The Wetiko of Dark Money
We often wonder how wealth morphs into cycles of unchecked power, abuse, trafficking and obscene violence. How do people like Epstein and his known associates continue to grift along without consequences while their trail of victims, crimes and whistleblowers are silenced and buried?
How do well intentioned businesses, communities and ecosystems become captured by consolidated power or land in the broligarch's portfolio?
How does power manage to stay alive when it wages crimes against humanity– crimes that are well documented and confirmed repeatedly?
How do people who platform the abusers of wealth and power continue to do so and take no accountability when the people they welcomed on their stage repeatedly turn out to be the worst among us? (Looking at you here, Oprah).
Here’s how.
Good, well intentioned people go silent when wealth and power enter the room. A wetiko of sorts creeps into the community and it starts in the smallest of ways.
Funding a sponsorship to a small event using money that’s barely been rinsed from a known oligarch’s family bank account.
Padding the ops budget by a few vendors who are friends of the founder and throwing a party filled with booze and drugs with that same padding.
Putting your friends on the payroll as "contractors" and moving corporate money through their bank accounts into yours to launch your own house of cards business using bloated invoices and investor kick backs.
Taking the email list of tens of thousands of participants and giving it to a politician who collects roadkill and doesn’t believe in vaccines.
Giving the microphone to known and well documented Epstein associates brand washing through family offices and fundraising events.
It starts small.
A yes here. A maybe there. A “we need to fund this” here. A “this is how the wealthy work” justification over there. And what started as a concession to pay for a party venue at the close of an event morphs over the years into the capture of an ecosystem by the very forces it was built to stand against.
That’s how power works.
And that's how a mind virus, a wetiko driven by dark money, takes over an entire community, ecosystem and society.
That’s why whistleblowers end up in the trunk of a car in upstate New Jersey or tossed out a window in Moscow.
That’s how young teenage women are forced into prostitution rings to become play-toys for the elite.
That’s why 80% of the politicians in our government vote against their constituents best interests.
That's why a large number of those politicians and millions of voters in this country justify giving unfettered power to pedophiles and criminally charged rapists.
That’s why the mom running a household of four on two legitimate salaries can’t get ahead and always feels like she’s drowning.
That’s why the homeless guy sleeping on the lawn next to the coffeeshop can’t get a safe nights sleep and has to carry his whole world on his back.
That’s why 60% of this country is one missed paycheck away from sleeping next to that guy on the lawn.
That's how the silence of good people, who built a community or ecosystem to "be the change" end up playing the Machiavellian game of “the ends justify the means” which entitles them to simply, look away.
I’ve been working in technology for well over a decade now and was a working photojournalist for the decades before it. I’ve seen this power play on repeat over the decades and documented it from all angles. To the extent that in the mid 2010s, I joined a hacker space and became well versed in the skills of OSINT and social engineering so I could truly understand how and why power and wealth are able to accomplish so much destruction and why only those who speak out are persecuted.
Now I know.
I’ve seen the full arc of this wealth capture up close and from all angles. Again and again. My bullshit radars are literally honed for this hot mess we’re in now and I learned it for a specific reason. I couldn’t understand how power corrupted so absolutely. I had to keep finding it, documenting it, and processing it again and again and again.
And here I am. I have the full picture now. And all I can say is the silence of those good people and the silencing of those who speak out rests at the heart of it all.
And none of today’s headlines should be surprising to anyone. We’re in the last gasp of capitalism and the enshittification of everything we hold dear is the final chapter. It’s here.
Open your eyes and speak your truth.
Even if you're forced into silence. The speaking of that truth and the integrity it takes to protect it are worth far more than anything the wealthy class could give us.
