Tag Archives: responsibility

The Death of the Commons and the Piss-Taking Wannabee Founders

A wave of performative, over-leveraged start-ups is degrading the shared trust that underpins venture capital. By making absurd nine-figure asks on the back of debt and bravado, showboating founders extract attention while imposing costs on everyone else. The result is harsher funding conditions, deeper scepticism, and the steady erosion of the start-up ecosystem as a commons.

Continue reading

Power Without Alibis: What Remains After You Understand How Cruelty Works

This final essay completes a trilogy on power by asking what remains once its mechanics are fully understood. Building on Pfeffer’s organisational realism and Machiavelli’s historical clarity, it argues that unsanitised descriptions of power do not endorse cruelty but remove the moral alibis that allow harm to persist. By collapsing the distance between action and consequence, such writing makes innocence unavailable and neutrality impossible. The central risk, that truth can be weaponised, is acknowledged, but silence is shown to be more partisan, concentrating power through ignorance rather than constraining it.

Continue reading