In A Capitalist System There Is No Alternative (Until There Is)

In January 2026, Mark Carney stood at Davos and said what most people in power have spent years carefully not saying: the old model isn’t coming back, and nostalgia isn’t a plan.

We had so many thoughts, and we still have more.

The speech didn’t come out of nowhere. It landed at the end of a long arc, from the 1930s debate over who corporations actually owe anything to, through the moment Milton Friedman made shareholder primacy into a kind of religion, through the brief window when Larry Fink mentioned ESG 26 times in one letter and then once and then not at all, through the quiet collapse of the Net Zero Banking Alliance and the organizations that signed its commitments and then, one by one, didn’t.

This episode traces that arc. How the language of responsibility got built, scaled, weaponized, and hollowed out and what Mark Fisher had to say about why it was always going to be hard to imagine anything different. We get into what Carney is actually arguing (and what he borrowed from the Finnish president to say it), why the Davos setting is either deeply ironic or entirely strategic, and why two sustainability consultants who have watched all of this from the inside are still, against the available evidence, stubbornly optimistic.

Not because things are fine. Because the pretending is over, and that might be exactly what was needed.

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