Structural Activism: Doing Good by Changing the System

For more than a decade, Effective Altruism has attracted some of the most influential figures in technology, finance and academia. Sam Bankman-Fried claimed he would earn billions only to give them away; Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna poured hundreds of millions into EA-backed initiatives; William MacAskill and Toby Ord became intellectual celebrities; and philosophers from Oxford to Silicon Valley proclaimed EA the most rational moral framework of our time. These names gave the movement cultural weight. Yet as their influence grew, so did the cracks in the ideology they promoted: an ideology that now looks less like moral clarity and more like a sophisticated justification for preserving the very system that empowers its biggest donors.

Effective Altruism’s pitch is beguilingly simple: Make a great deal of money and then give it away to the most efficient causes. In theory, this means billions of dollars are directed to save lives, reduce suffering and prepare for future risks. In practice, it has become something else entirely: a system for laundering conscience, shoring up elite legitimacy and entrenching the very inequalities it claims to be fighting.

The problem begins with structure.

Effective Altruism encourages ambitious people to earn wealth in precisely those industries most responsible for producing inequity and fragility — finance, monopolistic tech, speculative markets — and then donate a fraction of that wealth to “high-impact” causes. The underlying mechanisms of exploitation remain untouched.

In fact, they are reinforced, because EA legitimizes the paths that generate the harms it then selectively alleviates. The billionaire who made a fortune through labor arbitrage, union busting or opaque financial engineering can now point to malaria nets or AI safety grants as evidence of moral seriousness. The result is a paradox: The more damage the system does, the more philanthropic fuel there is for EA to distribute.

This is why critics increasingly see Effective Altruism as a kind of public-relations strategy. It provides a moral vocabulary for elites to present themselves as benefactors while ensuring that the fundamental distribution of power remains intact. It channels activist energy toward areas deemed “safe” by the wealthy, causes that do not threaten the underlying political economy.

There is no effective altruist fund pouring billions into campaigns for a 90 percent wealth tax, or for dismantling the structures that allow capital to concentrate endlessly in the first place. The EA ecosystem is filled instead with grants for speculative forecasting projects, global health interventions and AI think tanks, initiatives that, while useful in their own right, do not challenge the order that keeps wealth and decision-making in the hands of a tiny elite.

The incoherence of EA lies in this separation between the way money is made and the way it is used. The logic is parallel: profit here, philanthropy there. The act of giving is untethered from the structures of extraction. There is no feedback loop, no attempt to redesign the underlying system. Instead, the wealth-making enterprise and the altruistic mission live in separate universes, bridged only at the point of donation. That detachment ensures that the cycle of accumulation and inequality continues uninterrupted.

What’s needed is a different philosophy: Structural Activism (SA). Unlike EA, which optimizes outcomes within the current order, SA insists that doing good requires changing the order itself. It begins with civic and social missions, identifies the new tools those missions require, and builds them in ways that others can also use. Those tools, once proven, can sustain themselves commercially, and the value generated can be reinvested back into strengthening the original mission. The process is circular, not parallel: mission generates enterprise, enterprise generates revenue, revenue reinforces mission.

Structural Activism becomes clearest when you imagine what a genuinely healthy civic–economic ecosystem would look like. Consider a hypothetical for-profit company whose explicit market is grassroots organizations: tenant unions, local labor groups, environmental coalitions, neighborhood associations. Instead of treating these groups as charity cases dependent on donor largesse, the company treats them as real clients with real needs: legal support, rapid financing tools for campaigns, document automation, compliance help, secure communication systems and strategic intelligence. It builds and sells these services as any B2B firm would — but the end users are organizations engaged in redistributing power, not accumulating it. The value isn’t extracted from them; it’s created with them. The entrepreneur is not “giving back later;” they are building structures that help others fight for themselves right now.

This is the core reversal SA demands. Under the EA model, capitalism generates wealth in familiar extractive ways and then shaves off a philanthropic layer, distributed according to elite priorities. Under SA, capitalism is reoriented to build infrastructures that widen the distribution of agency. The for-profit firm serving tenant unions is not patching inequities with donations; it is building the scaffolding that lets marginalized groups negotiate, sue, organize and advocate on equal footing. Its revenue model reinforces the moral mission instead of living parallel to it. The marketplace becomes a site for strengthening the underrepresented, not another arena where they are priced out or subordinated. That is the difference between a donation mindset and a structural mindset.

A real-world example of this philosophy is already emerging. Episdemos (a company I launched earlier this year) is a for-profit, software as service company that sells to unions, associations, politicians and civic groups, who pay for enabling secure, easy to use, anonymous voting, and transparent decision-making. These clients are not passive recipients of charity: They are actors building their own democratic capacities, using a tool intentionally designed to increase their internal fairness and external power. And because the revenue stays tied to the civic function that created the tool, value creation and democratic strengthening become the same process rather than two separate, morally inconsistent tracks. Episdemos is not redistributing charity; it is commercializing empowerment.

This is what Structural Activism ultimately points toward: a vision in which business is not the amoral generator of inequality later softened by deeply cynical philanthropy, but a civic partner building the structural capacities society actually needs. Instead of concentrating wealth and then deciding which causes deserve a billionaire’s blessing, SA imagines enterprises that, by design, spread tools, power and decision-making outward. Such distribution does not need or rely on magnanimous donors (latter day earls and dukes) or elite tastes,  but  on markets that reward the strengthening of democratic actors themselves.

In a society starving for new institutional forms, this is the only kind of “doing good” that does not depend on a self-serving, exploitative altruism that cannot help but be a tool in the hands who those who wield it: an extractive mechanism for which giving a bit of the cash is ultimately nothing much more than the cost of doing business, and more crucially, being able to keep on doing business as usual.