Erin Kissane’s latest essay, “Bad shape,” builds on her work around Meta’s role in the genocide of the Rohingya, and backs up a bit to look at social media writ large. She ends up arguing that the last fifteen years suggest that “platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.”

I especially liked this passage:

A tractor structurally can’t spare a thought for the lives of the fieldmice; shouting at the tractor when it destroys their nests is a category error. Business does business. The production line doesn’t stop just because a few people lose fingers or lives. And what is a modern corporation but a legal spell for turning reasoning beings into temporarily vacant machines? We know this, which is why we have OSHA and the FAA and the FTC, for now.