vultures feeding their young

looting after a breakdown

An essay that has stuck in my mind lately is fear of breakdown, written in May of this year by architecture critic kate wagner . To explain our moment in history, she applies an insight from 20th century psychologist D.W. Winnicott, who wrote of treating patients living in paralyzing fear of a “breakdown” — some possible future crisis that would change their lives and leave them without a sense of who they are. Winnicott writes,

There are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life, has already been.

In Wagner’s essay, the “patient” is the average liberal or left-leaning person who knows deep down that “the breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened.” We talk constantly of risks, backsliding, and warning indicators of decline because doing otherwise would be to accept the unimaginable is inside the house and not waiting at the doorstep. Democracy, world order, literacy — whatever it is that makes you who you are by virtue of your caring about it — is already over.

What the patient really fears is the dissolution of who they think they are. In the particular historical instance of 2026 and the set Wagner (and I) belong to, the acute issue (to my mind) is that our relation to the places that educated us, employed us, and disappointed us is not as we imagined it to be. Nobody wants to admit their idea of self is flawed, that they are actually a looter and not a victim. The assignation of looter is more a structural role than an individual choice, which is why I would consider myself primarily a species of looter. I say that because I’m a content creator.

When we talk about “breakdown” in 2026, what’s usually breaking down is the social, economic, and political arrangements of the post World War Two order. Whether you think that post World War Two order was good or bad, you have to acknowledge that it was massive. It created a system of trade, regulation, and management that knit the globe together, raising standards of living, murdering countless innocents, and making a lot of people (including, arguably, the girl reading this) rich. All the motley images, institutions, and dreams of twentieth century life — college, houses with lawns, hipsterdom, the 9 to 5, you name it — derive from the creation of a world order that put the United States at its center and vested power within its institutions.

For a variety of reasons, that world order is past saving. But because it was so massive, there’s a lot of value to be extracted from it. If they’re lucky enough to be able to, a lot of people are taking this an opportunity to loot, even if they wouldn’t describe it to themselves in that way.

Types of Looter

The first looters are corrupt actors taking money out of the government. It’s a well-told story that Trump and his cronies have used the government for private gain, pumping crypto scam coins and handing contracts out to friends. A version of this already happened with the War on Terror and the way defense contractors treated the taxpayer. It is perhaps most vividly represented by what’s happened to the architecture of DC. The White House and Reflecting Pool were symbols of postwar order, of American power. Now they are tacky opportunities to make money off sporting events and shitcoins. The fate of these monuments has broken through the news cycle because people know that the equivalent of what was done to the Reflecting Pool has been done to the less visible infrastructures of public health, education, defense, and justice.

And we also know some ugly, boorish old man got a lake house because of it.

The second type of looters are tech companies and platforms. As people like Mike Pepi describe, platforms “disrupted” legacy institutions. They were unbound by regulations, juiced by VC money, and could do for free what institutions had to charge for. So instead of a local taxi company, you now have an app on your phone called Uber. Instead of a collection of networked actors like local DJs and record labels determining what music gets popular, you now have an app on your phone called TikTok. Instead of a third place or an extended network through church or school, you now have an app on your phone called Hinge.

Some people blame the apps (or phones) for killing their IRL institutional predecessors, but this gets it backwards: the breakdown was already happening when they showed up. The platforms are looters. AI companies extend this pattern of looting and make it more obvious: Anthropic trawls through trillions of words of text produced over centuries, taking not just the intellectual property of individual authors but appropriating (for free) the efforts of publishing houses, libraries, schools, and the array of other institutions that produced all those words. As you doubtless already know, they clone the collective knowledge of those institutions, siphon off some profit, and replace them with a thing that doesn’t pay back into the system which allowed it to happen.

And we know that some Rationalist freak in San Francisco got a nice glamping set-up for Burning Man because of it.

The third kind of looter are content creators. In the past world, I would have pursued an academic job or a journalistic job. A lot of my peers who create educational content would’ve done the same, and so would a lot of the people who watch our content and engage with our work. The same is true for other niches.

Those institutions no longer function. And yet, the work that was done within such institutions — not just literal information transfer or skills training, but care work in the form of mentorship, spiritual reflection, or the advancement of curiosity — was always necessary, and still needs to get done. So it gets done online.

In one sense, I am just a guy meeting an audience demand, doing that work through the medium that is available to me. But in another sense, I am taking advantage of the fact this work can’t get effectively done within a contemporary institution — I am profiting from continued decline. A part of why I’ve been so pissed off by Aaron Parnas — the creator who essentially reads paywalled news articles written by actual journalists into a TikTok camera and then makes millions by saying “you can trust me, unlike the mainstream media” (despite the media being his source for everything) — is that it’s shameless looting behavior. It’s taking the work, effort, and credibility of institutions and giving nothing back, just keeping the value for yourself — or, more accurately, keeping a sliver of it for yourself and passing the rest along to TikTok and Substack which, through the creator, are doing the real institutional looting. We know this is all bad not just from a moral fairness standpoint, but from a sustainability standpoint.

And we also know that a bunch of the most annoying Bushwick-based 26-year-olds you’ve ever seen are buying themselves a $9 matcha latte as “a little treat” because of it.

The fourth kind of looter are the people still working at legacy institutions. Increasingly, these places are staffed by people playing a game of musical chairs with dwindling grants and email job opportunities. Every year, the institution is less effective, the pie gets a little smaller, and the competition for what’s left increases. Old heads who are the Executive Vice Chair of Whatever or the Assistant Provost Dean for Whatnot are making six figures and watching as the bottom rungs of the career ladder — roles like Junior Analyst or Grad Student, which make five figures — get knocked out from under them. Many are deeply upset by this trend and the decreasing effectiveness of their work, but they’re also raising families and need a steady paycheck.

In 1970, political scientist E.O. Hirshmann proposed a framework of “exit, voice, or loyalty” to describe the choices faced by people working within declining institutions. People can leave, people can protest, or people can remain loyal. But the framework misses what may be the most rational and historically typical response to decline: “loot.” If you exit, you’re destitute. If you voice concerns, nobody listens. If you’re loyal, you’re a victim. If you loot, you conform with the action most of your peers are taking, and you can get what you and your community need.

If you literally educate children, care for patients, clean up the environment, or do something like that, you aren’t a looter — but your boss probably is, your boss’s boss definitely is, and you’re part of a dying breed.

What to do instead of looting?

Looting is a word with a strong moral valence. I choose it because I believe what we are involved in is both immoral and common, like eating beef. It is the default track for a person today — the world wants you to loot.

Nobody is a bad person for looting, because it’s better than many of the alternatives. If you invest your value into the institution, because it will just go to waste or get slurped up by a different, worse looter. If you are actively making the situation worse, then you’re complicit, or an accelerationist chud.

So what to do?

Loot ethically. Find a method to transform the value you’re extracting from the still-fat husk of the 20th century world order into nourishment for whatever new thing comes after. Like the vulture that flies off from the carcass to regurgitate her scavenging into the throats of her young waiting back at the nest, we should take our proceeds from content creation or email job and use them to feed a future which can fly on its own wings. These proceeds are not just monetary. They’re also skills-based, since after the revolution we will still need to circle back, touch base, and know how to do things. And they’re clout-based, since the reputation and social capital we build through institutions or outside of them shouldn’t just be an individual asset, but an asset for the collective projects one chooses to participate in.

The breakdown has already been. Look around at anywhere power exists today and you see looting. But the age of looting cannot continue forever, because there is a finite amount of meat on the bones we’re pecking.