By now, I’m sure you’ll expect me to have another post that references the word “relational”—how philanthropy can’t quite see it, doesn’t really fund it, yet how vital it is.
Yes, I’m relational, and I deeply believe in it. I’ll continue making the case to anyone willing to listen, or even sit still for a moment.
And I’ve also acknowledged that it isn’t new. In a way, it’s something that has always been there, will always be there, even if it isn’t as visible as I had hoped it would be. And because it isn’t visible, it can’t really be counted or accounted for in a lot of our social change work.
I was thinking about this because I came across a fabulous essay by Geoff Mulgan in Prospect Magazine, titled After Capitalism, published in 2009. I’ve read and re-read it.
In a way, standing at the edge of the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he was seeing green shoots and signs of a different future. He talks about the commons, open source, co-ops, a care-based support economy, Wikipedia as post-capitalism, wellbeing over GDP, and even goes so far as to say that capitalism might become the servant, not the master.
And yes, the future played out differently.
But at the same time, I feel like in 2026 we’re at a similar moment. If you look back, open source won the technology battle, but ultimately became invisible infrastructure that platforms were built on top of, without ever quite being maintained or supported properly. People burned out, while the infrastructure was enclosed and built upon by platforms now worth trillions.
The rest of it stayed marginal. At best, ESG scaled and then got gutted. And capitalism never really turned servant. If anything, finance and platforms are more master now than ever before.
My takeaway is that it didn’t fail because it was wrong. The relational was real then, is real now, and has always been real in between.
Perhaps it lost because it was seen as virtuous, and therefore never quite funded, allied with, or made adjacent to power.
And to that end, being virtuous and right is no protection at all.
I feel like we’re now in a similar crisis-shaped moment. Similar vocabulary, more than a few of the same people, maybe some new people as well.
And I wonder if we’re about to do the exact same thing all over again.
Last time around, the relational was captured.
This time around, it risks being replaced by technology.
References
- Geoff Mulgan, After Capitalism, Prospect Magazine (2009).
Originally written for LinkedIn on 8 June 2026. View original →