The Author
Pamela J. LaTulippe is an investigative writer, podcast host, creator of Aware Trade, and author of the forthcoming book Aware Trade: The Rise of Coercive Capitalism. She holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Accion Program on Strategic Leadership in Inclusive Finance.
Her career traces the full arc of the infrastructure she now investigates. She was part of the team at Firefly Networks, the MIT Media Lab spinout co-founded by Professor Pattie Maes, that pioneered collaborative filtering, an early algorithmic technology that would evolve into the behavioral prediction and targeting systems at the heart of Surveillance Capitalism. She went on to co-found her own technology company during the dot-com era, raising institutional venture capital from Matrix and Sigma Partners at a time when women received a fraction of a percent of all VC funding. The Boston Globe profiled her in its business section, proclaiming her a Digital Master. From there, her work took her deeper into the payments industry, where she spent a decade at Mastercard as an early pioneer of digital wallet technology, working on the tokenized payment infrastructure being deployed across e-commerce, in-store contactless, and in-app channels. She watched every layer of this infrastructure being built from the inside. That is what makes her diagnosis of where it is heading different from every other account of it.
Aware Trade is the publication she built to close the gap between what is actually being constructed and what the public understands about it. Through investigative reporting and long-form podcast conversations, she tracks the convergence of technologies and systems that are quietly redesigning the architecture of economic life: programmable money in the form of tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and smart contracts that execute financial conditions without human intervention, artificial intelligence that scores and segments people in real time, agentic commerce in which AI systems research and transact autonomously on your behalf, and emerging machine payments protocols that allow machines to pay machines at scale without any human in the loop.
Individually, each of these developments has a reasonable-sounding justification. Together, they converge into what she calls Coercive Capitalism: a system that does not merely observe and predict human behavior as Surveillance Capitalism did, but also constrains it. A system where the conditions attached to your money, your identity, and your access to economic life can be set, changed, and enforced without your knowledge or consent. Cryptocurrency and blockchain infrastructure, once framed as tools of financial liberation, are increasingly being absorbed into this architecture as well, raising urgent questions about who ultimately controls the rails.
Her original contribution to this analysis is the concept of Structural Narcissism: the argument that these systems are not the product of malice but of a specific organizational and psychological failure. Drawing on the neuroscience of Iain McGilchrist and the firsthand neurological testimony of Harvard brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, she argues that the leaders designing this infrastructure operate from a state of left-hemisphere dominance, a mode of thinking that excels at efficiency, measurement, and control but has lost access to the right-hemisphere capacities of empathy, context, and ethical imagination. In individuals, this imbalance produces narcissistic behavior. In organizations and institutions, it produces systems that optimize relentlessly while remaining blind to human consequences. That is not a character flaw. It is a structural condition, one that has been selected for and rewarded across decades of corporate and financial culture. It is what makes Coercive Capitalism possible without moral friction, and it is what makes it so difficult to stop from the inside.
She is based in Greenwich, Connecticut. She is available for speaking engagements and media interviews.
