If you offer to buy a kidney from me and I agree to sell you that kidney, then we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory, voluntary arrangement in which the state should not intervene. Never mind that all the people who sell their kidneys are poor and desperate and all the people who buy the kidneys are rich and powerful. After all, can we really ever be sure that someone *feels* "powerful" or "desperate"?

8/

This is an extremely convenient political philosophy if you happen to be in the market for a kidney, or for that matter, if you want to buy the labor or bodies of any kind of worker for any kind of use.

9/

It's a great philosophy if you never want to bargain with a union, because the union is interfering with the "voluntary" transactions between workers and their bosses, and the glittering equations (operating in a Cartesian realm with no room for "power" or other squishy factors) prove that this is "market distorting."

It's also an extremely convenient political philosophy if you are getting rich by stealing from people, or even murdering them.

10/

If you offer me a payday loan with a ten heptillion percent APR and I accept it, that's voluntary, it's the market, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pass comment on the fact that 100% of the people who take those loans are poor and 100% of the people who originate them are rich:

pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usu…

11/

Likewise, if you're enjoying a wildly profitable monopoly, this philosophy acts as antitrust repellent: "if people didn't prefer my monopoly business practices, they'd shop elsewhere":

eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/p…

It's great news if you want to destroy the planet with immortal, infinitely toxic plastic packaging, because it lets you claim that the only problem with plastics is "littering" (irresponsible individuals) and not your products:

pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/the…

12/

Party Like It’s 1979: The OG Antitrust Is Back, Baby!

President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

It's fantastic news if you're one of a few very large fossil fuel companies who are rendering the only planet in the known universe that's capable of sustaining human life uninhabitable, because it lets you blame the problem on our individual "carbon footprints" (not your depraved greed):

mashable.com/feature/carbon-fo…

13/

The Carbon Footprint Sham

“This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever.”

^{Mark Kaufman (Mashable)}

This is a philosophy that is violently allergic to systemic analysis. It *must* reduce everything to a set of individual choices, taken in a power-free vacuum: to litter, to labor, to borrow, to shop. Its adherents are so saturated in this ideology that they can't even see that it *is* an ideology.

14/

Think of Noam Chomsky's interview with Andrew Marr:

> Marr: How can you know I’m self-censoring?

> Chomsky: I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

15/

A systemic view challenges everything about the neoliberal mindset. In 2011, the streets of Hackney (and beyond) erupted in an uprising of protest, which included some looting and arson, though the vast majority of mobilization was of marching and shouting protesters outraged at the murder of a Black man by London police.

16/

In response, then-Prime Minister David Cameron declared all systemic explanations for the uprising to be off-limits, calling it "criminality, pure and simple":

theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/09…

"Criminality, pure and simple" has *zero* explanatory power. Where did this "criminality" come from? Why did it spike on these days? What happened to it after the uprising was crushed by police? Did it go away?

17/

David Cameron's full statement on the UK riots

Full text of the prime minister's response to the violence that broke out in London, Birmingham and other cities

^{David Cameron (The Guardian)}

Is it festering in the hearts of Britons up and down the country, awaiting some inaudible signal before detonating again?

How frightening it must be to believe in a world without systemic explanations! It's a world where inexplicable spirits sweep across the land, engendering population-scale effects that are the result of millions of people making voluntary, individual decisions, disconnected from any kind of social phenomena.

18/

It must be terrifying, like living in a world secretly governed by demons or witches.

It's the world of the conspiracy fantasist.

Yesterday, I wrote about the role that the conspiratorial wing of the Trump coalition is playing in keeping the Epstein story alive, and the danger this poses to Trump:

pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/win…

Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators.

19/

As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes - not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it - bragged about it, even!

20/

But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with *imaginary* abusers - Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings:

pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ide…

This is the "mirror world" of right wing conspiracism described in Naomi Klein's *Doppelganger*:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not…

21/

It's the world in which real suffering children (kids in cages, children rotting in Alligator Auschwitz, kids working the night-shift at a meat-packing plant) don't matter at all, while imaginary children (unborn children, Qanon victims, etc) take center stage.

Indeed, one of the strangest things about the Epstein case is that it's the rare instance in which right-wing conspiratorialists care about *actual* people, rather than imaginary ones.

22/

The mirror-world dominates right-wing politics. It's a world in which systemic problems don't exist, because it's a world in which systemic power doesn't exist. It's a world where individual rich people with evil in their heart are to blame for our problems, not a world where a system of impunity for the powerful allows rich people to get away with hurting us.

23/

This is why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools." An antisemite blames their problems on a cabal of Jewish bankers, rather than the dominance of the political system by finance capital.

In response to yesterday's post, reader Garvin Jabusch wrote to say, "your phrase 'blame systemic problems on individuals' does a fantastic job of crystallizing how I feel about the BP-invented concept of the carbon footprint."

24/

This is exactly right, and it's an important connection I'd never drawn before myself. Because while conspiracies have run rampant since time immemorial, the modern conspiracist is a conservative, trapped in the mirror-world:

pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/tha…

The mirror-world warps reality, but that warpage has the same curvature as neoliberalism's "There is no such thing as society."

25/

Conspiracism - like neoliberalism - insists that the world runs on individual virtue and wickedness, not the systemic properties that make it easier or harder (or impossible) to do the right thing.

This is why Donald Trump banned the word "systemic." To any objective observer, it is plain that Donald Trump is an effect, not a cause.

26/

He's too stupid and impulsive to do anything except fill the Donald Trump-shaped hole in our politics, after 40 years of Democrat/Republican consensus that "there is no such thing as society" and insistence that every social problem is the result of a "distorted market" and can only be worsened by state intervention.

27/

Both neoliberalism and conspiracism insist that the world is run by great men, not by social forces. By denying that anything can be "systemic," Trump can deny that *he* is systemic, merely a conveniently shaped monster suited to our monstrous times.

28/

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:

clarionwriteathon.com/members/…

eof/

Clarion Write-a-Thon | Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly …

^{clarionwriteathon.com}