The book that stayed with me all these years is Fishing for Truth by Alan Finlayson. At first glance, it is a study of how scientists assessed the Northern Cod stock off Newfoundland. In reality, it is a tragic story about a society staring at a catastrophe it was creating, and failing to see it. Not because the data was missing, but because of who was doing the looking.

The Northern Cod had fed people for five hundred years. Then, in 1977, Canada extended its fisheries jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles, gaining control of the Grand Banks. Large fishing companies expanded domestic harvesting capacity with new trawlers and processing plants, backed by government subsidies to industrialize the fishery. Fifteen years later, the Northern Cod was virtually gone from overfishing. Tens of thousands of people lost their livelihoods. The scientists setting annual fishing quotas were measuring the health of the cod stock the whole time. And yet the fishery collapsed.

The local inshore fishers in Newfoundland saw the destruction of the Northern Cod plainly, each year pulling up emptier and emptier nets. The truth was right there, but it escaped the people whose job was to understand the crisis. In Fishing for Truth, Finlayson argues that the science assessing cod was shaped, often unconsciously, by the interests that profited from catching fish, not protecting them. No single person intentionally lied. It was subtler and more unsettling. He showed that knowledge itself, even hard scientific knowledge, is not simply discovered. It is constructed by people, and people are shaped by incentives. The Department of Fisheries had a mandate to keep the fishery open. Political and economic pressure rewarded optimism and punished alarm. Every one of those pressures nudged the interpretation of the data in the same direction: the cod stock is fine, the fishing can continue.

The future is safe.

No single nudge was a lie. But add them up, year after year, and the system produced a distorted version of truth that served the wrong people, right up until the fish were gone.

We tend to think of truth as something fixed, waiting to be found, and of suppliers as either honest enough to report the truth or dishonest enough to bury it. That is not how it works in complex supply chains. Someone decides what gets measured, how, by whom, and which numbers count. Whoever controls the production of supplier data shapes not only the truth about that supplier, but the targets it pursues.

In Fishing for Truth, the misinformation was structural. It was built into the data production. Try applying that idea to everything you buy. Your suppliers are producing data about their own consequences right now. The carbon number. The labour audit. The safety record. Left alone, unaudited suppliers will manage the truth to optimize their own profit, shaping what gets measured and disclosed.

Certification systems, like the one run by the Marine Stewardship Council, are important. We will dive into them later. For now, the facts tell us that more needs to be done. A third of the world's fish stocks are being depleted faster than they recover. The ocean is warming, acidifying, and losing oxygen. And over 128,000 fishers are trapped in forced labour on fishing vessels worldwide. If you eat fish, there is a very good chance your money is funding at least one of those destructive outcomes.

A lot has happened since Fishing for Truth was published. The Northern Cod survived. After a 32-year moratorium, the stock is recovering. A careful fishery has reopened. The near-total destruction of a five-hundred-year-old resource and the loss of 30,000 livelihoods carry hard lessons.

The most enduring lesson is the one about truth. And trust. Our suppliers will go to almost any length to make a profit. It does not make them bad. It's just their nature. The best way to ensure we can trust our suppliers is to make truth a condition of enforceable contracts, with real consequences for causing harm.

There are a thousand other collapses underway right now in the world's supply chains, many resembling the ecological crisis of the Northern Cod. Others are social or cultural. Each is a function of suppliers chasing profits that depend on your money. And each supplier can be made to compete for your money on terms you set.

If you want to start your own journey toward accountable supply chains, visit Supplierism.com to see how we are building a free app to make it possible.

Supplierism is not a business. It is a movement. Capitalism built by everyone, for everyone. And always free.

It is a thoughtful conversation. It is also, from beginning to end, a description of a supply problem that neither man names.

Harari diagnoses. Klein nods. The mechanism is missing.

Here is Harari on social media:

The algorithms experimented on millions, on billions, of human guinea pigs to see how we make humans more engaged. They discovered that the easiest way to make people engaged is to press the hate button or the greed button or the fear button.

That is not a description of a discourse problem. It is a description of a product. Built by a supplier. Tested on buyers. Sold without disclosure. The cost of that product, measured in teen mental health, in election integrity, in social trust, did not appear on any receipt.

It appeared on the bill.

Harari knows this. He says it plainly. What he does not say is who should be writing the terms of the next product before the same thing happens again.

He gets closer when the conversation turns to AI.

The real danger with AI is things like millions of AI boyfriends and girlfriends changing the psychology of the next generation, changing the deepest tendencies and structures of the human mind.

He proposes a defence. He calls for a ban on AI personhood. No legal status. No bank accounts. No companies run by machines.

These are terms and conditions. Buyer-side rules, written in advance, that suppliers must accept before they are allowed into the market.

This is the pattern among even the smartest thinkers. Harari is laying out the case for why people should create their own legally enforceable terms and conditions for ethical AI. He walks right up to the start line of Supplierism. Then declares that we need new laws, new regulations and heroic lawmakers to enforce them.

But new laws move at the speed of governments. Suppliers move at the speed of profit. By the time the laws arrive, they are watered down, the product is in a child’s pocket, and the harm is on your balance sheet.

Supplierism does not wait for some new fast and enlightened government to magically appear. It takes on your suppliers using the one thing they need: access to your money. But Supplierism makes that access conditional on good behaviour. With consequences.

Why does this work? Because buyers already have the right to set the terms they need, to govern AI and every other harm their suppliers create. They have always had this right. The only thing missing was the capacity to use it at scale.

Where Ezra Klein misses is more interesting.

Klein (whose work I admire and try not to miss) has spent years arguing that liberalism’s problem is communication. The wrong people are good at podcasts. The right people still talk like the institutions of an era that no longer exists. The algorithm rewards excitement, and excitement rewards cruelty.

All of it is true. None of it fixes the problem.

The solution is not better communicators. It is to change what the algorithm rewards. Engagement is a supplier metric. It was chosen by the supplier, optimized by the supplier, and sold to the supplier’s advertisers. The buyer, meaning you, was never asked what the algorithm should optimize for.

Aggregate what the buyers want instead. Attach it to where the money flows. The algorithm will optimize for something else, not because the supplier had a change of heart, but because the supplier needs your money.

Klein keeps looking for the answer in better elites. The answer is in better buyers.

Harari ends the conversation on finance.

AI will create a new financial system that we will not be able to understand. We will see things happening, like: this company fired me, that company hired me. Why? I have no idea.

Harari is describing a dystopia where AI runs the world and no one can see why. He is right to worry. But the question is no longer whether AI is dangerous. The question is whether it is inevitable. If you believe it is, then the only question left is who the AI works for. A company? A tech billionaire? A government?

Or you.

That is the choice in front of every buyer right now. There will be AI in your bank, in your insurance, in your kid’s classroom, in your doctor’s office. The only question is whose terms it is reading. Who controls the contract.

Harari believes people, working together, should control AI for the good of humans. That likely puts him in your buyer pool. So does the Pope, and the 1.4 billion who follow him. So does nearly everyone who believes in privacy, in human rights, in not handing their child’s mind to whoever bids highest for it.

That is not a fringe. The buyer pool that wants what Harari wants is most of the people and almost all of the money. The group that actually wants the opposite is small: it wants unfettered AI, machines running the economy, no terms at all. And it does not hold the money. Suppliers follow the money. The leverage is on your side.

Harari spent two hours describing the gap. Klein spent two hours not seeing it.

Go to Supplierism.com. State your terms. Then see who you are already standing with.

Even if you never set foot in a church, there is a good chance your views and the Pope’s encyclical say nearly the same thing. AI should reflect the values of billions of humans, not the values of the few who are building it.

Supplierism is built on a simple observation. Suppliers have been writing the terms of your purchasing relationships your entire life. The costs of those relationships, like climate disruption, inequality, and corruption, are passed back to you on a separate set of bills. Left to Silicon Valley’s devices, AI is poised to become the next great negative externality, disrupting everyday life without limitation. But AI trained to negotiate with your suppliers has the potential to transform the economy and capitalism itself. For the first time, you can set the terms. For the first time, those terms can be pooled with millions of others. And for the first time, suppliers will have to answer to a buyer their own size.

So, what does this have to do with the Pope?

The Pope is an influencer with 1.4 billion followers. At a conservative $15,000 in annual consumer spending each, that is roughly $21 trillion in annual buying power. Larger than the United States economy.

His pool is not the only one you can join.

Women control roughly $31.8 trillion in global consumer spending and influence 70 to 80 percent of all purchasing decisions. A women’s buyer pool around safety, pay equity, supply chain transparency, or any other shared term is larger than the Pope’s pool. By 2030 it is projected to control 75 percent of all discretionary spending on earth.

Gen Z today spends $2.7 trillion annually and is on track to hit $12 trillion by 2030. A Gen Z buyer pool around AI training data, mental health, or climate is the fastest-growing pool in the world.

I am neither a woman nor a teenager. But I do have a daughter. I want her to have equal opportunity to earn a living and to live in a fair, safe, and free world. Joining my daughter’s buyer pools is straightforward. Joining the Pope’s may feel less so. But both are exactly what Supplierism is built for. Maximum leverage for people, organized around shared terms rather than shared identities.

Go to Supplierism.com. Generate your legal terms and conditions for ethical AI. It takes seconds. Then see who you are already in a pool with.

A. Buyer

The costs add up. The toll of social media on a generation of kids. Plastics in our oceans. Corruption and discrimination in our economy. The cost of climate change on everything you will ever buy.

None of these problems are paid for by the companies who created them. They are ultimately paid by you.

Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, estimates that climate change alone will cost the global economy $23 trillion a year by 2050. That is not a number from a protest sign. It is a number from the industry whose entire job is putting a price on risk. The bill is real. The question is who pays and why.

You did not sign for any of this. You were not asked. The transfer happened in the gap between what suppliers know about the consequences of their decisions and what you, as the buyer, have any practical way to discover, evaluate, or refuse.

Supplierism is the name for what happens when that gap closes.

On May 13, 2026, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Jensen Huang, and more than a dozen other CEOs travelled to Beijing with Donald Trump. They were not there to promote democracy or free markets. China has no plans to become either.

They were there as suppliers. Nothing more and nothing less. Negotiating market access at the highest level of government, on their terms. Buyers like you, whose money funds the whole arrangement, were not invited.

Xi told them China’s door will open wider. The leaders of the free world were not on that trip. The trip itself is proof that this role has been abdicated.

So who is the leader of the free world?

Think about it. Make a list. Then find a mirror.

You are the leader of the free world. Your money makes it go around. The choices you make with your money shape every part of the world we live in. Every CEO and politician on that trip to Beijing, and Xi himself, were chasing one thing. Your money. That is why they were meeting. To organize themselves as suppliers to you.

You are the leader, whether you know it or not.

For most of economic history, markets ran on trust. If a supplier cheated a buyer, word traveled and the supplier was finished. Accountability was a function of relationship, and the relationship was the contract.

That changed when commerce industrialized. The dominant supplier became a corporation. The buyer became a stranger. The relationship became a transaction. Suppliers hired lawyers and lobbyists. The accountability that used to live in trust was repackaged into one-sided agreements you never read.

Large institutional buyers responded by building procurement systems. Walmart could insist that its suppliers meet specifications it had written. Militaries, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies could require certifications, audits, and contractual remedies when things went wrong.

You, and your household, got none of that. You could always read the warning on the back of the package.

The imbalance was not natural. It was operational. Setting terms with a supplier requires legal expertise, analytical capacity, the ability to aggregate demand, and a credible way to enforce consequences. Each of those was too expensive for an individual buyer to deploy alone.

Until now.

Artificial intelligence has collapsed the cost of everything that tilted markets in favour of corporate sellers at the expense of human buyers. Qualifying suppliers to meet your values. Drafting terms and conditions. Aggregating your demand with millions of other buyers. Monitoring whether the terms are being met. All of that can now be done at a cost and scale that fits on your smartphone.

Everyone can now have the same supply management capability as Apple or Walmart. The infrastructure exists. The only question is who controls it and what values it serves.

Supplierism insists that the value system comes from buyers. Collectively. Democratically. Not from the companies that build the tools. Technology does not decide what matters. It illuminates what has been hidden and enforces what has been decided. Humans set the priorities. Machines carry the weight. Not a company. Not a CEO. And certainly not some algorithm or AI.

Supplierism is not a critique of capitalism. It is the part of capitalism that was missing.

Markets are extraordinary at producing innovation and rewarding things people actually want. The problem is that ordinary people are bad at capitalism. They lack the information to negotiate properly and the leverage to enforce terms. The textbook free market assumes both parties are informed and roughly equal in negotiating power. Almost no household transaction looks like that.

Supplierism closes that gap. It does not replace markets. It makes them work the way the textbooks always claimed they did. And it makes regular people good at capitalism.

This is why Supplierism is not socialism, not regulation, not consumer activism, and not ESG. It does not ask buyers to be more virtuous or sacrifice convenience. It asks one thing: start treating your purchasing relationships as professional relationships, with terms, conditions, and consequences.

Most reform movements ask you to carry a new burden in the name of a collective good. Supplierism asks the opposite. Stop carrying burdens that were never yours.

When buyers force suppliers to own the consequences of their operations, those consequences move from your balance sheet to theirs. Pollution. Discrimination. Climate change. The impact of AI on work, on safety, on attention, on the social fabric. Once those costs sit where they were generated, capital markets do the rest. A company carrying a $200 billion climate liability cannot raise capital on the same terms as a company that has eliminated it. Investors price the risk. Lenders price the risk. Insurers price the risk. The supplier solves the problem because it can no longer afford not to.

This is the leverage that was always sitting in plain sight. Buyers could always activate it. They just lacked the tools.

In practice, this starts simply. Decide what you believe in. What you will and will not accept from a company you give money to. What kind of data, what kind of supply chain, what kind of future. The list does not have to be exhaustive. It has to be yours.

Then AI writes the terms. It drafts the contracts. It aggregates your demand with millions of buyers who share your values. It qualifies the suppliers who meet your terms and disqualifies the ones who do not. Those suppliers face a choice: lose markets or change behaviour.

You decide. AI writes. AI negotiates. Suppliers respond.

Go to Supplierism.com and build your first terms and conditions. It takes seconds.

Those CEOs in Beijing already know how this works. Now you do too.

The infrastructure is being built. The AI is finally on your side. The framework has a name.

Supplierism is not a business. It is a movement. Always free.