The end of corporate pretense
Public attention is shifting from performance metrics to institutional legitimacy
A few years ago, I took an MBA course called the Socially Responsible Enterprise. One of my assignments was to analyze the impact reports of two tobacco companies and develop a recommendation for investors, indicating which company was a better investment. After reading the reports, the answer I brought to the professor was, neither. They should be shut down. The professor encouraged me to take a more pragmatic look at the problem and suggested that the efforts towards harm reduction should be the focus. In the middle of this project, I had to travel to Kansas for a funeral. My aunt had just died of a smoking-related disease. A week after burying my aunt, I stood in front of my class and argued that investors should put more money into Philip Morris, a company that had helped kill someone I loved.
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.
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.