The Bat Phone Has Been Disconnecte...
I always assumed there was a phone call that could be made. A quiet but urgent line could be dialed from some towering Wall Street building in Manhattan built atop all this granite. Or, from a well-manicured hand from a man sitting in a double-wide townhouse filled with the scent of fresh-cut flowers, where a direct connection to the White House could be made when markets needed crisis funds or when the threat of regulation started to encroach.
A previously direct and reliable line of communication to power, authority, or urgent help is no longer available, much like if Commissioner Gordon could no longer reach Batman.1
By shotsstudio
That’s what happened in 2008, after all. The bailouts weren’t simply a stroke of policy; they were the outcome of a system built on entrenched and subsidized relationships, a seamless mechanism of response. And it happened again during COVID. The market’s invisible hands were frozen. The supply chains were stuck. We don’t need to imagine a phone call was required even before a bolus of cash was unleashed, clutching the lifeline extended by the government, drawing another massive intervention into play.
The phone calls were easier to make after the Powell Memo,2 drafted in 1971 as a call for corporate America to protect itself from the rising influence of regulation, interest in communism, public interest movements, and critiques of capitalism. The memo sparked a wave of corporate political engagement and lobbying efforts that ensured markets would be placed at the center of everything. Powell and his peers feared that capital itself could be destabilized if corporations didn’t actively shape the world in their favor.
But after rereading the Powell Doctrine recently, I realized something: even Powell’s imagination had limits. He wanted to ensure business had a seat at the table and change the nature of debate in universities toward more free-market discourse. Instead, a system emerged in which markets became the table, the room, the agenda, and the entire decision-making infrastructure.
Now, something has shifted.
The phone is no longer there.
I hate being told to “look for the silver lining” when I can physically feel the risk of this transition in my body. It’s the sensation of moving through border control last week and feeling the collective fear, returning to a university flagged on a list, noticing which institutions and efforts are already canceled or suddenly on shaky ground.
But then something shifts. A conversation, a recognition, a realization of the gaps that open when development funding no longer moves as expected, when old alliances dissolve, when the usual expectations of support for science, for new ideas, for the ecosystems we thought were stable. When all of that begins to disaggregate.
When the hedge fund managers have a terrible month and can’t explain what happens next.3
What happens now that the game is up?
What holds us together when the variables are in flux?
Markets were never a neutral force; they were engineered, built, and constantly maintained through policy, power, and influence. But if the structures that once held them up are fragmenting, if the connective tissue between capital and governance is fraying, what remains?
Contribution
Not contribution as an economic transaction, not as corporate social responsibility or some philanthropic afterthought, but as something far more fundamental: contribution to meaning-making. Contribution to shared learning. Contribution to each other’s well-being.
This moment forces us to see beyond the possibilities and extraordinary limits of market logic, beyond the grant cycles and incentive structures that shaped industries and institutions. We are being pulled into something else, something still unnamed. When the funds are pulled, the job is removed, and the institutional scaffolding falls away. Who are we?
What are we meant to do together?
Batman Wiki contributors. (n.d.). Batphone. Batman Wiki. Retrieved from https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Batphone
Powell Jr, L. F. (1971). The memo. Chicago. Retrieved from https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
Rudegeair, P., & Zuckerman, G. (2025, March 14). The week the smart money got whipsawed by the market. The Wall Street Journal.