ESG Media

Somewhere in your savings there is a promise. It tells you that the money you set aside, the money you will not touch until you are old, has been placed among the good companies and kept away from the wicked ones. The promise has a name. They call them ESG funds.

The letters stand for environmental, social, and governance, which is only a careful way of asking whether a company treats the earth and the people on it with any decency at all. It is a good question. It is the right question. And Americans, trusting that someone was answering it honestly, have handed roughly four trillion dollars to the funds that claim to ask it.

This book is about the lie folded inside that promise.

For the grade that decides which companies are good is not taken from how those companies behave. It is taken from what they say of themselves, from their own policies, their own disclosures, the glossy reports they write with their own hands. And the agencies that hand down these grades cannot even agree with one another. Let a company mark its own paper, and the paper will come back without a blemish, every time.

A score built on self-description is a door left open, and someone always walks through it. The place they walk through is the professional network where reputations are made. An executive writes a few words, and beneath them a congregation of praise assembles, until it seems the public itself has risen up to call this a good and decent company. It did no such thing. The praise was arranged.

And now ask the only question that matters. What becomes of the one who answers back, who says the true thing, who contradicts the lovely picture and names what is not supposed to be named? She meets the algorithm and the hounds.

The algorithm is the first, and it works without leaving a mark: quieting her post until no one sees it, closing the comments beneath it, letting the inconvenient page fail to open, restricting her account with no notice, no reason, and no appeal.

The hounds are the second, and they do what the platform wants done but will not be seen doing. They fall upon the offending voice and bury it, not to reason with it but to drown it. They are not employees. They take no orders.

There are laws that were meant to stop precisely this, laws that can compel a company to tell you when it has silenced you, to give its reason, to grant you an appeal. But a law must have something solid to take hold of, and these two were built to leave nothing in the hand. One leaves no record; the other is not the company at all. Between the silence of the machine and the deniability of the crowd, the law reaches for the wrong and closes on air.

ESG Media follows that single corrupted number all the way down, takes one company and holds it to the light, and shows you everything the grade was built to keep from you: the algorithm, the hounds, and the rating they exist to protect. It is short, it is meant to be read at a single sitting, and it is only the first, for the same question can be put to every giant the market has agreed to call good.

You have been told where your money goes. This, at last, is where it actually goes.