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It’s easy to laugh about Teen Boss; to see it as just a passing meme or a joke. But what it represents about the way young people are failed by platform capitalism is a serious concern. The problems with Teen Boss will outlive Teen Boss, and they speak to a society-wide dereliction of responsibilit…

“It’s too bad because girls at the ages [Teen Boss] is targeted to, ages eight to eleven, are going through a really tricky developmental moment where they become more withdrawn,” said Melissa Campbell of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) when we spoke by phone in February. Campbe…

A function of this marketable cultural obsession with microcelebrity is classism, which Teen Boss doled out in large supply. It’s fair to say that young people from a range of backgrounds need to find work in order to support themselves, their families, their futures—often as a means of survival. C…

Humanitarian aid workers are indeed deployed as the charitable equivalent of diplomatic “honest brokers.” Their broader social function is to connect those who look at catastrophe from the comfortable distance of the West and those everywhere else who must actually live amid its aftermath. The truc…

In this respect, aid work parallels the culture of abuse that has taken root within the private-sector world of military contracting, which also operates in a netherzone of blurry-at-best jurisdictional authority and agency oversight. And it’s long been true that the personality profile of swashbuc…