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Companies accumulate wealth by taking it from people with less power through various means of subterfuge (that we call it marketing is, in and of itself, marketing), which, even on a small scale, is an activity necessarily uninterested in equality. If capitalism could deliver economic parity — if parity was even part of the ideology’s intent, which it’s not — then Latinx women wouldn’t still make 54 cents on a white man’s dollar several hundred years into the American capitalist experiment.

Capitalism is an apparatus that convinced a whole culture that then-worthless clear rocks were the only real way to tell a woman you wanted to marry her, so convincing us that buying a T-shirt from a creep (or from union busters, or polluters, or whoever) is the same as being politically active is comparatively light work

Even though there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, that doesn’t mean all consumer choices are the same. Companies can’t be feminist, but their leaders can make choices that operate on feminist values, like supporting the unionization of their workforces and providing fair wages and comprehensive health care and family leave to all workers. When possible, taking your business to those companies is an ethically superior choice. Capitalism is a global economic order that’s impossible to opt out of on an individual consumer level, but it’s possible to make some of the individual choices therein with integrity, even if you understand that doing so doesn’t move the dial as political action.

the only clear-eyed way to regard a corporation is, at best, as an adversary

The complex and its buildings vaguely recall a Southwest landmark frequently mistaken for the city of the future: Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s 1970 “urban laboratory” nestled in the mountains north of Phoenix. It’s oddly fitting: Soleri imagined a sustainable desert utopia, as well as speculative space “arcologies”—self-sustaining architectural ecologies, delicately rendered as hypothetical asteroid-belt cities or prototype ships

The only spacecraft we see on the tour is a model of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, glimpsed from a distance in an otherwise empty hangar. Even the spacecraft isn’t real.

the name Spaceport America suggests theatrics. There are several commercial spaceports throughout the United States, some of which sport more activity and tenants. Most of Virgin Galactic’s testing has happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port; Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport recently signed on the SpaceX competitor Vector as a customer.Others, like Oklahoma’s Air and Space Port, seem to be even more like ghost towns than this one. But New Mexico’s gambit suggests we are at the spaceport of the nation. It doesn’t feel like the frontier of private space travel so much as a movie set.

Many promises for technologies of future urbanism start as desert prototypes

New Mexico examples tend to include slightly more dystopian rehearsals: Much of the state’s existing science and defense industries emerged from bringing Manhattan Project scientists to what, at the time, was the middle of nowhere to test nuclear weapons—essentially, to practice ending the world.

most of my fellow tourists take the premise of ubiquitous space travel to colonies on Mars as a fait accompli. I’m not sure why people in a desert would fantasize about going somewhere even harder to inhabit

Humanity dreams of going to space for many of the same reasons some people went to the desert: because it is there, because they hope to get rich extracting natural resources they find there, and because they suspect mysterious, new terrains can’t be any worse than the irredeemable wreckage of the landscape they’re leaving behind

believing in the inevitability of Mars colonies is maybe no less idealistic than believing in the Southwest itself

The romance and promise of the American West was built, in part, on federal land grants to private corporations that promised to bring boomtowns to places previously otherwise deemed uninhabitable wastelands. Cities rose and fell with the rerouting of railroads

To manifest destiny’s proponents, to doubt the inevitability of technological and social progress via the railroad was tantamount to doubting the will of God. Today, questioning the value of (mostly) privately funded space development likewise feels like doubting human progress

I wonder if the future always feels like rehearsal until it arrives, or if it is always rehearsal, only seeming like it has arrived when the run-through loses its novelty. Maybe all of the impatient skeptics will be proven wrong this year, and the future will finally arrive at Spaceport America. Here in the desert, a better future always seems to be right around the corner

Andrew Carnegie, the famed American industrialist, who advocated that people be as aggressive as possible in their pursuit of wealth and then give it back through private philanthropy

“the poor might not need so much help had they been better paid.”

“MarketWorld.” In essence, this is the cultlike belief that intractable social problems can be solved in market-friendly ways that result in “win-wins” for everyone involved, and that those who have succeeded under the status quo are also those best equipped to fix the world’s problems.

Among the denizens of MarketWorld are so-called “thought leaders,” the speakers who populate the conference circuit, like TED, PopTech and, of course, the Clinton Global Initiative. (When you pause to think about it, “thought leader” is appallingly Orwellian.)

Giridharadas argues that the rise of thought leaders, whose views are sanctioned and sanitized by their patrons — the big corporations that support conferences — has come at the expense of public intellectuals, who are willing to voice controversial arguments that shake up the system and don’t have easy solutions. Thought leaders, on the other hand, always offer a small but actionable “tweak,” one that makes conference-goers feel like they’ve learned something but that doesn’t actually threaten anyone.

giving MarketWorld what it craved in a thinker: a way of framing a problem that made it about giving bits of power to those who lack it without taking power away from those who hold it

In a nod to Wilde, he argues that the person who “seeks to ‘change the world’ by doing what can be done within a bad system, but who is relatively silent about that system” is “putting himself in the difficult moral position of the kindhearted slave master.”

He’s come to big conclusions: that MarketWorld, along with its philosophical antecedents, like Carnegie-ism and neoliberalism (which anthropologist David Harvey defines as the idea that “human well being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets and free trade”), has been an abject failure

His key idea is to reinvigorate governments, which he believes could fix the world’s problems if they just had enough power and money. For readers who are cynical about the private sector but also versed enough in history to be cynical about governments, the book would have been more powerful if Giridharadas had stayed within his definition of an old-school public intellectual: someone who is willing to throw bombs at the current state of affairs, but lacks the arrogance and self-righteousness that comes with believing you have the solution

the justice system continues to be slow to understand the link between online harassment and real-life violence

In order to increase public safety this decade, it is imperative that police — and everyone else — become more familiar with the kinds of communities that engender toxic, militant systems of harassment, and the online and offline spaces where these communities exist. Increasingly, that means understanding social media’s dark corners, and the types of extremism they can foster.

Businesses have to learn when online outrage is manufactured

There’s a difference between organic outrage that arises because an employee actually does something outrageous, and invented outrage that’s an excuse to harass someone whom a group has already decided to target for unrelated reasons — for instance, because an employee is a feminist. A responsible business would ideally figure out which type of outrage is occurring before it punished a client or employee who was just doing their job.

Social media platforms didn’t learn how to shut down disingenuous conversations over ethics and free speech before they started to tear their cultures apart

Dedication to free speech over the appearance of bias is especially important within tech culture, where a commitment to protecting free speech is both a banner and an excuse for large corporations to justify their approach to content moderation — or lack thereof.

Reddit’s free-speech-friendly moderation stance resulted in the platform tacitly supporting pro-Gamergate subforums like r/KotakuInAction, which became a major contributor to Reddit’s growing alt-right community. Twitter rolled out a litany of moderation tools in the wake of Gamergate, intended to allow harassment targets to perpetually block, mute, and police their own harassers — without actually effectively making the site unwelcome for the harassers themselves. And YouTube and Facebook, with their algorithmic amplification of hateful and extreme content, made no effort to recognize the violence and misogyny behind pro-Gamergate content, or police them accordingly.

All of these platforms are wrestling with problems that seem to have grown beyond their control; it’s arguable that if they had reacted more swiftly to slow the growth of the internet’s most toxic and misogynistic communities back when those communities, particularly Gamergate, were still nascent, they could have prevented headaches in the long run — and set an early standard for how to deal with ever-broadening issues of extremist content online.

Violence against women is a predictor of other kinds of violence. We need to acknowledge it.

Somehow, the idea that all of that sexism and anti-feminist anger could be recruited, harnessed, and channeled into a broader white supremacist movement failed to generate any real alarm, even well into 2016

many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first

It remains difficult for many to accept the throughline from online abuse to real-world violence against women, much less the fact that violence against women, online and off, is a predictor of other kinds of real-world violence

Politicians and the media must take online “ironic” racism and misogyny seriously

Gamergate masked its misogyny in a coating of shrill yelling that had most journalists in 2014 writing off the whole incident as “satirical” and immature “trolling,” and very few correctly predicting that Gamergate’s trolling was the future of politics

Gamergate was all about disguising a sincere wish for violence and upheaval by dressing it up in hyperbole and irony in order to confuse outsiders and make it all seem less serious.

Gamergate simultaneously masqueraded as legitimate concern about ethics that demanded audiences take it seriously, and as total trolling that demanded audiences dismiss it entirely. Both these claims served to obfuscate its real aim — misogyny, and, increasingly, racist white supremacy

The public’s failure to understand and accept that the alt-right’s misogyny, racism, and violent rhetoric is serious goes hand in hand with its failure to understand and accept that such rhetoric is identical to that of President Trump

deploying offensive behavior behind a guise of mock outrage, irony, trolling, and outright misrepresentation, in order to mask the sincere extremism behind the message.

many members of the media, politicians, and members of the public still struggle to accept that Trump’s rhetoric is having violent consequences, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The movement’s insistence that it was about one thing (ethics in journalism) when it was about something else (harassing women) provided a case study for how extremists would proceed to drive ideological fissures through the foundations of democracy: by building a toxic campaign of hate beneath a veneer of denial.

by taking up military history, Gladwell’s half-witted didacticism threatens to convince millions of people that the only solution to American butchery is to continue shelling out for sharper and larger knives

Although the phrase “Bomber Mafia” traditionally refers to the pre-World War II staff and graduates of the Air Corps Tactical School, Gladwell’s book expands the term to include both kooky tinkerers and buttoned-down military men. Wild, far-seeing mavericks, they understood that the possibilities of air power had only just been breached. They were also, as Gladwell insists at various points, typical Gladwellian protagonists: secluded oddballs whose technical zealotry and shared mission gave them a sense of community that propelled them beyond any station they could have achieved on their own.

Gladwell’s narrative is transmitted as seamlessly as the Wall Street or Silicon Valley koans that appear atop LinkedIn profiles, Clubhouse accounts, and Substack missives.

Gladwell has built a career out of making banality seem fresh

Drawing a false distinction between the Bomber Mafia and the British and American military leaders who preceded them allows Gladwell to make the case that a few committed brainiacs developed a humane, “tactical” kind of air power that has built the security of the world we live in today.

By now, the press cycle for every Gladwell book release is familiar: experts and critics identify logical flaws and factual errors, they are ignored, Gladwell sells a zillion books, and the world gets indisputably dumber for it.

“What actually happened?” Gladwell asks of the Blitz. “Not that much! The panic never came,” he answers, before favorably referring to an unnamed “British government film from 1940,” which is in actuality the Academy Award-nominated propaganda short London Can Take It!, now understood to be emblematic of how the myth of the stoic Brit was manufactured.

Gladwell goes to great pains to portray Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay as merely George Patton-like: a prima donna tactician with some masculinity issues. In reality, LeMay bears a closer resemblance to another iconic George C. Scott performance, one that LeMay directly inspired: Dr. Strangelove’s General Buck Turgidson, who at every turn attempts to force World War III and, at the movie’s close, when global annihilation awaits, soberly warns of a “mineshaft gap” between the United States and the Commies. That, as Gladwell might phrase it, was the “real” Curtis LeMay: a violent reactionary who was never killed or tried because he had the luck to wear the brass of the correct country on his uniform. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay once told an Air Force cadet. “Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”

Why would Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to admire LeMay so much, talk at such great length about the lethality of LeMay’s Japanese firebombing? The answer lies in what this story leaves out. Mentioned only glancingly in Gladwell’s story are the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The omission allows for a stupid and classically Gladwell argument: that indiscriminate firebombing brought a swift end to the war, and its attendant philosophical innovations continue to envelop us in a blanket of security that has not been adequately appreciated

While LeMay’s 1945 firebombing campaign was certainly excessive—and represented the same base indifference to human life that got Nazis strung up at Nuremberg—it did not end the war. The Japanese were not solely holding out because their military men were fanatical in ways that the Americans weren’t, as Gladwell seems to suggest, citing Conrad Crane, an Army staff historian and hagiographer of LeMay’s[1]; they were holding out because they wanted better terms of surrender—terms they had the prospect of negotiating with the Soviet Union. The United States, having already developed an atomic weapon—and having made the Soviet Union aware of it—decided to drop it as it became clear the Soviet Union was readying to invade Japan. On August 6, the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, and mere hours after the Soviet Union formally declared war on the morning of August 9, the Americans dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. An estimated 210,000 people were killed, the majority of them on the days of the bombings. It was the detonation of these bombs that forced the end of the war. The Japanese unconditional surrender to the Americans was announced on August 15 and formalized on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2. As historians like Martin Sherwin and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have pointed out, by dropping the bombs, the Truman administration had kept the Communist threat out of Japan. Imperial Japan was staunchly anticommunist, and under American post-war dominion, the country would remain that way. But Gladwell is unequipped to supply the necessary geopolitical context that could meaningfully explain why the American government would force an unconditional surrender when the possibility of negotiation remained totally live.

In 1968, he would join forces with segregationist George Wallace as the vice-presidential candidate on his “American Independent Party” ticket, a fact literally relegated to a footnote in Gladwell’s book. This kind of omission is par for the course in The Bomber Mafia. While Gladwell constantly reminds the reader that the air force leadership was trying to wage more effective wars so as to end all wars, he cannot help but shove under the rug that which is inconvenient

This is truly a lesson for the McKinsey set and passive-income crowd for whom The Bomber Mafia is intended: doing bad things is fine, so long as you privately feel bad about it.

The British advocacy group Action on Armed Violence just this month estimated that between 2016 and 2020 in Afghanistan, there were more than 2,100 civilians killed and 1,800 injured by air strikes; 37 percent of those killed were children.

There's nothing inevitable about an ad market that requires surveillance. Contextual advertising – advertising based on the content of articles, rather than data on the readers – is far more profitable for publishers than behavioral ads.