The Long Con
What Replaced the American Dream and How to Build Something Better
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when you spend enough time watching the numbers. Not the stock market numbers, which keep going up. The other numbers. Rent. Groceries. Medication. The cost of keeping your kids in decent schools. The amount left over at the end of the month after the bills are handled.
Those numbers have been moving in one direction for a long time, and they are not moving in your favor.
Between 1979 and 2019, the U.S. economy became dramatically more productive. GDP grew. Corporate profits grew. The stock market grew. And yet, according to the Economic Policy Institute, inflation-adjusted pay for the median American worker rose just 13.7 percent over that entire 40-year stretch. The top one percent of earners, in that same period, saw their wages rise 160 percent. The top 0.1 percent saw 345 percent. This divergence is not an accident. It is not the market finding its natural equilibrium. According to economists who have studied the data, it is the result of deliberate policy choices made in the interests of people who already had a great deal of money, at the expense of people who did not.
The Brookings Institution found that after adjusting for inflation, wages in 2017 had only about ten percent more purchasing power than wages in 1973. Ten percent over 44 years. Less than a quarter of a percent per year. Meanwhile, Pew Research documented that by 2016, Americans in the top tenth of the income distribution were earning 8.7 times as much as those at the bottom, compared to 6.9 times in 1970. The gap keeps widening, and nobody in a position to close it seems especially interested in doing so.
On top of the wage picture, consider the cost picture. Average monthly rent in the United States was $1,185 in 2020. It is now $1,700. The consumer price index for groceries was $254 in 2020, even in the middle of a supply chain crisis. It is now $320. Electricity that cost 13 cents per kilowatt hour five years ago now costs 20. If you had $100,000 in a conservative bond-oriented retirement fund in 2020 and saw a 25 percent gain, your actual purchasing power today, after inflation and before taxes, is about $96,830. You made money on paper and lost ground in reality.
This is the environment we are living in. And it matters to understand how we got here, because understanding the mechanism is the only way to figure out what to do about it.
The Machinery of Extraction
The story of how American economic policy evolved from something broadly redistributive into something that systematically concentrates wealth is long and complicated. It involves the Bretton Woods agreement after World War II, which made the dollar the world’s reserve currency and gave the United States extraordinary leverage over global trade. It involves Nixon ending the gold standard in 1971, touching off years of inflation and recession, and then the secret 1974 deal between Treasury Secretary William Simon and the Saudi Kingdom that created the petrodollar system and stabilized American financial dominance by tying global oil trade to the dollar. It involves the deregulation of financial markets, the steady erosion of union bargaining power, and the rise of shareholder primacy as the dominant theory of what corporations are for.
But explaining all of that is a project for economists and historians. For this piece, what matters is the result, which is a system in which the primary economic activity for a large and growing number of powerful actors is not producing anything, but extracting value from things other people built.
Private equity is the clearest example. Consider what happened to Toys R Us. In 2004, the company was profitable. Standard and Poor rated it B+. It had real estate assets, recognizable brand equity, and about $100 million per year available to invest in e-commerce development. Then KKR, Bain Capital, and Vornado Realty Trust acquired it in a leveraged buyout. Within a short time, the company’s interest payments alone were running four times what that reinvestment budget had been, as management fees and dividend recapitalizations consumed over $470 million. Toys R Us never built the e-commerce platform. The debt load made it impossible. The stores closed. Workers were let go. Anchor retail spaces across the country went dark.
This same playbook was run on KB Toys, Sports Authority, and dozens of other companies. The people running these operations were not making mistakes. They understood exactly what they were doing. A profitable business, in the private equity model, is not primarily a producer of goods and services. It is a vehicle for a debt service transaction.
The same logic has moved into healthcare. The Senate Budget Committee’s 2025 report detailed multiple instances of private equity firms adding hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to acquired healthcare facilities, extracting short-term profits, and then walking away as those facilities struggled to function. A 2023 study published in JAMA found that private equity ownership of healthcare facilities was associated with a 25 percent increase in adverse patient events. Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, which had served low-income residents for nearly two centuries, was closed after a private equity acquisition stripped its assets for investor distributions. Steward Health Care, once the largest private equity-operated hospital system in the country, filed for bankruptcy in 2024. Genesis HealthCare followed in 2025. Envision Healthcare collapsed in 2023. At least 20 percent of all for-profit private hospitals in the United States are now owned or operated by private equity firms, according to the American Federation of Teachers.
Then there is housing. After the 2008 financial crisis, Blackstone built and sold off Invitation Homes, becoming the largest owner of single-family homes in the country. The company re-entered the market in 2021, acquiring Home Partners of America and later Tricon Residential. The scale of Blackstone’s current residential portfolio, including single-family homes and apartment units, runs into the hundreds of thousands of units. Blackstone argues that it represents less than one percent of the overall rental market and that its operations improve housing quality and supply. The counterargument, documented by the Pestakeholder Institute, is that at Blackstone’s San Diego properties acquired in 2021, rents increased 38 percent in less than three years, nearly double the 20 percent market average for the region. At some individual buildings, the increases ran north of 70 percent.
The broader housing picture is stark. Fewer homes are being built today than in 1959, despite the U.S. population being nearly twice what it was then. The housing shortage is structural, the result of decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning, and rising construction costs. Into that shortage, Wall Street has deployed enormous capital, not to add supply but to capture the pricing power that shortage creates. Blackstone’s own president described declining new housing construction as good news in a 2023 earnings call, because it was favorable for values. That is not a landlord looking to solve a problem. That is an investor describing an asset with inelastic demand and constrained supply. Those are the mechanics of a toll booth, not a market.
The technology sector is running a version of the same play. OpenAI, by its own projections, is on track to burn more cash than any company in history. Nvidia invested $100 billion into the company while simultaneously holding a monopoly on the hardware required to build AI infrastructure. OpenAI has secured exclusive purchase agreements for memory components with Samsung, reportedly cornering 40 percent of global DRAM production capacity, making it effectively impossible for consumers or small businesses to build or buy machines that run AI models locally. Microsoft holds a 27 percent equity stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm, valued at $135 billion, while simultaneously being one of the largest cloud providers that would benefit from AI dependency.
The end state this system is building toward is one where you cannot access information, conduct business, or participate in the digital economy without routing your activity through infrastructure that a small number of companies own. When that transition is complete, the debt gets collected. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the explicitly stated strategy.
The physical infrastructure of that transition is already landing in communities across the country, and the bill is being handed to the people who live there.
Data Centers: What They Are Not Telling You
The data center is the physical object that houses the AI economy. It is a warehouse the size of several football fields, running 24 hours a day, consuming extraordinary amounts of electricity and water, generating noise, heat, and diesel exhaust from backup generators, and producing relatively few permanent jobs. As of 2024, the average new data center site covered approximately 224 acres, a 144 percent increase in footprint since 2022. The largest campus projects now exceed 1,000 acres. More than 4,000 are already operating in the United States, mostly in Virginia, Texas, and California. Another 3,000 are planned or under construction.
The costs of this infrastructure are not being borne by the companies building it. They are being distributed to the communities that host it.
Residential electricity prices jumped 7.1 percent in 2025, more than double the general inflation rate, and topped 20 percent in some states, according to federal data. Data centers are not the only factor driving those increases, but they are a significant one. A 2024 report from Virginia’s own legislative watchdog agency found that households in that state, which hosts more data centers than anywhere else in the country, could see their monthly electricity bills increase by $14 to $37 as the power grid is upgraded to meet data center demand. That upgrade cost is passed to ratepayers. A single medium-sized data center can consume up to 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling, equivalent to the annual water use of roughly 1,000 households.
In 2025, Americans paid more than $60 billion in electricity rate increases nationwide. Multiple regions showed evidence that data center power procurement contributed directly to those increases. The companies building the data centers are not paying for the new substations, new transmission lines, and new power generation capacity their operations require. Those costs are socialized. The profits are private.
The community impact playbook will be familiar by now. Developers enter non-disclosure agreements with local officials before any public announcement. Eighty percent of Virginia municipalities with existing or proposed data centers had NDAs in place, according to a review of 31 jurisdictions. Public input is limited. Environmental review timelines have been shortened by federal executive order, reducing formal opportunities for communities to object. Zoning approvals for projects that will fundamentally alter the character of rural and agricultural land are frequently decided in half-empty rooms, with the developer’s attorneys present and most affected residents unaware that the meeting is happening.
The jobs argument is made at every zoning hearing. It is mostly not true. A November 2025 study by two business school professors found no clear evidence that data centers stimulate local growth in tech employment. A separate analysis by Food & Water Watch estimated that as few as 23,000 people in the entire United States work in the data center industry. That is a vanishingly small number of permanent jobs in exchange for 300-million-gallon-per-year water draws, billion-dollar electricity subsidies, and the permanent rezoning of farmland.
Here is what happened when communities found out what was actually being proposed.
In Tucson, Arizona, residents discovered a project called Beale’s Project Blue, a proposed data center development that the city had been negotiating largely outside public view. Residents showed up. They attended meetings, wrote op-eds, and organized. On August 6, 2024, in an unscheduled vote, the Tucson City Council voted unanimously to discontinue discussions with the developer. The chamber was packed. People cheered. The Beale executives, apparently having not anticipated that the community would have opinions about a significant water-consuming installation in one of the driest cities in the country, left to boos.
In Indianapolis, Google announced a $1 billion data center project for the southeast side of the city. Residents organized opposition, showed up consistently to city-county council meetings, and made their case. In September 2025, Google’s attorneys appeared before the council and announced the company was withdrawing its rezoning proposal. A resident who had been part of the effort told More Perfect Union: “For a long time, it felt like we were four people with cardboard swords fighting a monster. But tonight it shows that people power still rings.”
In Ohio, a proposal to rezone 300 acres of farmland for data center development generated enough organized opposition that the landowners withdrew the application entirely. In Wisconsin, residents citing concerns about agricultural land loss and water use have pushed state legislators to introduce mandatory quarterly reporting requirements for electricity and water consumption. In Culpeper County, Virginia, a $12 billion data center project was unanimously denied by the planning commission after residents objected to its proximity to a Civil War battlefield and raised concerns about rural preservation.
Between March and June 2025 alone, community opposition led to $98 billion in data center projects being blocked or delayed, according to Data Center Watch. The total blocked or delayed between May 2024 and March 2025 reached $64 billion. These are not symbolic victories. These are billion-dollar infrastructure projects that did not happen because people showed up to meetings, wrote letters, talked to their neighbors, and refused to accept the premise that their community existed as a site for someone else’s infrastructure.
More than 230 state and local environmental organizations sent a letter to Congress in December 2025 demanding a national moratorium on new data center construction until adequate regulations could protect communities. That coalition is bipartisan. Conservative rural landowners who do not want their agricultural county rezoned for server warehouses are sitting next to progressive environmentalists who are concerned about water consumption and diesel generators. The data center fight is one of the cleaner examples of what happens when extraction lands directly in someone’s backyard, and they decide to do something about it.
The opposition to data centers is not organized by any national political party. It is not being funded by any major foundation. It is being conducted by the same people who attend school board meetings, write letters to the editor of local newspapers, and show up when something that affects their community is on a government agenda. It is civic participation in its most basic form, and it is stopping billion-dollar companies from taking what they want.
This matters not just as a feel-good story about community power. It matters as a data point about what is possible when people treat their community as something worth defending rather than something that happens to them.
What Is Actually Being Stolen
There is a study, cited frequently in behavioral economics, called “Income and Emotional Well-being: A Conflict Resolved.” Its findings are worth sitting with. Money and happiness are closely linked to approximately $60,000 to $90,000 in annual income. At that range, a person or family can own a home, save for retirement, start a small business, and absorb setbacks without going into crisis. Above that threshold, the relationship between income and happiness mostly flattens. People making $130,000 a year are, on average, no happier than people making $80,000.
What $60,000 to $90,000 actually buys is not luxury. It buys the capacity to say no when you are mistreated. It buys the freedom to report harassment without immediately becoming homeless. It buys the ability to join a union or attend a city council meeting without worrying that the person with leverage over your job or your landlord will find out. It buys the kind of autonomy that allows you to be a citizen rather than a dependent.
The extraction economy has a specific interest in keeping as many people as possible just below that threshold. A person who cannot afford to miss a paycheck is not a free person. They are a person who will absorb indignity, work unsafe hours, skip necessary medical care, and decline to make noise about any of it because the risk of making noise is too high. The goal of the current system, whether anyone has articulated it precisely or not, is to keep the noise down.
That is what is actually being stolen. Not just money. Autonomy. The capacity for self-determination. The ability to participate in civic life as something other than a consumer.
There Is a Different Way to Organize
This is the part where a certain kind of writer would pivot to a call for government action. Elect better people. Pass better laws. Regulate the private equity firms. Break up the tech companies. These things may or may not happen, and some of them may or may not help. But waiting for governments, which are largely operated by and in the interests of the same actors who built the current system, to voluntarily dismantle it is not a strategy. It is an optimistic theory.
The alternative is civic mutualism.
The term is less dramatic than it sounds. What it describes is the idea that people who share a community have real obligations to one another, that those obligations can be organized into functional institutions, and that those institutions can provide many of the things that the extraction economy either does not provide or provides at an artificially high price. It is not a utopian vision. It is a description of things that already work, have worked for a long time, and are working right now.
Credit unions are the most visible example. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, federally insured credit unions in the United States held $2.43 trillion in assets and served 144.7 million members, according to the National Credit Union Administration. Those members added $38 billion in dividends to their accounts in 2024. A credit union is not a charity. It is a member-owned cooperative financial institution. When it makes money, that money goes back to the members, not to shareholders. Its lending decisions are oriented toward member benefit, not toward extracting maximum interest from people in financial distress. Credit union membership grew by 2.4 million in 2025 alone.
That is not a fringe movement. That is 144 million Americans who have, at least in the domain of banking, chosen an institution that is structurally obligated to serve them over one that is structurally obligated to extract from them. The difference is ownership.
In the Basque Country of Spain, there is a cooperative federation called Mondragon that has been operating since 1956. It employs 70,085 people across 260 cooperatives in 35 countries. In 2024, it reported sales of €11.2 billion and net income of €632 million. The ratio of executive pay to lowest worker pay is capped at 6-to-1. In the United States, that ratio at major corporations averages approximately 344-to-1. When Fagor Appliances, one of Mondragon’s founding cooperatives, went bankrupt in 2013 during the aftermath of the financial crisis, the corporation absorbed 95 percent of the affected workers into other parts of the network. When the 2008 crisis hit, Mondragon worker-owners voted to share the pain through reduced hours rather than layoffs. Of 103 cooperatives created between 1956 and 1986, only three failed, a 97 percent survival rate across three decades. This is not because cooperative economics is magic. It is because when workers own the enterprise, their interests and the enterprise’s interests are the same thing.
In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson is doing something similar at a smaller scale. Their Freedom Farms Cooperative produces organic food for working-class Black residents in a county where more than 61,000 people are food insecure. Their community land trust holds 52 debt-free properties. Their network of worker cooperatives employs local people on terms the workers themselves control. None of this required a billionaire or a government program. It required people organizing around shared needs and building institutions that serve those needs.
Community land trusts offer one of the more direct solutions to the housing problem. A community land trust acquires land and holds it in perpetuity for the benefit of the community, removing it from speculative markets and making it permanently available for affordable housing, community gardens, or other civic purposes. The model is not new. It has been operating in Vermont, Atlanta, New York City, and dozens of other places for decades. It is not complicated. It is simply a decision that some land should be treated as a community resource rather than an investment vehicle.
Self-Help Credit Union, chartered in 1983 in North Carolina, has spent four decades offering affordable loans to low-income families for child care, home ownership, and business development. It has made over $11 billion in financing available to communities that conventional banks routinely redlined out of the credit system. It is a member-owned institution making decisions oriented toward member benefit. It is not a revolutionary concept. It is a cooperative doing what cooperatives do.
The Decline of Civic Life and Why It Matters
There is a connection between economic precarity and civic disengagement that is not intuitive but is well documented.
Formal volunteer participation in the United States fell to 23.2 percent in 2021, the lowest level recorded in nearly two decades, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps. The percentage of American households donating to charitable organizations declined from 66 percent in 2000 to 49.6 percent in 2018. Economic disadvantage and income inequality, according to research published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership, significantly suppress volunteering. The Great Recession had a persistent dampening effect on civic participation, particularly in communities that had previously been doing well. When economic instability becomes chronic, the Gallup data shows, people have less discretionary time and fewer resources to give.
This is not a coincidence. The same mechanism that extracts financial autonomy also extracts civic participation. A person working two jobs to afford rent in a market where private equity has priced out starter homes is not attending city council meetings. They are not volunteering at the food bank or coaching youth sports or serving on the neighborhood association. They are surviving. And when enough people are just surviving, the institutions of civil society atrophy. The volunteer fire departments lose members. The mutual aid networks thin out. The PTAs go unstaffed. The civic organizations that once served as the connective tissue of American community life quietly collapse.
This is not an accident either. Atomized people who lack community infrastructure are easier to manage. They are less likely to organize. They are more likely to consume rather than participate. They are customers, not citizens.
The number that should be alarming to everyone is this one: more than 30 percent of nonprofits reported difficulties maintaining service levels in 2022 due to declining volunteer numbers, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The organizations that exist to address the gaps left by government and the market are themselves being hollowed out by the same economic pressures that created those gaps.
What Civic Mutualism Actually Requires
This is the part that is harder to write, because it is not primarily about policy or institutions. It is about individuals deciding to behave differently from the way the system encourages them to behave.
The extraction economy needs you to be passive. It needs you to be a consumer of services rather than a producer of community. It needs you to outsource every function of daily life to a platform or a corporation that charges you for it and extracts your data while doing so. It needs you to be too busy, too exhausted, and too financially stretched to participate in the institutions that would give you leverage over your own circumstances. Every hour you spend on a screen consuming content is an hour you did not spend at a neighborhood meeting or a cooperative planning session or a volunteer shift. The atomization is the product.
Civic mutualism begins with the decision to stop being a customer of your own community and start being a participant in it.
This means practical things. It means moving your money from a bank that uses your deposits to extract value from communities like yours to a credit union that is structurally required to reinvest that value in members like you. It means, if you have the capacity, joining or founding a cooperative rather than a conventional business. It means volunteering with organizations that fill gaps the market cannot or will not fill, not because you feel good about it, but because the work needs doing and you are capable of doing it.
It means supporting nonprofits with money and time, not as charity but as infrastructure. The food bank, the legal aid organization, the housing advocacy group, and the workforce development nonprofit are not optional amenities in a healthy community. They are the institutions that keep people functional, that absorb shocks, that advocate for people who cannot afford lobbyists. They are chronically underfunded and understaffed, and they are increasingly being asked to compensate for the failures of systems that were deliberately designed to fail certain people.
It means showing up to city council meetings, school board meetings, planning commission hearings, and zoning variance hearings. The decisions that shape your community’s physical and economic structure are made in rooms that are mostly empty, by elected and appointed officials who are largely accountable to whoever actually shows up. Developers show up. Private equity lobbyists show up. If community members do not show up, the decisions reflect that.
It means the less comfortable thing, too, which is advocating for people who cannot advocate for themselves. The immigrant family that does not speak English well enough to navigate the housing authority bureaucracy. The disabled veteran who does not know that he is entitled to benefits he has never claimed. The elderly woman whose landlord is illegally withholding her security deposit. These people exist in every community. The civic infrastructure of a healthy community does something about them, not because it is required by law but because the members of that community have decided that looking the other way is not acceptable.
None of this is passive. All of it requires deciding that your community’s health is your problem, not someone else’s job.
On Self-Reliance as a Civic Act
There is a tendency in progressive discourse to treat self-reliance as a conservative talking point and mutual aid as a left-wing one, as though these were opposites. They are not. They are the same thing at different scales.
A person who can fix their own plumbing, grow some of their own food, perform basic first aid, and handle their own minor legal matters is a less vulnerable person. They are less dependent on platforms that charge extraction rents for services that used to be handled within families and communities. They are less exposed to the instability of supply chains they cannot control. They have more time and more capacity than someone who must outsource every function of daily life because they have never learned to do any of it themselves.
The skills that used to be transmitted through communities, through 4-H clubs and Scouting programs and church communities and neighborhood associations, are not trivial. They are the substrate of resilience. A child who has learned to cook, to camp, to read a map, to lead a group, to manage a project, to sit with discomfort and work through it is a more capable adult than one who has not. These skills do not primarily serve the individual who has them. They serve the community those individuals inhabit, because communities composed of capable people are more resilient than communities composed of consumers.
Scouting is worth mentioning here because it is an institution that has been quietly doing civic mutualism at scale for over a century, mostly without calling it that. The Scouting model connects young people to outdoor environments, teaches practical skills, develops leadership capacity, and creates a culture of service that is oriented specifically toward community. The merit badge system is, at its core, a curriculum in capability. Service hours are not optional. The requirement exists because service is treated as an obligation, not a preference.
There are hundreds of organizations like this across the country, quietly building the human infrastructure of civic life: volunteer fire and rescue companies, community emergency response teams, Rotary clubs, Kiwanis, local chapters of national service organizations, community gardens, tool libraries, skill-sharing networks, mutual aid collectives. Most of them are perpetually short of volunteers and money. All of them are doing work that serves communities in ways that no government program or private enterprise can replicate, because what they are actually doing is not delivering a service. They are building relationships, and the relationships are the product.
What We Should Throw Out
The consumer mindset has to go. The idea that your relationship to your community is fundamentally that of a customer, entitled to receive services and exempted from the obligation to provide them, is both morally wrong and practically destructive. Communities do not run on entitlement. They run on contributions. The person who only takes and never gives is not participating in a community. They are living in a hotel that doesn’t charge.
The dependency on systems that are explicitly designed to extract from you also has to go, at least where you have alternatives. If your bank is making decisions with your money that are harmful to your community, there is a credit union available. If you can source food from a local cooperative or community-supported agriculture arrangement instead of a chain that uses your grocery data to optimize its pricing models, that option exists. If there is a community organization that needs your particular skills, the lack of participation is a choice, not a constraint.
The idea that voting is the primary form of civic participation also has to go. It matters, and you should do it. But the local nonprofit that provides legal aid to people who cannot afford attorneys has a more direct impact on more lives than the outcome of most elections. The volunteer EMT who shows up in the next 90 seconds is more meaningful in that moment than any policy that gets passed. The neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door during a heat wave is not waiting for a government program to do it.
The passive acceptance of systems that harm you has to go. When a private equity firm loads a hospital with debt and starts cutting staff, patients die. When a zoning board approves a development that will price out existing residents, those residents are displaced. When a company processes your data in ways that were not disclosed and uses it against your interests, something has been taken from you. The appropriate response to being harmed is not to accept it. It is to organize, to show up, to document, to advocate, and in some cases to build the alternative institution that removes your dependence on the harmful one.
The idea that these problems are too big for individuals to affect also has to go. The current system requires your participation to function. It requires your deposits, your labor, your data, your consumption, and your passivity. Withholding any of those things, particularly at scale, is leverage. The credit union sector has $2.43 trillion in assets because 144.7 million Americans made a decision to bank somewhere that was accountable to them. Mondragon generates over $11 billion in annual revenue because 70,000 people decided to own their workplace. Cooperation Jackson holds 52 debt-free properties in one of the most economically distressed counties in the United States because a group of people decided to organize around their own needs rather than waiting for someone else to address them.
These are not small numbers. They are not marginal experiments. They are working institutions that demonstrate, with evidence, that a different way of organizing economic and civic life is possible and viable.
The Practical Argument
At this point, it is worth being direct about what civic mutualism is not.
It is not a return to some imagined pre-industrial past where communities were self-sufficient, and everyone knew their neighbors, and nobody was poor. That past did not exist.
It is not a political program. It does not require a particular ideology. Conservatives and progressives both have traditions of civic engagement, mutual aid, and community service. The American tradition of voluntarism and civic association is not owned by any political party. Alexis de Tocqueville, observing American life in the 1830s, identified the tendency of Americans to form voluntary associations to address shared needs as one of the distinctive features of the country’s civic culture. That tendency is not a progressive or conservative value. It is an American one when it is functioning.
Civic mutualism is also not a request for sacrifice. It is a reallocation of time and resources toward things that return more value to the people who invest in them. A credit union member earns better interest rates and better loan terms than a customer of a bank that is optimizing for shareholder return. A cooperative worker has more job security and more voice in workplace decisions than an employee of a conventional firm with the same revenue. A person who has participated in building their community’s institutions has relationships and standing in that community that a person who only consumes it does not.
The purely self-interested case for civic mutualism is that it produces communities that are more resilient, more functional, and better able to protect their members from the kinds of shocks the extraction economy is very good at delivering.
The Numbers That Should Motivate You
Producer economy productivity grew 59.7 percent between 1979 and 2019. Median worker compensation grew 13.7 percent. The difference went somewhere. CEO compensation at major American firms rose nearly 1,200 percent between 1978 and 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The labor share of national income fell from 64.5 percent in 1974 to 56.8 percent in 2017. Private equity has spent over $1 trillion acquiring healthcare companies over the past decade. Blackstone controls over 274,000 rental housing units. The data center infrastructure required for the AI transition is projected to cost over $1.7 trillion by 2030, according to Forbes, more than the estimated cost to end world hunger permanently.
These numbers describe a system that has been systematically redirecting the value produced by working people into the accounts of people who do not produce a fucking thing, and which is now accelerating that process through the financialization of healthcare, housing, information, and eventually every other basic need.
The response to this is not despair. The response is to build the institutions that opt out of it, support the organizations that fight it, and participate in the communities that will outlast it.
What to Do
Move your money. Credit unions and community development financial institutions exist in every state. The NCUA’s credit union locator is free and takes five minutes. This is not a political act. It is a decision about who manages your money and in whose interests.
Join or found a cooperative. Worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, producer cooperatives, and housing cooperatives all operate on the same basic principle: the people who use the institution own it. The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives has resources for starting one. The model works.
Volunteer. Not because it will change your feelings but because the organization needs the work done and you are capable of doing it. The food bank, the literacy program, the community emergency response team, the local Scouting troop that is down to three volunteers, the mutual aid collective that lost half its core members to burnout. These organizations are the infrastructure of community resilience, and they are short-staffed.
Show up to meetings. City council. School board. Zoning commission. Planning hearings. Budget hearings. The decisions that shape your community’s future are made there, largely by default, because most people do not attend. Your presence is leverage.
Support community land trusts and housing cooperatives. These are the institutions that permanently remove land from speculative markets and make it available for community benefit. They require capital, organizational capacity, and political support. They are worth all three.
Learn skills and share them. The capacity to be useful to your community is not built by consuming content about it. It is built by doing things, failing at them, getting better at them, and passing the knowledge on. The declining transmission of practical skills from one generation to the next is a civic problem, not just a lifestyle one.
Advocate for people who cannot advocate for themselves. Find out what organizations in your area are doing this work. Legal aid. Disability advocacy. Housing advocacy. Immigration services. Elder care. These organizations are chronically underfunded and understaffed. They need money, time, and people willing to make noise on behalf of people who cannot make noise.
A Final Word on Urgency
There is a hospice nurse named Bronnie Ware who spent years recording the regrets of people at the end of their lives. The most common one, reported by people who had decades of accumulated experience and nothing left to lose by being honest, was this: I wish I dared to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Nobody at the end of their life wishes they had been a better consumer. Nobody looks back and feels good about the years they spent passive and compliant inside systems that were taking from them. What people regret is the time they did not spend on things that mattered, which in most cases means people, places, and communities they cared about.
The extraction economy has a specific interest in your time. It wants you consuming, scrolling, working extra hours to afford things that used to cost less, and too exhausted at the end of the day to attend a meeting, organize a cooperative, or ask hard questions at a zoning hearing. Every hour you spend moving through systems designed to extract from you is an hour you did not spend building something that belongs to you and your community.
This is not a call for a particular politics. It is a statement about physics. The system described in these pages is not going to reform itself. The people who benefit from it are not going to voluntarily return what they have taken. The government bodies that are supposed to regulate it are largely staffed by people who are either captured by it or too slow to contain it. The technology transition currently underway, if it proceeds as its architects intend, will make the extraction infrastructure more comprehensive and more difficult to avoid than anything that has come before.
None of that requires your despair. It requires your attention and your time, directed at things that are actually worth your time.
The institutions of civic mutualism do not require permission to exist. Credit unions, cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, and volunteer organizations do not need the cooperation of the people who benefit from the current arrangement. They need people who are willing to build them, use them, and defend them. They need people who have decided that waiting for someone else to fix the problem is not a strategy.
The evidence that this works is not theoretical. It is $2.43 trillion in credit union assets. It is 70,000 Mondragon workers in 260 cooperatives across 35 countries, earning decent wages with a 6-to-1 pay ratio in an economy where 344-to-1 is considered normal. It is 52 debt-free properties held in community trust in Jackson, Mississippi. It is $98 billion in data center projects stopped by people who showed up to meetings with cardboard signs and refused to leave. It is the volunteer fire company that arrives in four minutes because the people in that community decided, a long time ago, that they were not going to wait for someone else to handle it.
The question is not whether civic mutualism can work. It demonstrably can. The question is whether enough people will decide that the current arrangement is unacceptable and act while they still have the capacity to do so.
Your time is finite. The systems taking from you are counting on you spending it passively.
This has come up in the context of FEMA and natural disaster recovery. The idea is the government comes in and makes it right- not really a thing. Recent Red Cross ads- >90% of the disaster recovery workforce is volunteer. People need to get personally involved again- sitting at home posting online not so much. At the beginning of WWII, retired WWI admirals would write letters making policy suggestions to the Times of London newspaper- Churchill got them involved directly in the war effort.