The Problem of Power

In light of this week’s events, I’m reflecting on my work here—and on the nature and function of power.

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

I think a lot about ending Boss Barista. I imagine an inflection point, a sign delivered to me in a pretty bow telling me this is over.

Lately, dragging myself to my computer feels impossible, and my cynicism feels all-encompassing. When I first started Boss Barista, I incorrectly assumed there were good people and bad people in the world, and many of the show’s early episodes focused on one of those bad actors. 

But as I’ve done this longer and longer—as my inbox ceaselessly fills with horrifying stories of terrible bosses and awful behavior—the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that corruption and harm arise not through one bad person, but through an encompassing addiction to power.

My cynicism isn’t born from this understanding alone, but from the observation that, once people experience power, they seem unable to untether themselves from the clawing, grasping need for it. 

Power makes people do whatever it takes, not to serve others but to protect their power. I used to joke that I would never ever open a coffee shop because I was convinced owning a business does something to rot your brain; it does something to make you forget entirely the struggle and strife workers face. That no longer feels like a joke.

I see everyone—not just business owners, but all types of people in positions of power—act like power should be conferred on them wholeheartedly, without the responsibility of earning it. I could argue that this is what has happened to the Democratic Party, a party concerned much more with preserving old, neoliberal structures of power and funding a genocide than listening to constituents’ needs, a party that then turns right around and believes itself entitled to people’s votes unquestioningly. 

Of course, we also saw the dynamics of power play out on the other end of the political spectrum this week, in a very different way. We saw how power begets power, how influential people win by screwing others over and how people valorize that violent domination. (That’s why the so-called party of law and order loves to punish criminals, but elected a rapist and felon.) We saw how many people truly desire power and how many believe proximity to those in power will spare them from its wrath.

These dynamics of power play out everywhere, not just in electoral politics. At least I believe I see these dynamics everywhere, and they make me feel a visceral, bodily distrust, one that extended to my personal and professional world. I’d become distrustful of the people around me and suddenly became very aware of the limitations of my own journalism because I could not be entirely sure of anything about anyone.

This visceral distrust has pulled me away from here, and from other areas of my life. I post less often on social media, don’t engage as much, and generally feel embarrassed to exist sometimes. At some points, this distrust intersects with the childhood trauma that continues to play out in my thirties, and which has produced retrospective moments of reckoning and realization where I ponder a memory and think, “Oh, that was not normal.” A lot of my distrust comes from my father: I’m the product of an affair he had, a fact that he cannot fully admit, and yet has defined my ability to exist in his life.

I could extrapolate further and say that one of the reasons he treats me this way is that he is also addicted to power—he is very much the patriarch of his family (he’s still married to the same woman he was with 37 years ago, when I was born). I pose the single biggest threat to his self-made image.

It’s interesting to write this all out and observe that the dynamics of power seem to operate the same across political parties, workplace situations, and even in my personal experience. Everywhere, we can see what people do to protect power, and rarely do we see power wielded benevolently. We even see the people in our own lives change when they access power.

Increasingly, it’s felt like this newsletter has been defined by a larger theme. I wasn’t just writing about workplace and labor issues in coffee, but about an immovable force capable of transforming all of us if we let it. I want to be careful, because I do believe that those who have done coalition work and who have experienced marginalization would be much more responsible stewards of power, and deserve the world. (I’m thinking of Zoe Leonard’s piece, “I Want a President,” which I’m sure many of you have seen before.) Still, power’s corruption feels so certain that writing anything against it feels like an exercise in futility. 

But then I remember what actually brought me here in the first place: a fundamental belief in people. I remember reading Dr. Devon Price’s 2018 piece, “Laziness Does Not Exist,” an idea he turned into a book in 2021, and thinking that so much of the rhetoric and vitriol we’re told about the people around us—that they’re lazy, that they don’t deserve livable wages, that they don’t deserve to exist—is designed to alienate us from one another. It’s simply not fucking true.

Everyone works hard, and everyone deserves dignity. The only exception to this is not the people next to us, who we’ve been tricked into believing compete with for scarce resources, but the people who have used their power to make resources scarce to protect their wealth and status. We are constantly asked to malign the people next to us, but the people we should be casting ire on are those with the pursestrings. Forgetting the influence of power is exactly what the system that enshrines power wants.

So that is what keeps me here: the knowledge that our struggles are united despite what those in power want us to believe. I cannot believe that malevolence simply comes from bad people, because I’ve seen what power does to people—what power has done to me. But there is something hopeful in the idea that we can pinpoint power, that we can look at it and name its influence, because a foe we cannot name is much scarier. We can fight the influence of power by fighting the structures that make it so potent.