It’s easy to see how individuals are recruited—volunteer themselves, even—into projects that are hostile to their own existence.vii After all, every worker already does the same thing by definition, to a certain degree. Think back to the Shell example. No one wants to work at an underregulated oil field that’s flaring ten million cubic feet of gas every week. Nor would people choose to live in the world that kind of activity is rapidly creating, not if they got to pick. But if that’s workers’ only or even best way to fit into the social metabolism, to access the mediations between themselves and the world that make life possible, we know they’ll take it. They don’t have much of a choice. All the players are then compelled to cooperate: Shell needs to sell the field; the new operator needs to start flaring; and the workers need to operate it the way they’re told to. This doesn’t require us to think of humans as utility-maximizing automatons; the individuals involved could find themselves overcome with moral qualms and quit—people do it all the time. But that protest presents itself to the system as a personnel problem, not a structural challenge, and such personnel problems mostly solve themselves.