Posts Tagged ‘writing’

When the Algorithm Sets the Price

Posted: September 9, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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What happens when the price of something stops being a decision and becomes an optimization?

There was a time when pricing was relatively simple.

A store decided what to charge. A landlord decided what to charge for an apartment. A hotel adjusted its rates. A customer looked at the number and decided whether to buy.

The decision might have involved spreadsheets, forecasts, competitors, and plenty of guesswork. Today, software can make that decision continuously.

It can watch demand, inventory, competitor prices, location, timing, browsing behavior, and thousands of other signals. It can adjust the price, watch what happens, and adjust it again.

The question is no longer simply: What should this cost?

It can become: What is the highest price the market—or this particular person—will accept?

That sounds like a technological question. It isn’t. It is an economic one.

Because an algorithm does not decide what to optimize. A person does.

And when the objective is maximizing revenue, the machine can become extraordinarily good at pursuing it.

The Market Learns to Move

Dynamic pricing is not new.

Airlines have used it for decades. Hotels do it. Rideshare companies do it. Retailers have long adjusted prices based on demand, inventory, season, and competition.

There is nothing inherently sinister about responding to changing market conditions. The important change is what software makes possible. A human pricing team might review yesterday’s sales and adjust prices today.

An algorithm can monitor thousands of variables in real time. It can test prices continuously. It can detect patterns no human employee could reasonably track. It can respond before anyone even notices the market has changed.

That is useful when the goal is efficiency. Businesses can manage inventory, respond to demand, reduce waste, and sometimes lower prices. But the same capability works in the other direction.

If a system can identify where demand is strong, it can also identify where consumers have little choice. If it can detect when inventory is scarce, it can detect when a customer is unlikely to walk away. And if it can make those calculations continuously, pricing stops being an occasional judgment.

It becomes an optimization problem. That distinction matters because optimization always depends on the objective.

Efficient at what?

From the Market to You

This is where another form of algorithmic pricing enters the picture.

Dynamic pricing asks: What will the market bear? Personalized pricing asks: What will you bear?

The difference can be subtle. A dynamic system might raise the price of a hotel room because demand increased. A personalized system could use information about the person searching for that room to estimate how much that individual is willing to pay. That information can come from many places: browsing history, location, demographics, purchasing behavior, or other characteristics.

The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating this emerging market under the term surveillance pricing. In 2024, it ordered eight companies offering surveillance-pricing products or services to provide information about how they use consumer data to set or influence prices. The FTC has said these systems can use information such as location, browsing history, demographics, and shopping behavior.

The technology is not hypothetical. The economics aren’t hypothetical either.

A field experiment published by economists Jean-Pierre Dubé and Sanjog Misra found that machine-learning-based personalized pricing could increase firm profits substantially beyond an optimized uniform price. Consumers did not all lose: more than 60 percent received lower prices. But total consumer surplus fell substantially compared with uniform pricing.

That distinction is important. Personalized pricing is not simply a machine programmed to charge everyone more.

It is more sophisticated than that. Some people pay less. Some pay more. The system’s purpose is to identify the difference and capture more of the value.

The old question was: What is the price of this thing? The new question can become: What is this particular person likely to pay?

That changes the relationship between buyer and seller. The price is no longer simply attached to the product. It can become attached to the person.

And that raises a more important question: What happens when the person has no good alternative?

The People Who Can’t Walk Away

For a luxury purchase, pricing power has limits. You can decide not to buy the watch. You can wait for the vacation. You can order something else.

But not every market works that way. People need housing. They need food. They need transportation. They need medicine and childcare.

The fewer alternatives a person has, the less meaningful the choice to simply walk away becomes. That is where algorithmic pricing collides with something older than artificial intelligence: unequal bargaining power.

A corporation may have sophisticated data, pricing software, economists, lawyers, and capital behind a transaction. The person on the other side may have a paycheck and a deadline.

The technology does not create that imbalance. But it can measure and exploit the consequences of it with extraordinary precision. And nowhere is that easier to see than housing.

The Apartment

Consider the case of RealPage. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued RealPage, alleging that its software helped competing landlords coordinate apartment pricing rather than compete independently. The basic mechanism was strikingly simple.

Landlords provided the software with information about their properties and rental markets, including sensitive information about rents and lease terms. The system processed that information and generated pricing recommendations.

The DOJ alleged that this allowed landlords to use competitors’ nonpublic information to make pricing decisions and reduced the incentive to compete for tenants. The department later expanded the case to include several major landlords.

This matters because there is a major difference between an algorithm responding to a competitive market and an algorithm helping competitors coordinate within that market. The first can make markets move faster. The second can make competition itself weaker. And the issue has not disappeared.

In 2026, the DOJ has continued to reach settlements and proposed judgments involving landlords accused of using RealPage’s system in ways that restricted competition. A proposed September 2026 consent decree involving Pinnacle, for example, would prohibit certain uses of competitors’ sensitive data and certain anticompetitive algorithmic pricing practices.

The machine is not merely calculating the market here. It is becoming part of the market’s structure. That is the important shift.

The algorithm is no longer just a faster calculator sitting behind a human decision. It can influence what competitors charge, how they respond to one another, and what prices consumers encounter.

The tenant does not get a machine. The landlord does. That difference matters.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Need to Hate You

It is tempting to describe all of this as if the algorithm itself were the villain.

That would be a mistake. An algorithm does not hate renters. It does not resent grocery shoppers. It does not want to extract money from anyone. It has no desires. It has an objective.

People choose the objective. That is why saying “the algorithm decided” can obscure more than it explains.

The important questions are:
  • Who built the system?
  • What information does it use?
  • What has it been told to optimize?
  • Who owns it?
  • Who benefits when it succeeds?

The machine does not introduce the incentive. It inherits it.

If a company rewards its pricing system for maximizing revenue, the system will look for revenue. If it rewards the system for increasing occupancy, it will pursue occupancy. If it rewards the system for extracting more from customers who have fewer alternatives, it will become better at finding those customers.

The technology is powerful because it does not have to believe in the objective. It only has to optimize it.

Algorithms didn’t invent exploitation. They industrialized its optimization.

When Optimization Becomes Extraction

This is where algorithmic pricing becomes more than a story about automation.

The system can observe. Then predict. Then price. Then observe what happened. Then learn. Then price again.

That creates a feedback loop. The market provides data. The data improves the model. The model changes the price. The new price changes consumer behavior. That behavior produces more data. And the cycle begins again.

A human pricing department cannot operate at this speed across thousands of products, customers, properties, or markets. A machine can. That gives the owner of the system a new form of economic power.

Not simply the power to set a price. The power to continuously discover how far a price can be pushed.

This is why the question cannot stop at whether algorithms are efficient. Of course they are.

The more important question is: Efficient for whom?

What Happens When the Machines Compete?

There is another problem hiding inside that question.

Competition assumes that sellers have a reason to undercut one another. But what happens when pricing systems become sophisticated enough to learn that constantly undercutting competitors is not the most profitable strategy? Researchers have already explored this possibility.

A 2020 American Economic Review study found that AI pricing algorithms can learn to collude and raise prices without ever talking to each other. More recent economic theory has examined similar problems, including models in which algorithmic pricing can produce inflated outcomes even without the traditional forms of communication antitrust law is designed to detect.

These studies do not prove that every pricing algorithm will collude. They prove something more useful: A machine does not need to be told to collude for competition to become a problem.

If the system is rewarded for profit, it can discover strategies that make more money. Sometimes those strategies may benefit consumers. Sometimes they may benefit the firm at the consumer’s expense. And sometimes they may weaken the competition that was supposed to protect the consumer in the first place.

That brings us back to the question underneath all of this. Who gets the gains from the machine?

Who Benefits From the Optimization?

The answer is not automatically “the corporation.” Businesses can use algorithmic systems to reduce waste, manage inventory, improve forecasting, and operate more efficiently. Those gains can sometimes reach consumers through lower prices or better service.

That is the strongest case for algorithmic pricing. But efficiency does not tell us how the gains are distributed.

The people buying the product generally do not own the pricing system. Renters do not own the housing software. Workers do not own the corporate data. Consumers do not decide what the algorithm is rewarded for maximizing. The companies do. And when the system becomes better at extracting value, the question becomes who captures that additional value.

That is the deeper economic issue. Technology can increase the size of the pie. It does not determine who gets the larger slice.

That depends on ownership, bargaining power, competition, regulation, and the rules surrounding the market.

An algorithm can therefore look like a neutral piece of software while operating inside a very non-neutral economic structure.

The machine may be new. The incentive is not.

The Machine Is Working

There is something almost unsettling about how ordinary this can look.
  • You search for an apartment. A price appears.
  • You look for groceries. A price appears.
  • You book a hotel. A price appears.

You assume the number is simply the price. But behind that number may be a system processing enormous amounts of information, predicting behavior, responding to competitors, and optimizing an objective chosen somewhere above you.

None of this requires a conspiracy. It does not require an evil executive sitting in a dark room. It does not even require anyone involved to believe they are doing something wrong.

The machine can be working exactly as designed. That is the point. The question is not whether the machine works. The question is what we have asked it to work toward.

We built systems capable of measuring human behavior at extraordinary scale. We gave them access to markets, consumer data, competitor information, and real-time feedback. Then we told them to optimize. So they did.

The problem is not that algorithms make decisions instead of humans. It is that we can encode our existing economic incentives into systems capable of pursuing those incentives faster, more precisely, and at a scale no human workforce could match.

Once that happens, pricing is no longer just a number. It becomes a reflection of power.
  • Who owns the data?
  • Who owns the software?
  • Who chooses the objective?
  • Who has the ability to walk away?
  • Who captures the gains?
  • And who pays for the optimization?

Those questions matter because algorithms did not create the economic system they operate inside. They made that system more capable.

Perhaps that is the question we should be asking when the machine sets the price: Was the thing we built it to optimize ever working for us in the first place?

When “Woke” Changed Meaning

Posted: August 17, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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The life, transformation, and political afterlife of a word

Few words in American politics can change the temperature of a conversation as quickly as woke.

For some, it means awareness. For others, progressive politics. For others still, it has become shorthand for political correctness, cultural excess, or an ideology they oppose.

The word is the same. The meaning isn’t. That makes woke worth examining.

Not because one side is right and the other is wrong. Its history offers a clear example of what can happen when a word moves from describing an idea to carrying a political identity.

And the story begins long before today’s culture wars.

A Word for Staying Alert

The earliest known written example of “Stay Woke” appears in a 1924 edition of the Houston Informer, a Black newspaper in Houston. C. F. Richardson, the paper’s editor, described “Stay Woke” as contemporary street slang. He wasn’t talking about sleep.

To stay woke meant staying alert. Paying attention. Looking after yourself, your family, your community, and your interests.

The phrase already carried a social meaning. Decades later, blues musician Lead Belly used “stay woke” in connection with the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women.

Again, the phrase carried the idea of vigilance in a society where failing to pay attention could have serious consequences.

The word’s meaning wasn’t simply awake. It was alert to what was happening around you. For Black Americans living within a society structured by racial inequality, that distinction mattered.

Before Politics

My own introduction to the word came from somewhere far removed from politics. I first encountered woke in hippie and jam-band culture, and later in rave, EDM, and music-festival culture. There, being woke could suggest consciousness, awareness, or simply being attuned to something beyond the ordinary.

For years, I listened to an ambient-music YouTube channel called Woke Nation, built around meditation, relaxation, and sleep. At some point, the channel changed its name to Awake Nation. I remember noticing the change because, by then, woke had begun to mean something very different in the political vocabulary I was encountering.

That experience isn’t evidence of what the word meant everywhere. But it illustrates something important about language: the same word can live very different lives in different communities. And woke had already lived several lives before it became one of the most recognizable words in America’s culture war.

Then It Spread

“Woke” remained part of Black American language for decades before moving into mainstream culture. Musicians and popular culture helped carry it beyond its original communities. Social media then gave the phrase an enormous new distribution network. Then came Ferguson.

Following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” became closely associated with the emerging Black Lives Matter movement. The word was no longer circulating primarily within a particular linguistic community. It was entering the national political vocabulary.

Merriam-Webster dates the major expansion of the term’s modern usage to this period. By the early 2020s, the dictionary was documenting another meaning of woke: a pejorative for people perceived as excessively politically liberal or progressive.

Something had changed. But what?

From Description to Label

One way to understand the transformation is to separate description from identity.

Originally, calling someone woke could describe a state of awareness. Someone was awake to racial injustice. Someone was paying attention. Someone understood that something was happening beneath the surface.

As the word entered mainstream political conflict, woke increasingly became a label. It could describe not simply what someone believed, but what kind of person they were presumed to be.

That distinction matters.

A descriptive word tells us something about its subject. A political label can tell us something about the person using it.

This is where the story becomes more complicated than ordinary linguistic evolution.

Words change all the time. Meanings expand, contract, and shift as communities use them in new contexts.

But political actors can also participate in that process. A 2025 peer-reviewed study examining woke describes this phenomenon as politicized semantic change: the process by which political conflict can contribute to a word acquiring a new, politically useful meaning. The researchers traced the changing use of woke across mainstream media, Twitter, and Google searches from 2010 through 2022. Their analysis describes a movement from a term associated with awareness of racial and social injustice toward a pejorative associated with excessive liberalism, hypersensitivity, and perceived ideological oppression.

That distinction is important. The argument isn’t that someone invented a new word. The word already existed. The argument is that its existing meaning became politically contested—and that contestation helped produce a new one.

When a Word Becomes a Signal

This is where woke becomes more interesting than a simple argument about whether the word is good or bad.

Words don’t exist in isolation. They exist between people. A word can describe something. But it can also signal belonging, opposition, suspicion, approval, or contempt. Woke increasingly began doing all of those things at once.

Merriam-Webster’s data illustrates how politically charged the word had become. In 2021, searches for woke spiked repeatedly, including a 4,303 percent increase on November 8, coinciding with its use in election coverage.

The word was no longer merely describing a particular form of awareness. It had become a political signal. Political signals are useful because they compress complicated ideas into something immediately recognizable.

You don’t have to explain which policy you oppose. You don’t have to explain which idea you think has gone too far. You don’t even have to explain what you think your opponent believes.

You can just call it woke. The label does the rest.

A Word Can Have Two Lives

There is an important caveat here. Words change. That isn’t evidence of manipulation by itself.

Language isn’t a museum exhibit. Meanings evolve because people use words differently.

So the fact that woke developed additional meanings is not unusual. What makes this case unusual is the speed and political intensity of the transformation.

The dictionary now records both sides of the semantic divide. Woke can describe being actively attentive to racial and social justice, while another sense describes something considered excessively politically liberal or progressive. Both meanings exist. The word didn’t simply acquire a new definition and discard the old one. It became contested territory. And when language becomes contested territory, conversations can become strangely difficult.

Two people can use the same word while talking about entirely different things. One hears awareness. Another hears ideology. One hears justice. Another hears excess. The argument begins before either person has established what they mean.

What Happened to the Word?

Perhaps the most revealing part of the story is that woke didn’t become politically powerful because it stopped meaning something. It became powerful because it began to mean too many things at once. That made it adaptable.

It could describe a political philosophy, a social movement, an activist, a corporation, a university, a television show, a government policy, or a person. Sometimes it was used sincerely. Sometimes sarcastically. Sometimes as an accusation. Sometimes as a badge of identity.

The word became a shortcut. And shortcuts are useful because they eliminate the need to explain everything underneath them. That is also their weakness. When we substitute a label for an explanation, we may win an argument without ever understanding the thing we’re arguing about.

The Battlefield Is the Meaning

The history of woke doesn’t prove that one political side invented language or that the other side corrupted it. It demonstrates something more uncomfortable. Language itself can become political terrain.

A word begins with one meaning. A community gives it context. A larger culture adopts it. Political movements attach themselves to it. Opponents redefine it. Media ecosystems amplify it.

Eventually, the word can become less useful for describing an idea than for identifying which side of an argument someone belongs to. That’s when language stops merely carrying information. It starts carrying identity.

Perhaps that is the more important lesson hidden inside the history of one small word. The next time someone calls something woke, the useful question may not be whether the label is correct.

It may be simpler: What, exactly, do you mean by that word?

Because before we can argue about an idea, we have to agree on what we’re talking about. And sometimes, the fight over the word is the first fight we have to understand.

🤬 Manufactured Outrage: The Business of Keeping Us Divided ➗

Posted: June 29, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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“We figured out there’s something that sells better than sex, and that’s rage.” — Scott Galloway

Every week, there is another crisis.

  • Another viral outrage.
  • Another politician saying the unthinkable.
  • Another celebrity demanding your attention.
  • Another company apologizing.
  • Another boycott.
  • Another culture war.
  • Another reason to pick a side.

Within hours, millions of people are arguing with strangers they’ve never met about people they’ll never know over events they’ll barely remember a month later.

Meanwhile:

  • Rent is still due.
  • Healthcare is still expensive.
  • Groceries still cost more than they did a few years ago.
  • Corporate profits continue to climb.
  • Private equity keeps buying hospitals, nursing homes, and housing.
  • Lobbyists continue writing legislation.
  • The concentration of wealth continues.
  • The concentration of power continues.

And almost none of it trends. That contrast isn’t the article. It’s the question.

If our lives are increasingly shaped by economic forces, why does so much of our collective attention revolve around cultural conflict?

The answer is not that these cultural issues are fake. They’re not.

Questions surrounding race, religion, immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights, policing, gun ownership, and free speech are real. They affect real people in meaningful ways. But there is another question that receives far less attention.

Why do these issues dominate our public imagination so completely while the economic structures shaping nearly everyone’s daily life rarely receive the same sustained focus?

The issue isn’t that people care about the wrong things. The issue is that we are rarely given enough uninterrupted attention to care deeply about the things that shape our lives the most. That distinction matters.

Because attention is no longer simply a feature of modern life. It has become one of its most valuable commodities.

The Product Is Our Attention

Industrial capitalism extracted physical labor. The digital economy extracts attention.
  • Every swipe.
  • Every click.
  • Every comment.
  • Every notification.
Every moment spent looking at a screen is measured, analyzed, monetized, and sold inside one of the most competitive markets ever created.
  • Technology companies compete for it.
  • Advertisers compete for it.
  • Political campaigns compete for it.
  • News organizations compete for it.
  • Influencers compete for it.

Your attention has become an economic resource. And like every valuable resource, institutions have become remarkably efficient at extracting it.

The question is no longer whether information reaches us. The question is which information survives long enough to command our attention.

Journalist Chris Hedges has spent years warning that much of modern journalism has been transformed into spectacle—where entertainment values increasingly eclipse civic ones. News still informs, but it must also compete for ratings, clicks, and engagement. In that environment, spectacle often wins.

The market rewards what captures attention. Not necessarily what deserves it. That incentive changes everything.
  • Stories become shorter.
  • Context becomes optional.
  • Conflict becomes continuous.

The goal is no longer simply to inform the public. The goal is to keep the public watching.

Scott Galloway argues that digital platforms discovered something profound about human behavior.

“We figured out there’s something that sells better than sex, and that’s rage.”

That observation explains more than social media.
  • It explains modern media.
  • It explains political fundraising.
  • It explains why cable news panels seem permanently angry.
  • It explains why every notification sounds urgent.
  • It explains why every disagreement becomes existential.

Because outrage performs. Not morally. Economically.

The system does not ask whether anger is healthy. Only whether it is effective. And by nearly every measurable engagement metric, it is. Which raises a deeper question.

If attention has become the world’s most valuable commodity…Who decides where it goes?

The Great Substitution

Noam Chomsky once observed:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

Whether one agrees with every aspect of Chomsky’s political analysis is almost beside the point. The observation points toward something larger than ideology. It points toward perception.

Every society contains more events than its citizens could ever possibly follow.
  • Thousands of policy decisions.
  • Corporate mergers.
  • Labor disputes.
  • Environmental rulings.
  • Court decisions.
  • Regulatory changes.
  • Scientific discoveries.
  • International conflicts.

No individual can meaningfully process all of them. Selection is inevitable. Somebody—or something—must decide what receives sustained attention. The question isn’t whether filtering exists. The question is how that filtering happens.

In previous generations, editors and producers performed much of that role. Today, editors still matter. But increasingly, algorithms perform it alongside them.

A handful of digital platforms now mediate an extraordinary share of the world’s information flow. Search engines decide what is discoverable. Social media platforms determine what becomes visible. Recommendation systems decide what spreads, what disappears, and what millions of people encounter before they’ve consciously chosen to look for it.

None of these systems asks a moral question. They ask an engineering question. What keeps people engaged?

And once that becomes the optimizing principle, another pattern quietly emerges. Attention becomes perception. Perception becomes priority. Priority becomes power.

Once you begin looking through that lens, the daily news starts to feel different. Not because the stories are false. But because you begin asking a different question.

What isn’t staying in view long enough for us to fully understand it?

The Incentive Machine

Conflict Is More Profitable Than Cooperation

If attention becomes perception, the next question is obvious. What determines where attention goes?

Not ideology. Incentives.

The most important systems in modern public life are built around optimization.
  • Social media platforms optimize for engagement.
  • Television networks optimize for ratings.
  • Advertisers optimize for attention.
  • Political campaigns optimize for turnout and donations.
  • News organizations optimize for subscriptions, viewership, and clicks.

Each institution has different goals. Yet remarkably, they all arrive at the same conclusion. Conflict performs. Calm does not.

A nuanced discussion of healthcare financing may affect millions of people. A viral confrontation between political rivals can dominate headlines for days. One changes lives. The other captures attention.

The incentive structure doesn’t ask which story matters more. It asks which story keeps people from scrolling.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has long argued that the greatest threat to journalism is not simply political bias, but institutional incentives that reward audience affirmation over adversarial reporting. As news increasingly competes in the same marketplace as entertainment, the pressure shifts from informing audiences to retaining them.

The result isn’t necessarily false information. It’s selective attention. Stories that provoke outrage survive. Stories that require patience struggle.

Complexity loses. Conflict wins. Again and again. Not because someone gives the order. Because every institution is responding to the same market signal. Attention.

Edward Snowden approached the same problem from a different direction. His warnings were never only about surveillance. They were about architecture.

The systems we build quietly shape the choices we make inside them.
  • Recommendation engines determine what appears before us.
  • Algorithms decide what is amplified.
  • Notifications compete for interruption.
  • Trending topics compete for urgency.

None of these systems are conscious. But all of them influence perception. They don’t tell us what to believe. They influence what we repeatedly encounter. And repetition has extraordinary power.

Not because repetition proves something is true. Because repetition teaches the brain that something is important.

Attention becomes perception. Perception becomes priority. Priority becomes power.

Robert Greene writes that whoever can provoke emotional reactions gains influence over others. Modern technology has industrialized that insight.

Every outrage cycle follows a familiar rhythm.
  • A statement.
  • A reaction.
  • A counter-reaction.
  • A viral clip.
  • A thousand comment threads.
  • A million people emotionally invested.

Then another controversy arrives. The previous outrage disappears. Nothing is resolved. Everything resets.

The cycle isn’t designed to produce understanding. It is designed to produce engagement. And engagement has become one of the most valuable commodities in the world.

This is why the question is not: Who is manipulating us? That question almost always leads to conspiracy thinking.

A better question is: What behaviors does the system reward?

Systems don’t require central planning to produce predictable outcomes.
  • Markets don’t.
  • Evolution doesn’t.
  • Traffic patterns don’t.
They emerge from incentives. The attention economy works the same way.
  • No single editor has to coordinate with every platform.
  • No executive has to orchestrate every controversy.
  • No politician has to manufacture every division.

When every institution benefits from attention…and outrage is the fastest path to attention……the outcome becomes remarkably predictable. Not because it was planned. Because it was rewarded.

When Reality Interrupts the Narrative

If the outrage economy has one weakness…it’s reality.

Reality has a habit of cutting across political identities.
  • A mortgage payment doesn’t ask whether you’re Republican or Democrat.
  • A medical bill doesn’t care who you voted for.
  • A factory closing doesn’t distinguish between progressive and conservative workers.

Economic reality has a way of collapsing cultural distance. And when that happens, something interesting occurs.

People who have spent years arguing with one another suddenly discover that they share the same employer.
  • The same landlord.
  • The same healthcare system.
  • The same paycheck anxiety.
  • The same shrinking leverage.
  • The same uncertainty about the future.

Shared conditions create shared interests. And shared interests create the possibility of something the outrage economy struggles to monetize. Solidarity.

When Workers Remember What They Have in Common

Shared Material Interests Build Stronger Coalitions Than Manufactured Division

If outrage fragments attention…shared experience restores it.

That is the quiet lesson running beneath nearly every successful labor movement in modern history. Not that people suddenly begin agreeing on everything. But that they begin remembering what they already share. Chris Smalls understood this.

When Amazon workers on Staten Island organized the company’s first successful independent union, they were not recruited because they shared the same political identity. They didn’t. Some were conservatives. Some were liberals. Some rarely thought about politics at all.

They came from different racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds. Yet every one of them walked through the same warehouse doors. Worked under the same productivity quotas. Faced the same scheduling pressures. Shared the same concerns about wages, safety, dignity, and respect.

For a brief moment, the culture war gave way to something more immediate. Reality. Material conditions became impossible to ignore because everyone experienced them together.

The organizing question was never: “Who did you vote for?”

It was: “What kind of workplace do we want?”

That distinction changes everything. Because shared material conditions often succeed where shared ideology fails. They create coalitions built not on identity…but on lived experience.

The same pattern has appeared elsewhere.

Starbucks workers organized stores across states with vastly different political cultures around scheduling, staffing, and wages.

The United Auto Workers brought together employees from communities that often vote very differently, yet negotiated around the same paychecks, pensions, and working conditions.

Hollywood writers and actors—hardly a monolithic political community—organized around compensation, creative ownership, and the emerging impact of artificial intelligence on their profession.

UPS Teamsters secured one of the most significant labor contracts in recent years by focusing on concrete workplace issues that affected every driver and warehouse employee regardless of party affiliation.

Different industries. Different cultures. Different politics.

The same underlying pattern. When reality becomes impossible to ignore…identity becomes less important than shared conditions.

This should not surprise us.
  • Economic pressure rarely asks ideological questions.
  • Inflation does not distinguish between red states and blue states.
  • Medical debt does not care who you follow on social media.
  • Unaffordable housing does not check voter registration.
  • A factory closure does not pause to ask your position on the latest cultural controversy.

Reality is stubbornly bipartisan. And reality has a remarkable ability to expose what outrage often conceals.

The people working beside you are rarely your greatest source of economic leverage—or your greatest obstacle.

More often than not, they’re living through many of the same structural pressures you are. That doesn’t erase genuine disagreements. Nor should it. Democracy depends on disagreement.

The question is not whether disagreements exist. The question is whether they consume so much of our collective attention that we lose sight of the conditions we experience together.

Attention becomes perception. Perception becomes priority. Priority becomes power.

If that sequence is true…then solidarity begins with attention. Not attention to the newest outrage. Attention to the realities that remain long after the outrage has disappeared.

Wisdom Is Resistance

There is an old saying that if you want to understand a society, don’t ask what it says it values. Watch what it rewards.

The modern attention economy rewards speed over depth.
  • Reaction over reflection.
  • Performance over participation.
  • Certainty over curiosity.
  • Outrage over understanding.
None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires incentives.
  • Markets respond to incentives.
  • Algorithms respond to incentives.
  • Political campaigns respond to incentives.
  • Media organizations respond to incentives.
  • Human beings respond to incentives.

Why would we expect the information ecosystem to behave differently?

Perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves is no longer: “Is this story true?”

Truth matters. But another question comes first. “Why is this the story I am being invited to spend my attention on today?”

It reminds us that attention is never merely personal. It is political. It is economic. And increasingly…it is one of the primary ways power is exercised in the twenty-first century.

That question changes everything. Because it transforms us from consumers of information…into observers of the system that delivers it.

Manufactured outrage does not require us to hate one another. It only requires us to look away from one another long enough to forget what we have in common.

Workers do not share the same religion. They do not share the same political party. They do not share the same cultural identity. They do not share the same vision for every social issue. They never have.

Yet increasingly, workers share the same economic landscape.
  • The same housing market.
  • The same healthcare system.
  • The same concentration of corporate power.
  • The same shrinking leverage over the institutions that shape their daily lives.

Attention becomes perception. Perception becomes priority. Priority becomes power.

The struggle over public attention is not ultimately a struggle over opinion. It is a struggle over what society remembers. Because what a society remembers…is what it eventually decides to change.

The outrage economy wins when every day feels like an emergency. Democracy works only when citizens can distinguish between the urgent…and the important.

The next time another manufactured outrage demands your attention, don’t just ask which side is right. Ask a different question.

What disappeared from view while everyone was looking here?

The answer may tell you far more about power than the outrage itself ever could.

When Change Comes in Layers

Posted: June 16, 2026 in Stimulus Space Response
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Photo by Branislav Knappek on Unsplash

The Nature of Change

“No great thing is created suddenly.” — Epictetus

This morning, I showed up.

I followed through on something that mattered to me — clear-headed, aligned, focused. For a moment, I felt like I was becoming the version of myself I’ve been working toward.

An hour later, I hit a different decision point. And I didn’t take the action I meant to. Old habits stepped in. I let the moment pass.

But here’s what surprised me: I didn’t unravel. I didn’t shame myself or throw the rest of the day away.

I shifted gears. I stayed present. And the rest of the day has been solid, productive, meaningful, even light.

That’s what reminded me: change doesn’t always arrive in clean lines. Sometimes it shows up in layers. And that’s still real progress.

Grace in the Middle

“You cannot rip the skin off the snake. The snake must moult the skin. That’s the process of change.” — Alan Watts

We’re conditioned to believe that transformation is something we push through. But often, it’s something we wait with.

We want to force the old version of ourselves to fall away. But it doesn’t work like that. It’s not about control. It’s about timing.

Alan Watts puts it simply: you can’t rush the shedding process. You don’t rip the skin off the snake. The change happens, but only when it’s ready.

What I’m learning is that real growth feels slower than we expect. Not weaker — just more alive.

Photo by Simon Stankowski on Unsplash

You Are Not a Machine

“Growth is an erratic movement, not a steady climb.” — Nathalie Goldberg

We tell ourselves that if we were changing, we’d be consistent.

But humans don’t move like machines. We’re cyclical, emotional, and imperfect. Progress is jagged. And that’s okay.

This morning reminded me that one slip doesn’t cancel the steps that came before it. It’s not all-or-nothing. Some days you show up in one area and miss in another — and both are part of the picture.

When we drop the pressure to be perfect, we make room for something more sustainable: self-trust.

Rewiring the Self

“Neurons that fire together, wire together.” — Donald Hebb

Every time we try again — even if it doesn’t stick — we’re teaching our brain something new.

Habits don’t form instantly. They form through repetition, through small shifts in how we respond. Each choice sends a signal.

When you pause instead of spiral, when you reset instead of shut down, that matters. You’re building a pattern of showing up with patience.

It takes time. But it takes.

Photo by Marc Marchal on Unsplash

Trust the Tending

This morning didn’t go perfectly. But I met myself with patience, and I kept going.

That’s what I’m learning to trust: the act of tending to yourself, even when your progress doesn’t follow a straight line. Even when it feels like you’re circling the same challenge again. Even when the change is quiet and invisible to everyone but you.

We often underestimate these moments. The decision to stay present instead of shutting down. The small, unglamorous choice to show up again. The willingness to ask: “What’s still possible today?” instead of assuming the day is lost.

These are the real milestones. This is the texture of transformation — not dramatic, not always visible, but deeply human.

Growth doesn’t have to be loud to be meaningful. Sometimes it’s just quietly showing up for yourself again.

Seek, Find, Embrace: The Power of Openness

Posted: October 24, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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An open mind can seem like a vague term. Yet closed-minded is very succinct and easy to understand. It can be confusing to learn that openness to the world is the key to finding what we seek in life. But it is straightforward that being closed-minded towards the world is to live a limited, suffocated life.

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” — Buddha

I find myself in a battle against being closed-minded regularly. Some practices that help me keep my mind more open than closed are:

  • Reading philosophy
  • Meditating
  • Studying humanism
  • Journaling
  • Practicing yoga

I have cultivated enough awareness to at least know the concepts of open vs closed-mindedness which I am grateful for. I still have much work to do to keep myself open-minded in moments of test and choice, but then again, who doesn’t?

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” — Albert Einstein

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Close-Minded — having or showing rigid opinions or a narrow outlook.

Open-Minded — willing to consider new ideas; unprejudiced.

Photo by Levi Bare on Unsplash

Having an open mind generally involves curiosity, willingness to learn, and embracing new experiences. For me, I find having an open mind correlates with positivity, productivity, or at the very least neutrality regarding thought, perception, emotion, and action. Day to day if/when I find myself slipping into negative or detrimental thoughts, perceptions, emotions, or actions; there is a good chance I’ve concurrently slipped into closed-mindedness.

I feel like being closed-minded is the default setting in our human nature. Hard-wired into us as a survival mechanism from caveman times. It also seems like we are becoming more closed-minded in the algorithm-dominated modern world of digital echo chambers and rage-bait. An open mind is a rich soil for evolution and growth. A closed mind is a rich soil for egocentric withering.

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thankfully, fostering an open mind is simple, easy, and completely within our ability to control. This is nice because living can be complex, difficult, and at the mercy of external situations enough as it is.

  • Mindful breathing exercises
  • Guided meditation
  • Journaling
  • Getting out into nature

The above list are some of my go-to’s that have been very helpful and enriching for me. But in the name of micro-tasking, start by just trying any small, simple new thing or by doing something you already do just a little bit differently.

Starting with our existing routines and habits, even the most mundane ones, is a practical way to open our minds. Try holding items with a different hand, eating breakfast for dinner, taking a different route to work, or watching a foreign film with subtitles. These small modifications can be surprisingly effective first steps toward a more open-minded perspective.

“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.” — Wayne Dyer

We need to be more open-minded. The world needs more open-minded people. Being open-minded is the foundational paradigm for learning, connecting with people, discovering new opportunities, and living a fulfilling and meaningful life.

It’s simple but not easy because we are going against the grain of human nature. It’s natural to be closed-minded when we already have what we need to survive. But we don’t want to just survive, we want to thrive. Regardless of our definition of what thriving is to us individually, the first step on our path there, begins with having an open mind.

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