“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” -Gramsci 1 Everyone quotes Gramsci now. It has become the default frame for this moment, a preferred sign-off on an email signalling that you know there is
Did I tell you about the time Steve Jobs responded to us? It was 2007. I was writing strongly worded green design blog posts, going after greenwashing claims from the designer of the Swiffer, the CEO of SIGG water bottles, and the entire electronics industry. It was the earliest days of the internet-to-corporate-response. People were
Capital moves. The structures we’ve built move it toward return, toward liquidity, toward exit. Systems persist. Communities persist. The places where people live and work and build lives—these do not exit. They continue, with or without the capital that passes through. We have designed our financial structures for the movement. The venture fund with its
On Mechanistic Metaphors Systems thinkers love to talk about leverage points—those magical places where a small intervention supposedly yields outsized change. The image is always mechanical: a bar, a fulcrum, a decisive push. But that metaphor smuggles in an assumption: that the world behaves like a machine waiting for the right force in the right place.
On forecasting, portfolios, and futures On forecasting, portfolios, and futures “We need to spend more time on Horizon 2,” they both say. One is a program officer at a climate and nature philanthropy. The initiatives they’re funding risk being captured by the dominant political economy in the U.S. or co-opted by greenwashing actors who sound
“Narrative change” has become its own sphere in philanthropy and movement work, stories as culture, identity, and legitimacy. Narrative work is funded. Those with the best narratives attract funding. There’s even been a backlash against narrative-building, and last week I had a set of compelling conversations thanks to Julia Roig’s post on Judith Mil’s post,
Performing Economic Realities: Climate Week on Value, AI, and the Contest Over Contribution My worlds all collided at Climate Week, and it’s taken me another week to metabolize the bafflement of many and find the corners of coherence, trying to remember more than the variation of seating charts, convening experiences, and which rooms were set
A story about unimaginative visions for efficiency and who gets to decide what intelligence serves. The machines are learning. But not what you think. The machines are learning how to hollow out human work and pour the profits into distant accounts. The machines are learning the language of efficiency, which means “we don’t need
A compelling narrative is emerging in business and finance: a shift from funding effort to paying for results. On the surface, outcomes-based models, results-based finance, and impact-linked finance appear to be a logical evolution toward greater efficiency and accountability. This approach, however, is not a panacea. It’s a complex tool whose application merits careful critique,
The signs are everywhere, if you know where to look. A German state announces it’s done with Microsoft Teams. A billionaire venture capitalist podcasts a manifesto justifying the rule of tech elites. AI researchers scramble to prevent a “data winter.” These might seem like disconnected events, but they reveal something deeper: three distinct responses to