You get your takeout in a nice brown paper bag. As you’re folding it up to recycle it later, you see the bold black stamp on the bottom: “ULINE”.

You open up a web link you found online to read an interesting article. It’s at Substack.com.

You are buying a cool new t-shirt to support a favoured podcaster. The shopping cart opens and you see it’s a Shopify link.

You are reading your feeds and discover that a journalist you’ve been following for years, a keystone of the small community to which you belong, has “returned” to X.

These four stories are the same story.

ULINE is a bad company. Substack is a bad company. Shopify is a bad company. X is a bad company.

The thread is common: the people that make money from these companies are spending it to make our society worse. They are privileging their own wealth accumulation over the well-being of real people. They are, all of them, amoral.

It’s a direct line. If you do business with, or support these companies, you are perpetuating their causes.

The restaurant I picked up that takeout order from? They’re funding election denialism and the whole Trump agenda. The journalist who publishes on Substack is contributing to the proliferation of Nazism. The small business selling t-shirts is funding political division and the interests of the mega-rich in Canada. Federico Viticci is helping perpetuate the man who’s actions have directly caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people… among other things (that dude covers a lot of ground).

Many companies do bad things. For example, Apple has some ugly labour issues in the Asian supply chain, and they treat their developers like shit. But I don’t think they’re directly damaging society as a whole.

This shouldn’t be hard. This should be the easiest thing ever.

I’m going to judge you by your inability to distinguish these very simple facts.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.