UofWinds 434, Week 13 2026: The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment, Organized Abandonment, Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future
Good morning. There is the lightest layer of snow gathered at the edges of the rooftops (and the solar panels) that I can see from my kitchen window. On Monday it is forecast to be 20°C but on Thursday it will be as cold as it is today. Everything feels unsettled but tolerable because we know that Spring will be here soon enough.
Feeling a bit unsettled myself, I have been revisiting some of the works that have restored me in the past (which is one reason why some of the links in this episode of the newsletter are from some years ago). This week I have been re-watching Laurie Anderson's 2022 Norton Lecture series. In the first episode, called The River, after a bit of a preamble, she begins her talk with a line that hit different on this re-watch; after telling the story of the time that she was mistaken to be performing as Loni Anderson, Laurie suddenly becomes serious and asks the viewer, "What war is this?"
Happy No Kings day to our neighbours to the North.
I find myself collecting readings and exhortations that – in essence – all say the same thing: that the only way out of the polycrisis where we find ourselves cannot be found through reform or restoration [ht], but from within a new world that we must make inevitable. That new world cannot yet be seen from this horizon but that does not mean that it's not already here. As Ursula K. Le Guin told us,
Utopia has been euclidean, it has been European, and it has been masculine. I am trying to suggest, in an evasive, distrustful, untrustworthy fashion, and as obscurely as I can, that our final loss of faith in that radiant sandcastle may enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia.
The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment
I had to double check my spreadsheet of the over 5K links that I've shared through this newsletter to make sure that this wasn't a repeat recommendation, but evidently I have been gatekeeping this 2017 blog post, entitled, The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment by Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell. This is surprising to me because this particular post fundamentally altered the way that I have since understand abuse of power in an organization and in politics.
Initially, the connection eluded us: why would the same person who made unwanted sexual advances also fake expense reports, plagiarize, or take credit for other people’s work? We remembered that people who will admit to attempting or committing sexual assault also disproportionately commit other types of violence and that “criminal versatility” is a hallmark of sexual predators. And we noted that taking credit for others’ work is a highly gendered behavior.
Then we realized what the connection was: all of these behaviors are the actions of someone who feels entitled to other people’s property – regardless of whether it’s someone else’s ideas, work, money, or body. Another common factor was the desire to dominate and control other people. In venture capital, you see the same people accused of sexual harassment and assault also doing things like blacklisting founders for objecting to abuse and calling people nasty epithets on stage at conferences. This connection between dominance and sexual harassment also shows up as overt, personal racism (that’s one reason why we track both racism and sexism in venture capital).
So what is the Al Capone theory of sexual harassment? It’s simple: people who engage in sexual harassment or assault are also likely to steal, plagiarize, embezzle, engage in overt racism, or otherwise harm their business.
Organized Abandonment
I found another sense-making concept that I realized that I have not properly shared before: organized abandonment, although I did mention the term briefly when I shared this quote back in '23 in issue 322:
Adler-Bolton and Vierkant coin the term “extractive abandonment,” (a variation on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of the carceral system as “organized abandonment”) to describe how public subsidies flow to privatized facilities offering substandard care, from for-profit nursing homes to prisons.
I think I didn't share Sarah Jaffe's The Baffler article Organized Abandonment when it first circulated last February because I figured that was already well-shared and wouldn't be new to the readers of this newsletter.
But I think its worth re-visiting and re-sharing in this moment.
... In Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Ricia Anne Chansky writes that resilient “is a word that has often been used to describe the people of Puerto Rico in the aftermaths of Hurricane María. This label is problematic, though, as it sidesteps the reality that this resiliency is born of repeated abandonment by the federal government during the almost 125 years that Puerto Rico has been a part of the United States.” Groups like Taller Salud, a feminist health care organization which I visited there in 2022, stepped into the gaps left by the state; they took care of each other, created new programs and plans for the next storm while holding their community together with blue tarps and orange tote bags of emergency supplies.
Organized abandonment, as abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes it, is the process by which the state and capital deliberately leave behind communities through disinvestment, privatization, and the degradation of the environment. New Orleans’ neglected levees—which failed disastrously during Katrina—were a version of it but so was the rush to reopen Bourbon Street and play the Sugar Bowl the day after a mass murder. It is a way of conditioning survivors to the fact that no help will be coming, of demanding they be resilient because there is no alternative. “Crisis, then, is organized abandonment’s condition of existence and its inherent vice,” Gilmore writes, alongside Craig Gilmore.
I believe we are seeing organized abandonment in the abundance of Canada, at all levels of government, although it has not yet been named as such. What is unsaid is that all the recent formidable cuts to our social services that have been recently made by our governments are no longer framed as temporary.
Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future
Andrew Curry's most recent post from his Just Two Things newsletter tackles both Technology and Change. It was one I had to bookmark and return to when I had enough time and space to consider what he was sharing and I'm glad I did so.
Not only does Curry introduce the reader to the Norwegian government's hilarious 00:04:00 video, The Ensh*ttificator, he shares from the 100 page report that that video stealthily promotes, Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future, from The Norwegian Consumer Council.
Curry then expands on the report with other readings and his own knowledge on the topic of audience capture and enshittification:
It’s worth noting that there were some books at the turn of the century that more or less anticipated this development, such as Blown to Bits, by Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster.
So this is a long way in to the enshittification problem, which suggests that:
- technology users have no power of voice or exit;
- this is partly a result of structural changes wrought by distribution channels that are in practice more or less free to use; and
- this has been amplified over time by a failure of competition policy and regulation.
And the point of going this long way round is to suggest that if we’re going to deal with enshittification, we will need to address these underlying issues.
Both Curry and the Norwegian Consumer Council outline possible policy changes that we need to work towards if we expect to see any improvements to the present.
I'm also looking forward to the Part II to his thoughts of Change.
“no dominant culture”, Williams writes, “ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intentions” [emphasis in original]. [125]
There is, in other words, always the potential for the emergent to emerge. All the same, writing in 1977, he noted that “the dominant culture reaches much further into capitalist society than ever before,” partly because of the nature of mass communications, a subject that was a particular interest of Williams. This is almost certainly more true than it was then, both because of the concentration of media ownership we have experienced in the last 50 years, and the online spread of mimetic visual culture.
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