Selling survival

The commodification of survival is one of the most sophisticated tools of social control ever designed, precisely because it feels like help.

Anxiety is at historic highs, so they sell us apps for breath work. Loneliness is a public health epidemic, so they sell us social platforms engineered to harvest that loneliness rather than resolve it. Workers are burned out and surveilled, so they sell us productivity tools that surveil us further while branding it wellness. Our democracy is under siege, so they sell us premium newsletters and paid communities where the price of entry determines who gets to be in the room — the same logic that enabled a convicted sex offender to buy his way back to respectability.

We are being sold back to ourselves. And the price keeps going up.

There is a reason every major tradition of liberation, every movement that has actually changed something, every people who have survived what looked unsurvivable, built community first. Not community as a product. Not community as a membership tier. Community as a practice. The act of showing up for each other without a transaction in the middle. The potluck where everyone brings what they have. The neighbor who watches your kid so you can make it to the meeting. The group text that exists not to sell you something but to make sure no one is alone when the news is bad. The mutual aid table. The circle that holds you when the institution will not.

These things do not scale in the venture-backed sense. They cannot be optimized. They resist extraction by their very nature. And that is exactly why they survive when everything else fails, and exactly why they are so threatening to a system that requires your isolation to function.

The world is complicated and so is surviving it. What I want to ask is something harder.

Where in your life is community something you do rather than something you buy?

Because the struggles we are facing, taken together, are too large for any product to solve. They require us to remember that we were built for each other, and that the most radical thing we can do right now, in this specific political moment, is to act like it.

Community is the infrastructure. Everything else is downstream.

So this week, I am asking you to do one thing. Not a big thing. One thing.

Reach out to someone in your life who is not in a transaction with you. Not a colleague. Not a collaborator. Not someone you are trying to get something from or give something to in a professional sense. Someone who is just yours, in the plain human meaning of the word. Check on them. Make plans. Show up in a way that has no agenda other than the fact that you both exist and that matters.

Let it be inefficient. Let it be slow. Let it cost you something.

That is how we survive. With each other.

Rewind

Last week we, stood up on business.

Read

This week we're reading: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Upcoming

Wednesday, April 8: RxT is hosting Saginaw, Michigan Councilwoman Carly-Rose Hammond and Virginia State Delegate John McAuliff for Data Centers and Democracy: How Policymakers are Pushing Back

Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media, and philanthropy. This is her personal newsletter.

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