Paytriarchy

New configuration for the oldest operating system

May 17, 2026

Last week, the future of the global economy was negotiated in Beijing by a group of the world’s richest men. Not mostly men. Men. And almost no one is calling it what it is — the biggest misogyny story of the month.

Look at who was in that configuration — Trump and Xi, the political figures, the tech, media and finance CEOs. State power, economic power, male dominance, fully integrated, negotiating with itself.

Meet the paytriarchy.

The seats on this junket were purchased. Donations, political alignment, DOGE adjacency. The paytriarchy bought its way to the table.

Look at which businesses got a seat. Payment rails. Platforms. Asset managers. Financial services. Men who built their fortunes by owning the tollbooth infrastructure through which money and data move. The means of transaction, not the means of production.

Here is the irony: Trump’s signature economic weapon is tariffs — an industrial-age tool aimed at factories, manufacturers, and the goods economy. It lands nowhere near the sector of rentiers and financialization profiteers. It touches no enshittified platform. Every one of these men flew home unconcerned about tariffs. They make bank no matter what.

I’m not the only one who noticed the gender bias. Zulfina at Letters from a Feminist was ahead of me on this. They pointed out that these men — unelected, unaccountable — flew to Beijing on your tax dollars. And Zulfina raised the alarm about what it means that the men now architecting AI attended that summit: if the people designing the system that will reshape how we all live, work, and communicate are this homogenous a group, the future they’re building already has its thumb on the scale.

There’s something else true about the men in that room. Almost to a person, they have made their peace with authoritarianism or actively helped push it forward. Some have funded it. Some have led it. Some have simply decided that open contempt for democratic norms is a price worth paying for access to markets. The paytriarchy is only loyal to the pursuit of profit. Democracy is optional.

Some people looked at that room and saw American capitalism facing off against Chinese state power. That’s not what happened. Xi’s China is an enclosure state, controlling rare earths, manufacturing capacity, and digital infrastructure through the same logic of captured dependency. This was not democracy meeting authoritarianism across a negotiating table. It was tollbooth meeting tollbooth. The rest of the world’s population was the implicit subject of whatever bargains they struck.

With few exceptions, the new paytriarchy did not get rich by making things. They got rich by positioning themselves between people and things people need, then charging for passage. This is the shift from the means of production to the means of transaction. Sociology was born in the crucible of the industrial revolution. Marx was preoccupied with the factory floor, the worker, the owner of the machinery. That analysis no longer reaches these men. You could unionize every worker in America tomorrow and not touch one percent of the cash flow represented by the paytriarchy. They don’t own the the shop floor. They are the vulture sector extracting from the workers and the owners of production simultaneously.

Feminist writers like Zawn Villines describe the pattern extractive, domineering men run in their intimate relationships. It begins with apparent generosity. Attention. Access. Then the terms quietly shift. The exits close. The dependency deepens and the abuse ramps up. One day you look up and realize you are producing value for someone who is extracting from you in myriad ways. Readers of those writers will recognize the vulture economy immediately. Free at first. But then the terms shift, the exits are sealed. Amazon is not a store. Facebook is not a public square. They are enclosures. The business model and the relationship model are the same model.

This is the same ancient operating system running at three scales simultaneously: the bedroom, the platform annd transaction economy, and the geopolitical negotiating table. Technologists call it enshittification. The logic is identical at every scale: apparent generosity, manufactured dependency, extraction.

In a recent podcast interview with me, Zawn Villines argues that patriarchy is not a byproduct of authoritarianism but its original template, the first system of men extracting resources from those with less power, enforced through dependency and violent control, replicated outward into every other authoritarian arrangement that followed. The paytriarchy didn’t borrow this logic from politics. They built their businesses with the same ancient playbook.

Think of it as a set of nested dolls. The bedroom inside the platform inside the broligarchy inside the global economy. Each one bigger than the last. Each one enclosing all the ones before it. But with every one, you find the same male face looking back at you. Domination. Extraction. The ancient patriarchal logic painted on every layer, all the way out to the largest doll ever assembled, the one that just had its architectural summit in Beijing.

The Beijing trip was not mainly about new deals. It was about bolstering and affirming the oldest raw deal we know.

In solidarity,

Paul

Remember: Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.

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