Peekaboo, I See You

Or: Possession is nine-tenths of the con.

It’s old news that we all live in bespoke realities—the feeds, the channels, the platforms that shape what we believe about ourselves and others. It’s not controversial to point out that these realities are largely owned or funded by a small collection of corporations, controlled by an even smaller number of people. Their business model runs on division. Whether it’s sports or politics or who deserves the last rose on The Bachelor, we can rest assured that the people who live in our reality are right and everyone else is either crazy or misled.

This essay isn’t about that.

This essay is about how sometimes, something goes down in the world that overcomes our carefully constructed information bubbles. You can tell when it happens because people who are supposed to be on opposite sides react to something the same way, and nobody quite knows what to do with that.

Two weeks ago, a warehouse worker in Southern California filmed himself setting fire to half a billion dollars worth of his employer’s inventory. Before he walked out, he said this: “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value we bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

No manifesto. Just someone doing the math on his own life—$18 an hour against $2,028 a month for a one-bedroom apartment—and concluding the numbers were never going to add up. He’s facing federal charges and a 20-year sentence. His employer reported $2.4 billion in operating profit last year.

Back in December 2024, a health insurance executive was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk. The accused killer was photographed looking like a cologne ad. At the scene, investigators found three shell casings with words etched into them—one per bullet: “Delay. Deny. Depose.”

No ideology. Just someone living in pain from a back injury because someone decided his wellbeing was worth less than the cost of relief, showing his insurer what their own valuation of human life looks like. He’s facing federal charges and life in prison. His victim’s employer reported $34.4 billion in operating earnings last year.

Two moments that couldn’t be more different on the surface. One guy is a working stiff, the other a child of privilege. One wants to live, the other wants to live better. The world lost a lot of toilet paper in one case, and a human life in the other.

And yet… all the information bubbles started humming with the same vibration. People who agree on almost nothing found themselves on the same page. Not celebrating, exactly—but not condemning cleanly either.

In both cases, the anger behind the action felt familiar to anyone who’s ever wanted to stick it to the man (which is everyone, if we’re being honest). The lack of condemnation wasn’t about the accused. It was about what the victim represented. It was about a rigged system that everyone can recognize but seemingly nobody can control.

And yet… most of the people who recognized the anger behind these events also believe, genuinely and not stupidly, in personal responsibility. In the idea that your outcomes reflect your choices. In the eternal hope of bootstrapping. Work hard, earn what’s yours, keep what you make.

That belief and that anger are supposed to be in contradiction. The first says the system is fair and effort is rewarded. The second says something is being taken. If you hold both at once, you’re either confused or you’re onto something.

This essay is for people who think they might be onto something.

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Let’s make a deal

There’s a story we’ve been telling ourselves for about fifty years, and it goes like this: when it comes to economic life, you have to pick between freedom and fairness.

Choosing freedom means you believe in personal responsibility—in the idea that what you earn is yours, that you built what you built through your own effort, that the system is basically fair to anyone willing to work hard enough.

Choosing fairness means you believe the game is rigged—that wealth concentrates at the top not because those at the top deserve it but because they arranged it, and that something structural is extracting value from everyone below a certain line. Therefore, something must be done to balance the scales.

Effort or extraction. Pro-bootstrap or anti-billionaire. Pick a side, and the other side will tell you everything you got wrong.

The choice between freedom and fairness frames our bespoke realities. It shows up at Thanksgiving to argue with aunt Marge. It drives cable news and clicks and views. It gets weaponized every election cycle by people who have a vested interest in keeping you fighting someone who’s essentially in the same boat.

The end result is a country where people feel forced to choose between their gut sense that something was stolen from them and their equally strong conviction that they earned what’s theirs.

What if the choice itself is the problem? What if the reason moments like these produce the same vibration across opposite bubbles is that they’re pointing at something the choice between freedom and fairness wasn’t built to show?

Behind door number one, we’ve got freedom. See, the pro-bootstrap stance isn’t just a belief about effort—it’s a belief about ownership. If you made it, it’s yours. Yours to keep, yours to spend, yours to leave to your kids. Nobody gets a vote on what you do with it. That’s not greed. That’s just the deal: you put in the work, you get to call the shots. The labor and the freedom are the same thing.

Follow that logic one step further and you end up somewhere most people don’t realize they’ve arrived. If making something means you own it and get to do with it as you please, then the billionaire’s pile is just a bigger version of your paycheck. Same principle, different scale. Which means defending their right to keep it isn’t class loyalty—it’s consistency. And attacking it starts to feel like attacking the very idea that your work belongs to you.

So what’s behind door number two? Fairness, of course. That’s what the anti-billionaire perspective is really about. The person who feels the game is rigged isn’t being paranoid or lazy. They’re running the same math the warehouse worker ran—hours in, dollars out, gap between the two that no amount of effort seems to close—and concluding that something in the equation isn’t right.

That’s not a rejection of personal responsibility—and it’s not billionaire envy. When you’ve worked hard and played by the rules and still can’t get ahead, at some point the honest conclusion isn’t I didn’t try hard enough. It’s something is being taken. It’s freedom constrained, and it seems pretty obvious by whom.

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It’s door number three for me

Here’s the deal: life is rarely all or nothing. The lady or the tiger. Your money or your life. When you’re presented with a fork in the road built by someone else, it’s worth poking around in the bushes to see what’s been paved over.

The freedom argument asks: who has the right to take what's yours? The fairness argument asks: why do some people end up with so much more than others? They feel like opposite questions. They're not. They're the same question asked from different directions, and they have the same answer.

But to get there, we have to follow the freedom argument one step further than it usually goes—past the point where it stops following its own rules.

You own yourself. You own what you produce. Those two links in the chain are solid. The sleight of hand is what comes next: the same logic gets extended, without acknowledgment and without justification, to things no person produced at all.

The land beneath your feet. The minerals beneath the land. The airwaves. The atmosphere used as a carbon sink. None of it was made by whoever holds the deed. It existed before any of us, and its value wasn’t created by the person who owns it. But once the logic of self-ownership gets quietly stretched to cover it, it receives the same moral protection as the wages you earned on a Tuesday.

And then it gets stretched one more time—from things no person created to things we created together. The public internet was built with public research funding on infrastructure that predated every company that got rich from it. The legal system that makes contracts enforceable was built by everyone and paid for by everyone. The roads, the ports, the power grid, the educated workforce—the entire substrate on which private wealth is generated—is a collective achievement that gets absorbed into the "what's mine is mine" framework without anyone asking when it crossed the line.

So the chain that started with something true—I own myself, I own what I produce—ends somewhere it was never entitled to go: I own what nobody produced, and I own what we all produced together.

Those last two links are the con. And that’s the answer to both questions.

The freedom argument breaks because it can't tell you whether a given claim to property is legitimate—it just says whatever you have is yours, and whatever anyone else has is theirs, and that's the end of the inquiry. Which sounds fair until you ask how the distribution got there in the first place. The fairness argument breaks because it can describe the extraction clearly but can only offer redistribution as the remedy—taking from the pile after it's been accumulated, which accepts the outcome of the game without asking who fixed the starting positions.

Neither argument will show you the deed. And the deed is what matters.

The electromagnetic spectrum—the invisible real estate through which every wireless signal in the country travels—was not created by the telecoms that hold licenses to it. It was claimed on behalf of the public and handed over. The mineral rights beneath American land—the oil, the lithium, the natural gas—did not belong to anyone before human beings decided they did. The patent system that lets a pharmaceutical company charge a thousand dollars for a drug developed on publicly-funded research rewards the claim-holder, not the people whose work made the drug possible. The water that western agriculture runs on. The shipping lanes. The legal infrastructure that makes contracts enforceable and property defensible in the first place.

None of it was made by the people who profit from it. All of it was either inherited from nature or built collectively—and then, at some point, a decision was made about who got to hold the deed. That decision is the one neither door will show you. And it matters because it changes everything downstream.

If the commons can’t be legitimately enclosed—if the ground you’re standing on was never yours to claim—then the freedom argument and the fairness argument stop being opponents. The freedom argument, applied honestly, becomes an argument against enclosure: your effort belongs to you, which means the value extracted from collective resources doesn’t. The fairness argument, applied precisely, stops being about redistribution and becomes about rectification: not taking from the pile, but asking how it got there.

The coercion happened upstream. The taking happened before the market opened for business. By the time you get to the argument about taxation being theft, the original theft has already been laundered through a few generations of “legitimate” transactions and is now wearing a suit, sitting across from a senator, and explaining why its marginal tax rate is the real problem.

Freedom and fairness don’t pull in opposite directions. They were always pointing at the same thing. The choice between them was never real—it was the deal on offer, the two doors in the game show, designed to keep you from noticing there was a third.

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All you had to do

I said this essay isn’t about the bespoke realities that divide us. Maybe I lied, a little.

The warehouse worker and the guy with the ghost gun don’t know each other. They didn’t grow up the same and they probably don’t vote the same. Nor do the people who feel something complicated about both of them—across every information bubble boundary we’re told matters. Complicated because while we can’t in good conscience condone the acts, we sure as hell recognize the math. The same math the warehouse worker did on his own life, the same math the guy in pain did on a system that decided his suffering was a line item. The math that keeps coming up short no matter how carefully you run it.

That’s not a left feeling or a right feeling. It’s what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a deed you didn’t sign.

The people holding those deeds would very much like you to keep arguing about whether the problem is freedom or fairness. They’ve built entire media ecosystems to make sure that argument never stops. Because as long as you’re fighting the person across the aisle—who did the same math and came up just as short—nobody’s asking who owns the ground you’re both standing on.

The warehouse worker said it plainly: all you had to do was pay us enough to live. He was talking to his employer. But the “us” in that sentence is bigger than one warehouse. It’s everyone who’s watched the gap between their work and their life keep widening, regardless of which team they root for, regardless of which door they’ve been told to pick.

That’s the vibe that harmonized the information bubbles, just for a minute. Not ideology. Not party. Just the sound of people who built something realizing they can’t control it because they don’t own it. And thinking, just for a minute, that maybe they should.