War Is Still a Racket? Re-reading Smedley Butler in the Age of Platform Capitalism, Defence Expansion, and Geopolitical Risk

Smedley D. Butler’s War Is a Racket remains one of the most provocative short critiques of modern political economy. Written in the interwar period, the book argued that war often serves organized economic interests more than public welfare. Although the text emerged from a different historical environment, its central claim has regained relevance in a century marked by financialized capitalism, global defence supply chains, digital surveillance, platform infrastructures, and data-driven forecasting. This article offers an academic re-reading of Butler’s argument in light of contemporary management, technology, and institutional analysis. Rather than treating war only as armed confrontation between states, the article studies war as an economic field shaped by corporations, bureaucracies, investors, media systems, logistics networks, and digital platforms. The paper uses an interpretive qualitative method grounded in historical text analysis and comparative theoretical synthesis. Three frameworks structure the analysis: Bourdieu’s theory of fields and capital, world-systems theory, and institutional isomorphism. Together, these perspectives help explain why war-related markets can reproduce themselves even when political leaders publicly describe military action as exceptional, defensive, or temporary. The findings suggest that Butler’s core intuition has not disappeared, but must be updated. In the twenty-first century, war does not operate only through arms manufacturers and politicians. It increasingly functions through platform capitalism, data infrastructures, energy routes, cyber capabilities, satellite systems, private risk markets, consulting networks, regulatory mimicry, and a broad legitimation apparatus that normalizes continuous preparedness. The article concludes that war’s “racket” quality is neither total nor universal; states still face genuine security threats. Yet the institutional ecology around modern conflict often converts insecurity into durable business models and symbolic legitimacy. The most important scholarly lesson is therefore not that every war is simply a fraud, but that conflict creates structured opportunities for accumulation, distinction, and organizational reproduction. Butler’s short book remains analytically powerful because it forces management and technology scholars to ask who benefits, who pays, and which institutions transform crisis into routine advantage.

Keywords: war economy, platform capitalism, defence management, institutional isomorphism, world-systems theory, Bourdieu, political economy

Introduction

Smedley D. Butler’s War Is a Racket is a short work, but its intellectual afterlife has been long. Many readers first approach it as a moral denunciation of militarism. Others see it as an anti-war pamphlet or a historical curiosity tied to the interwar United States. Yet Butler’s text can also be read as a compact theory of organized advantage. His central argument was not only that war destroys life. It was that war may become a system through which a relatively small number of actors convert public sacrifice into private gain. That argument continues to matter because modern conflict is deeply entangled with management systems, technological infrastructures, financial markets, and global organizational routines.

The relevance of Butler’s thesis has expanded rather than disappeared. In the contemporary world, conflict no longer appears only in the form of mass industrial war between large armies. It also appears as sanctions regimes, drone warfare, cyber operations, satellite dependency, border securitization, intelligence outsourcing, strategic resource competition, maritime disruption, platform-mediated information conflict, and speculation around geopolitical risk. These phenomena have created new zones of profit and authority. Defence firms benefit from procurement cycles. Energy firms respond to price volatility. Logistics providers adapt to rerouted trade. Cybersecurity vendors expand in response to digitally framed threat environments. Media platforms monetize attention during conflict. Forecasting and data firms sell prediction, risk scoring, and behavioural analysis. Governments mobilize emergency language that strengthens executive discretion. Universities, think tanks, consultants, and professional associations also participate in the production of legitimacy, expertise, and policy vocabulary.

For that reason, War Is a Racket should not be read only as a moral text. It should also be read as a work of institutional diagnosis. Butler highlighted a pattern in which public narratives and organizational incentives diverged. Citizens were told that sacrifice was necessary, noble, and patriotic. Meanwhile, industries tied to war could experience extraordinary returns. In modern language, Butler pointed to asymmetric value extraction under conditions of national emergency. The issue is not whether every security response is illegitimate. The issue is whether emergency structures create stable channels through which concentrated actors gain material and symbolic advantages that outlast the conflict itself.

This article asks a simple but important question: how useful is Butler’s argument for understanding the contemporary political economy of war? To answer that question, the article moves beyond a straightforward summary. It brings Butler into conversation with three powerful theoretical traditions. First, Bourdieu helps explain how war is shaped by fields, capitals, and struggles over legitimacy. Second, world-systems theory helps place conflict inside a global hierarchy of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral relationships. Third, institutional isomorphism helps explain why organizations in different sectors increasingly adopt similar security logics, risk vocabularies, and governance structures. Together, these theories provide a richer framework than moral critique alone.

The article also speaks to management and technology studies. Conflict today is managed through procurement systems, dashboards, compliance routines, digital infrastructures, vendor ecosystems, and performance narratives. War has become a management problem as well as a geopolitical one. It is organized through contracts, standards, audits, partnerships, data streams, and public-private hybrids. In that environment, the “racket” is rarely visible as an obvious conspiracy. It often appears instead as normal administration, rational planning, innovation policy, resilience strategy, or market opportunity.

The central argument of this paper is that Butler’s thesis remains relevant, but only if updated. Modern war is not merely a racket in the sense of crude profiteering. It is a broader institutional field in which insecurity can be transformed into capital, authority, organizational expansion, and moral prestige. In such a field, profit is important, but so are symbolic legitimacy, strategic position, informational control, and bureaucratic reproduction. The contemporary war economy is therefore less linear than Butler’s original account but, in some ways, more deeply embedded in everyday institutions.

Background and Theoretical Framework

Butler’s original argument

Published in 1935, War Is a Racket presented a stark interpretation of the First World War and American military involvement. Butler argued that war had generated enormous profits for a small number of business interests while the costs were socialized across soldiers, families, and taxpayers. He wrote from personal experience as a decorated military officer who had become disillusioned with the relationship between armed force and commercial benefit. The rhetorical power of the book came from its clarity. Butler refused euphemism. He suggested that noble public language could conceal underlying systems of enrichment.

The book’s limitation is equally clear. It compresses a highly complex set of political, strategic, and historical processes into a powerful but simplified indictment. It pays less attention to genuine security threats, ideological conflict, state autonomy, or the multiplicity of actors involved in wartime decision-making. Yet precisely because the work is short and sharp, it functions well as a critical lens. It forces the reader to ask how institutional arrangements distribute risk and reward.

Bourdieu: fields, capital, and symbolic power

Bourdieu offers a more sophisticated vocabulary for extending Butler’s insight. In Bourdieu’s framework, social life is structured through fields: relatively autonomous arenas in which actors struggle for different forms of capital. These include economic capital, social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital. A field is not random. It has rules, hierarchies, recognized authorities, and forms of habitus that shape what actors perceive as natural or legitimate.

War can be interpreted as a field or as an intersection of fields. The military field, the political field, the economic field, the media field, and the academic field overlap in moments of crisis. Actors compete not only for contracts or state funding, but also for legitimacy, expertise, patriotism, access, and influence. In such a setting, symbolic capital becomes crucial. A firm may gain from being associated with national security. A politician may gain from appearing decisive. An academic or consultant may gain from expertise credentials. A technology company may gain from presenting its products as essential for resilience. Thus, what Butler described as profiteering can be expanded into a broader sociology of conversion, in which one form of capital is transformed into another.

Bourdieu also helps explain why war economies are durable. Fields reproduce themselves through classification, recognition, and institutionalized belief. If security language becomes dominant, many actors adjust their strategies to that logic. Over time, the war-related field may appear natural. Emergency procurement, surveillance expansion, platform moderation policies, cybersecurity consulting, and military logistics partnerships become ordinary. The field then no longer requires overt propaganda at every step. It is reproduced through professional common sense.

World-systems theory: core, periphery, and unequal security

World-systems theory, especially in the work of Wallerstein, places war within a global hierarchy. Capitalist modernity is not evenly organized. Core zones control capital-intensive production, financial power, and institutional leadership. Peripheral zones often supply raw materials, labour, or sites of extraction. Semi-peripheral zones mediate between the two.

This framework matters because war does not affect all regions equally. Conflict in peripheral or strategically exposed regions may generate profits in core states through arms exports, reconstruction contracts, financial flows, security services, and technological dependence. Meanwhile, the social costs are frequently concentrated elsewhere: displacement, destroyed infrastructure, debt, dependency, and reduced development capacity. Butler’s account focused on national-level profiteering, but world-systems theory broadens the question. It asks how military and security systems sustain global inequality.

War can also stabilize hierarchy. Peripheral insecurity may justify external intervention, training missions, debt arrangements, humanitarian dependency, and elite alignment with core powers. Technology intensifies this pattern. Satellite systems, cloud infrastructures, defence software, cyber tools, and dual-use digital platforms are disproportionately designed and governed by powerful actors. Security dependence can therefore become a route to long-term dependence in data, logistics, and policy architecture.

Institutional isomorphism: why security logics spread

DiMaggio and Powell’s theory of institutional isomorphism explains why organizations increasingly resemble one another. They identify three mechanisms: coercive isomorphism, driven by formal and informal pressures; mimetic isomorphism, driven by uncertainty and imitation; and normative isomorphism, driven by professionalization.

These mechanisms are highly relevant to contemporary war economies. Under threat conditions, organizations seek legitimacy and survival. Governments impose compliance requirements. Firms imitate successful defence or cybersecurity models. Universities create security studies centres. Media organizations adopt new threat languages. Technology firms integrate “trust and safety,” geopolitical intelligence, and resilience functions. Airports, ports, hospitals, telecoms, banks, and universities all borrow from security management frameworks. The result is not simply a larger military sector, but the diffusion of militarized governance norms across civilian institutions.

In this sense, the modern racket can operate without explicit corruption. Organizations may sincerely believe they are acting responsibly. Yet when coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures align, entire sectors can move toward permanent securitization. Budgets expand. exceptional tools become normal. Private actors receive public contracts. Risk discourse becomes self-reinforcing. This is exactly where Butler’s critique benefits from institutional theory: the “racket” is not always a secret plot; it may be a highly normalized organizational ecology.

From industrial war to platform capitalism

Butler wrote in an age of industrial capitalism. The present era is shaped by platform capitalism, financialization, and digital interdependence. Platforms extract value by coordinating data, users, infrastructure, and markets. In wartime or crisis, this model becomes especially powerful. Social platforms shape narratives. Cloud systems host government and commercial data. Satellite networks support communications and targeting. Cybersecurity vendors mediate trust. Analytics companies offer prediction and threat intelligence. Financial markets react to geopolitical signals in real time. Prediction infrastructures and speculative instruments can transform conflict into tradable information.

This does not mean that war is reducible to platforms. States remain central. Physical violence remains central. But digital infrastructures have changed how war is organized, represented, and monetized. The classic image of munitions factories must now be expanded to include code repositories, remote sensing systems, data centres, compliance dashboards, and risk-pricing models. Butler’s insight therefore survives, but its objects have changed.

Method

This study uses an interpretive qualitative method. It is not an econometric test of defence-sector profitability, nor a legal evaluation of specific conflicts. Instead, it is a theoretically informed conceptual analysis with three main components.

First, the article conducts a close historical reading of Butler’s War Is a Racket. The purpose is not to reproduce the text line by line, but to identify its core analytical claims: concentrated benefit, public sacrifice, moral legitimization, and institutional concealment.

Second, the study engages in comparative theoretical synthesis. Butler’s claims are placed in dialogue with Bourdieu’s theory of fields and capital, Wallerstein’s world-systems approach, and DiMaggio and Powell’s institutional isomorphism. These frameworks are selected because they illuminate different dimensions of the same problem. Bourdieu clarifies symbolic struggle and the conversion of capitals. World-systems theory situates war in the unequal global order. Institutional isomorphism explains organizational diffusion and normalization.

Third, the paper uses contemporary analytical interpretation to connect these theories to current developments in management and technology. The article focuses on patterns rather than single events: securitized procurement, defence-tech expansion, data infrastructures, energy-route vulnerability, financialized geopolitical risk, and institutional diffusion of security logics. This approach is suitable for an academic article aimed at conceptual clarity. It allows the paper to make a disciplined argument without claiming exhaustive empirical coverage.

The method is therefore interpretive, interdisciplinary, and critical-realist in spirit. It assumes that material interests matter, but that interests become effective through institutions, symbols, and organizational routines. The method also recognizes that war cannot be explained by profit alone. States may face genuine threats, leaders may act under uncertainty, and societies may support military action for reasons beyond material gain. The analytical task is not to deny these realities, but to examine how institutional settings structure benefit, legitimacy, and continuity.

Analysis

1. War as accumulation beyond the battlefield

Butler’s original formulation focused on the direct profits of war industries. That remains important. Defence production still generates major revenues, and procurement cycles can reshape national industrial policy. But the modern war economy is broader. It includes insurance, transport security, energy arbitrage, cybersecurity, satellite services, infrastructure hardening, consulting, intelligence contracting, private logistics, reconstruction planning, and crisis media. Conflict multiplies markets.

From a Bourdieusian perspective, the significance of this expansion lies in capital conversion. A cybersecurity company may begin with technical capital but convert wartime relevance into symbolic capital, state contracts, and market valuation. A technology platform may convert infrastructural centrality into political access. A consultant may convert policy language into advisory authority. A university may convert strategic funding into academic prestige. These gains are not incidental. They form part of the broader war-related field.

This helps explain why conflict often outlives its immediate strategic rationale. Once a field has expanded, many actors depend on its continuation. Their interests may not require full-scale war; low-intensity insecurity can be enough. Persistent alert status, unresolved tension, periodic escalation, and chronic risk discourse may sustain budgets and reputations more effectively than stable peace. Butler identified profiteering in visible wartime. The contemporary extension is that continuous insecurity can itself become a business environment.

2. The moral economy of legitimacy

A central feature of Butler’s argument was moral inversion: those who fought and suffered were not those who most benefited. This remains analytically useful, but the mechanism of legitimation has become more sophisticated. Modern institutions rarely defend profit openly during conflict. Instead, they invoke resilience, innovation, national interest, humanitarian necessity, deterrence, interoperability, or critical infrastructure protection. These claims are not always false. Many are partly true. Their power lies precisely in their plausibility.

Bourdieu helps us understand this as symbolic power. Actors with high symbolic capital can define what counts as common sense. If a defence-tech initiative is framed as innovation, criticism may appear anti-modern. If surveillance expansion is framed as public safety, dissent may appear irresponsible. If military expenditure is framed as resilience, questions of distributive justice may be postponed. Symbolic capital therefore does not merely decorate material interest; it organizes visibility and silence.

In management terms, legitimacy is often produced through process rather than argument. Audit systems, white papers, technical standards, compliance certifications, scenario planning, and expert panels generate an appearance of neutral necessity. This matters because institutional trust is increasingly procedural. Citizens and even scholars may not see a “racket” if decisions pass through enough formal mechanisms. Yet procedural density can mask underlying asymmetries of benefit.

3. World-systems and the geography of expendability

World-systems theory reveals that war’s costs and rewards are geographically uneven. Peripheral and semi-peripheral regions frequently bear the material burden of conflict, extraction, or militarized instability. Core actors may still experience risk, but they often retain stronger financial buffers, greater diplomatic leverage, and more profitable positions in arms, energy, data, and reconstruction markets.

This does not imply a simple conspiracy of the core against the periphery. Rather, it suggests a structural asymmetry. Core states and firms are better positioned to convert conflict into capital, while peripheral populations are more likely to experience displacement, commodity shocks, governance fragility, and infrastructural loss. Security itself becomes unevenly distributed. Some actors purchase stability through advanced systems, while others live with the externalities of militarized order.

Technology reinforces this asymmetry. Digital infrastructure is not neutral. Cloud dependence, software standards, cyber defence subscriptions, satellite access, and remote sensing all embed unequal relationships. A state that relies on external digital infrastructure for security may also become dependent in governance, data management, and strategic planning. In this sense, the modern war economy extends beyond weapons. It includes informational dependency.

Butler’s original national critique therefore scales up into a global one. The question is no longer only whether war benefits elites within one state. It is also whether global conflict arrangements allow powerful actors to externalize cost and internalize advantage across the world-system.

4. Institutional isomorphism and everyday militarization

One of the most striking developments of the twenty-first century is the spread of security language into ordinary organizational life. Universities teach resilience management. Schools conduct security drills. Hospitals prepare for cyber conflict. Banks build geopolitical risk units. Technology firms expand trust-and-safety departments. Supply-chain managers integrate conflict mapping into procurement. HR departments adopt crisis communication routines. Media teams develop disinformation protocols. Boardrooms discuss geopolitical exposure.

This diffusion can be explained through institutional isomorphism. Coercive pressures come from governments, regulators, insurers, and investors. Mimetic pressures arise when organizations copy peers perceived as sophisticated or protected. Normative pressures emerge through professional networks, certification regimes, consultants, and executive education. Over time, organizations that appear unprepared for geopolitical disruption may be judged irresponsible.

The result is not always negative. Some preparedness is necessary. The problem arises when militarized logics colonize civilian priorities. Resources shift toward threat management at the expense of welfare, social trust, education, or long-term development. Emergency language narrows policy imagination. Public value becomes harder to define outside risk frameworks. Here Butler’s insight returns in a new form: the racket is not only that war creates profit; it is that security rationality can become the default grammar of institutions.

5. Platform capitalism and the monetization of conflict attention

Modern conflict is mediated through platforms that organize visibility, speed, and engagement. This has several consequences. First, war becomes an attention economy. Images, rumours, maps, commentary, and threat narratives circulate instantly. Second, platforms and data intermediaries become critical infrastructures. Third, conflict information becomes monetizable through advertising, subscriptions, analytics, forecasting, and speculation.

In this environment, the line between witnessing and commercialization blurs. The public may consume war as real-time content. Analysts package interpretation. Platforms optimize engagement. Markets respond to signals. Political entrepreneurs use conflict to build audiences. Security consultants convert visibility into authority. While none of these mechanisms alone proves bad faith, together they create incentives for amplification.

A Butlerian reading of this landscape would ask who benefits from constant conflict salience. Not only weapons firms, but also platforms, data vendors, and attention brokers may gain. Bourdieu deepens the point by showing that audiences are also fields of struggle. Expertise, virality, and credibility are forms of symbolic capital. The authority to define a conflict can itself become an asset.

At the same time, platform capitalism complicates traditional anti-war critique. Some digital systems genuinely protect civilians, expose abuses, improve disaster response, or strengthen transparency. The issue is therefore ambivalence. Technology can document violence and also commodify it. It can decentralize information and also intensify manipulation. It can support resilience and also normalize permanent securitization.

6. The management of uncertainty as a revenue model

Modern organizations increasingly sell uncertainty management. Risk analytics, scenario planning, crisis consulting, predictive modelling, insurance instruments, supply-chain intelligence, and digital monitoring all promise foresight under unstable conditions. Geopolitical conflict is especially lucrative because uncertainty is both urgent and difficult to resolve.

This creates a subtle extension of Butler’s argument. In his account, war generated profit mainly through production and procurement. In the current era, anticipated war, possible war, prolonged standoff, and crisis simulation can also generate profit. The commodity is no longer only ammunition or hardware. It is also foresight, preparedness, and informational advantage.

Institutional isomorphism helps explain demand. When organizations see peers investing in geopolitical risk tools, they imitate. Boards want dashboards. Investors want scenarios. Governments want intelligence partnerships. Universities want policy relevance. Newsrooms want expert voices. Insecurity thus becomes marketized even before direct violence expands.

This does not mean these services are useless. Many are necessary. But the political question remains: does an economy organized around insecurity develop interests in maintaining insecurity? Butler would likely answer yes. A more careful academic answer is that such an economy tends to lower institutional resistance to chronic alertness. Peace may remain desirable in rhetoric while instability remains profitable in practice.

7. States, autonomy, and the limits of the “racket” thesis

A serious academic reading must also identify where Butler’s argument is too narrow. Not all wars are driven by profit. States can face real threats. Some military spending is necessary for deterrence, sovereignty, and civilian protection. Some technological investment has defensive value. Some institutions genuinely aim to reduce harm. A theory that treats all conflict as business manipulation risks analytical flattening.

This is why the article does not defend a literal reading of “war is a racket” in every case. Instead, it argues that the racket thesis is most useful as a diagnostic of institutional tendency. It asks whether conflict environments systematically create opportunities for concentrated accumulation, legitimation, and reproduction. The answer is often yes, even when security concerns are real.

Bourdieu allows room for relative autonomy. Fields do not collapse fully into economics. Political leaders, military professionals, and civil servants may act from conviction, duty, or strategic necessity. World-systems theory also allows for geopolitical struggle not reducible to individual greed. Institutional theory reminds us that organizations often conform under uncertainty without malicious intent. The point, then, is not cynicism for its own sake. It is structured vigilance.

8. Re-reading Butler for management and technology studies

Why should management and technology scholars care about Butler? Because war today is administered through systems they study: supply chains, platforms, regulation, procurement, strategy, innovation, organizational legitimacy, and digital infrastructure. If management studies ignores war, it risks treating some of the most consequential forms of coordination and value allocation as external to business. If technology studies ignores war, it misses how digital systems gain scale, funding, and legitimacy through conflict.

Butler’s enduring importance lies in his insistence on distributive questions. Who carries risk? Who receives reward? Who defines necessity? Who becomes visible as a hero, and who remains invisible as a beneficiary? These are management questions as much as moral ones. They concern governance, metrics, accountability, and organizational ethics.

Findings

The analysis produces six main findings.

First, Butler’s core claim remains analytically relevant, but its contemporary form is more institutional than conspiratorial. Modern conflict economies are rarely organized through a single visible chain from politicians to arms profiteers. They function through dense networks of contracts, standards, infrastructures, consultancies, media systems, and security narratives. The racket is dispersed across institutions.

Second, war-related accumulation today operates through multiple forms of capital. Economic capital remains central, especially in procurement and market expansion. However, symbolic capital, informational capital, and infrastructural centrality are equally important. Organizations benefit not only by selling goods, but by becoming indispensable, credible, and embedded.

Third, the global distribution of conflict remains unequal. World-systems analysis shows that insecurity is often concentrated in regions with less capacity to convert crisis into durable institutional advantage. Powerful actors are better positioned to monetize or manage instability, while weaker regions absorb higher social and developmental costs.

Fourth, securitization spreads through isomorphic mechanisms. Security logics diffuse across civilian organizations not simply because of direct coercion, but also because of uncertainty, imitation, professional norms, and the search for legitimacy. This makes conflict rationality more socially durable than direct wartime mobilization alone.

Fifth, platform capitalism has transformed the war economy. Conflict is now mediated by attention systems, data infrastructures, cloud architectures, remote sensing, cyber markets, and predictive analytics. War-related value extraction includes not only physical production but also informational coordination and monetized visibility.

Sixth, the strongest scholarly use of Butler is critical but not absolutist. The statement “war is a racket” should not be treated as a universal empirical law. It is better understood as a critical framework for examining how institutions transform insecurity into advantage. This preserves Butler’s force while avoiding reductionism.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the contemporary war economy is not merely a return of old militarism. It is a hybrid order combining industrial production, digital intermediation, organizational imitation, financial speculation, and symbolic legitimacy. Butler’s short book remains powerful because it names the moral scandal at the centre of this system: collective sacrifice can coexist with concentrated gain. Contemporary theory adds that such gain is often reproduced through normal institutions rather than extraordinary corruption.

Conclusion

War Is a Racket continues to matter because it asks a question that modern institutions often prefer not to ask directly: when societies organize for conflict, who benefits beyond security itself? Butler’s answer was blunt. A small number of interests gain while the public pays in blood and taxation. This article has argued that his answer remains important, but that the structure of the problem has changed.

In the twenty-first century, war and insecurity are embedded in a much broader institutional environment. Defence firms remain important, but they are joined by platform companies, cyber vendors, satellite providers, logistics operators, consultants, data analysts, insurers, think tanks, and expert communities. The war economy now includes not only production, but mediation, prediction, compliance, and legitimacy. It is therefore harder to see and harder to challenge.

Bourdieu shows that modern conflict is fought not only over territory and resources, but also over symbolic authority and capital conversion. World-systems theory shows that the costs and profits of conflict remain globally unequal. Institutional isomorphism shows why security logics spread into areas of life that appear civilian, technical, or neutral. Together, these perspectives transform Butler from a moral critic into a precursor of contemporary institutional analysis.

The conclusion is not that every war is fake, or that all defence activity is illegitimate. Such claims would be analytically careless. States do confront real threats, and security institutions can protect lives. The more convincing conclusion is that conflict creates persistent opportunities for accumulation and organizational expansion, and that these opportunities are often normalized through professional, technological, and bureaucratic forms. In this setting, peace is not simply the absence of war. It is also the refusal to let insecurity become the unquestioned operating system of political economy.

For management, technology, and political economy scholars, Butler remains worth reading not because he solved the problem, but because he framed it with unforgettable clarity. His central warning still resonates: societies should be sceptical whenever sacrifice is universalized but benefit is concentrated. In an era of platform capitalism, financialized risk, and institutionalized securitization, that warning is not outdated. It is unfinished.

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