Part One: The Pattern

The follow is the first part in a planned four part series of essays that are far more intellectually rigorous than my historical work. I am experimenting on the bleeding edge of writing I think is interesting to read, and structuring it in the way I prefer to read the most. If you enjoyed this piece in particular, a simple message in my inbox does heaps in helping me figure out what's working.

In 1985 Bob Geldof watched a BBC news segment about the Ethiopian famine and couldn't sleep.¹

The man saw something real and it broke something open in him and he did what creators do — he turned it into a thing he knew how to make. He called his friends. He wrote a song. He organized the largest live music event in history. 1.9 billion people watched Live Aid across 150 countries. They raised $127 million.

Ethiopia was still a disaster for another decade.²

I'm not here to make Bob Geldof the villain of this story. I don't think he is. I think he saw something that genuinely broke his heart and he genuinely tried to fix it and the song was real and the concert was real and a lot of the money was real.³

What I'm interested in is what happened to the room.

Because here's the thing about Live Aid that nobody talks about when they talk about Live Aid. The concert made careers. It revived careers. It created a moral economy around a specific suffering in a specific place that ended up being more beneficial — professionally, culturally, reputationally — to the people in the room than to the people who were the reason for the room. Queen had their greatest performance. David Bowie looked incredible. U2 became U2 *that afternoon.*⁴

The BBC segment that started it all won awards. The whole apparatus of Western popular culture organized itself around Ethiopian suffering and came out, institutionally, better than it went in.

The occasion outlasted the cause.

Now here's where it gets structural, because I don't think this is a music industry problem or a celebrity problem or even a charity problem. I think it's a pattern so fundamental to how rooms work that we've stopped seeing it.

Think about the washing machine.

When the washing machine was invented, the story we told ourselves was: this technology will give people — women specifically, since they were the ones doing the laundry — more free time.⁵ And in a narrow, literal sense that's true. The washing machine does the laundry faster than doing it by hand. But what actually happened is that the introduction of the washing machine coincided with the expectation that clothes would be washed more frequently. Standards of cleanliness rose to absorb the efficiency gain. Women entered the workforce and the time the machine saved got immediately consumed by new forms of participation in new systems with new demands.

The technology that was supposed to free people from a room just opened the door to a bigger room.

This is not a coincidence and it's not a conspiracy.⁶ It's what rooms do. Rooms are self-organizing systems that optimize for their own continuation. They take the thing that justifies their existence — the suffering, the cause, the mission, the person — and they metabolize it. Not maliciously. Architecturally. The room needs to keep being a room, and it will find a way to do that, and the occasion will serve the room for exactly as long as the room needs it to.

I learned this in a church.⁷ I've watched it happen in companies, in movements, in friendships, in families. I've watched institutions that existed to serve something real gradually, quietly, make themselves more important than the thing they served — and I've watched the people inside those institutions genuinely believe, the whole time, that they were doing the opposite.

The harm doesn't require malice. The harm is architectural.

And I want to show you the largest architectural harm of my lifetime.

Footnotes

¹ This is the origin story Geldof tells consistently across interviews and in his 1986 memoir Is That It? — the sleepless night, the man who couldn't look away, the phone calls to friends that became a movement. I've repeated it here the way he's told it because the telling is part of what matters. The story of why Live Aid happened became as culturally load-bearing as Live Aid itself. Whether it's precisely accurate in every detail is less interesting to me than what it reveals about how we need our moral moments to have clean origin stories. We need the sleepless night. We need the one man who couldn't look away. We are, as a species, much better at caring about one person's insomnia than about systemic agricultural policy in the Horn of Africa.

If you're unfamiliar with Live Aid entirely: on July 13, 1985, two simultaneous concerts — one at Wembley Stadium in London, one at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia — were broadcast live to an estimated 1.9 billion people in 150 countries. It remains the largest live television event in history by audience. The concert was organized to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief and featured nearly every major act in popular music at the time. It raised approximately $127 million (about $350 million in 2026 dollars). The BBC segment that inspired it was filed by journalist Michael Buerk and cameraman Mohamed Amin in October 1984. That footage — skeletal children, overwhelmed aid workers, a biblical landscape of suffering — became one of the most widely viewed news reports in television history.

² The 1984–85 Ethiopian famine killed somewhere between 400,000 and 1 million people depending on the source and methodology. The longer-term mortality from the political and economic conditions that caused and extended the famine is harder to count and much less discussed. Live Aid's $127 million, for context, represented less than one percent of Ethiopia's GDP at the time. The famine itself was not a natural disaster in any simple sense — it was driven by a combination of drought, the Derg military junta's forced resettlement programs, ongoing civil war, and the deliberate use of food as a political weapon. The suffering was real. It was also not the kind of problem a concert could solve.

I'm not saying the money didn't matter. I'm saying the proportion tells you something about what the concert was actually for.

³ Some of it wasn't. A 2010 BBC World Service investigation, reported by journalist Martin Plaut, found credible evidence that significant portions of the aid money were diverted by the Derg regime — the military junta that was simultaneously receiving the aid and conducting the forced resettlement programs that were actively killing people. Rebel leaders reportedly used aid money to purchase weapons. Geldof has disputed the specific figures and methodology. The broader point — that humanitarian aid delivered without political accountability can strengthen the systems causing the harm — is not seriously contested by people who study this professionally. The academic literature on this is extensive; a good starting point is Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa by Alex de Waal (1997).

I include this not to indict Geldof but because I think the complication is the point. The room metabolizes even good intentions.

⁴ This is not hyperbole. Music historians and the band members themselves mark Live Aid as the inflection point where U2 crossed from successful Irish rock band to global phenomenon. Bono's impromptu descent into the crowd during "Bad" — which caused them to miss two planned songs and which Bono believed at the time had been a disaster — is now studied in performance programs as a masterclass in presence and spontaneity.

Queen's 21-minute set at Wembley, particularly their performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" into "Radio Ga Ga" into "We Are the Champions," is regularly cited as the greatest live rock performance ever captured on film. It revived a career that had been in commercial decline. David Bowie debuted the music video for "Dancing in the Street" with Mick Jagger during the broadcast. Phil Collins famously performed at Wembley, then took a Concorde to Philadelphia to perform at JFK Stadium the same day.

The suffering in Ethiopia was real. It was also the backdrop against which several of the most successful careers in music history were cemented. Both things are true simultaneously and that's exactly the problem I'm trying to describe.

If you haven't seen Queen's Wembley set, it's worth watching — not because it disproves my argument, but because it makes the argument harder and therefore more honest. Freddie Mercury was transcendent that day. The crowd response is one of the most extraordinary things ever filmed. And it happened because Ethiopian children were starving. Both things. At the same time.

⁵ The historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan documents this extensively in her 1983 book More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. The book traces how domestic technology — washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators — consistently increased the standard of domestic output expected of women rather than reducing their total labor. The washing machine didn't save time. It raised the bar for what clean meant.

This pattern has repeated with nearly every labor-saving technology since. Email was supposed to reduce meetings. Smartphones were supposed to free us from desks. Each time, the efficiency gain is absorbed by rising expectations, and the system — the room — expands to fill the new capacity.

⁶ I want to be precise here because the word pattern does a lot of work in this essay and I don't want it doing work it hasn't earned. I'm not describing intentional coordination. I'm describing emergent behavior — the kind that arises when a sufficient number of actors each pursuing rational self-interest operate inside a shared system. The system produces outcomes nobody individually chose. This concept has been explored rigorously in complexity theory, institutional economics, and sociology. For a technical treatment, see W. Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (1994). For a more accessible version, see James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998), which documents how institutions designed to serve populations systematically reorganize those populations to serve the institution instead.

This is different from conspiracy and I think the difference matters. Conspiracy thinking lets everyone off the hook by making the harm contingent on a small number of identifiable bad actors. Architectural harm is harder to fix precisely because there's nobody to blame. The room isn't run by anyone. The room runs itself.

⁷ I've written about this elsewhere and I'll write about it again. The short version for people arriving here without context: I spent years inside an authoritarian religious institution, left, and have been processing the shape of that experience ever since. The processing is the work. This essay is part of the processing.

I mention this not because my biography is the point — it isn't — but because I want to be transparent about where this lens comes from. I didn't learn to see rooms by reading about them. I learned by living inside one that was optimizing for its own continuation at my expense while telling me it was doing the opposite. That experience is what trained my eye. Whether it makes me more credible or less credible is for you to decide.