The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end. The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive.

These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image. She can believe – reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism – that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant and often pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her money, her decisions, her selfhood and her soul.

The model of business success in the millennial era is that of dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners of life can still be exploited.

Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

To use Amazon—which I did regularly for years with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible; even, and maybe particularly, people.