed, more thoughtful, or simply more anxious and agitated? Media literacy is not only about analyzing messages but also about recognizing how media shapes our perceptions of reality. Right now, it feels as if the media and the message are meant to sabotage our ability to act. But if we can control how we receive and metabolize information, our agency can be reclaimed.

The most radical solution is to forgo our screens and isolation and instead engage with the people in the places we’re in. Through this, community can be built, and real resistance can begin.