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It was close to midnight in Sunnyside, and the bodega under the 7 tracks was doing what bodegas do best: staying open. The man ahead of me bought a six pack and a pack of Newports. The woman behind me was holding three lottery tickets like a small prayer. The cat was asleep on the chips. Nobody in that store was doing anything wrong. Every single thing for sale was legal. And I remember thinking that almost everything in that line, in its own quiet way, was taking something from the person who bought it.

We are taught early that bad things are against the law. Robbery, violence, war, cruelty: we built police stations, courts, and prisons around the idea that harm should be illegal. But the longer I thought about it, the less tidy that idea became. Some of the most harmful things in modern life are perfectly legal. And some of them are not just legal. They are thriving industries.

The legal kind of harm

Walk into any bodega in Queens. Beer in the fridge, cigarettes behind the counter, lottery tickets by the register, a cat asleep on the chips. None of it is illegal. All of it, in its own way, takes something from the people who buy it.

Alcohol makes people feel good for an evening. That’s real; nobody drinks to feel worse. But the old story that a glass of wine is good for your heart has fallen apart, and major health bodies, including the World Health Organization, now say there is no level of drinking that is safe for health. Tobacco we already know about. Marijuana is now legal in more places every year, and while an occasional user may be fine, heavy daily use is linked to dependence, and in young people to memory problems and a higher risk of psychosis.

Then there is pornography. No age check except, until recently, a button that says “I am 18.” No cost. No limit. It’s available on the same device a child uses for homework. In many places it is not only legal but almost invisible as an issue, too ordinary to discuss.

Nepal, the country I come from, ordered porn sites blocked in 2018. Anyone with a VPN walked right around it. Banning something and making it disappear are not the same thing.

Looking for the villain

When something feels this destructive, the instinct is to look for who is behind it. Someone must want this. Someone must be pulling the strings.

So I looked. What I found was not a secret council. It was a list of companies.

Aylo, formerly MindGeek, owns Pornhub, YouPorn, Brazzers, and others. A Canadian private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners acquired it in March 2023. Before that, an Austrian businessman, Bernd Bergmair, was its majority owner. In 2023, Aylo entered a deferred prosecution agreement with U.S. prosecutors over a charge that it profited from deals with producers involved in sex trafficking.

XVideos and XNXX belong to WGCZ Holding, a Czech French company. XVideos was founded in Paris in 2007 by Stephane Pacaud, who reportedly turned down an offer of more than $120 million to sell it, saying he had a video game to play. The Financial Times reported that the company’s two main sites receive 6 billion visits a month.

OnlyFans is run from London by Fenix International. It was majority owned by Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian born American billionaire, until his death in March 2026. Two months later, Architect Capital bought about 16% of the company for $535 million, valuing it at roughly $3.15 billion.

There are people online who insist some ethnic or religious group secretly controls all this to destroy society. The facts don’t support it. The owners are businessmen of many nationalities, private equity funds, and holding companies. That is somehow more unsettling than a conspiracy. A conspiracy can be exposed. A market just keeps going.

They are not trying to ruin anyone. They are trying to make money. Ruin, if it comes, is a side effect nobody is paid to notice.

The winner and the crowd

Here is where it gets complicated, and where I have to be honest with myself.

Take one person: a young woman who starts an OnlyFans account and earns a million dollars. Her rent is paid. Her family is supported. She can travel, invest, quit a job she hated. For her, individually, it may be the best thing that ever happened. Who am I to call that a tragedy?

And the defenders of this world have real arguments. These are consenting adults. Sex is not some secret humanity just discovered. A creator who owns her own page has more control than performers ever had under the old studio system. If people watch for entertainment and keep it in proportion, what exactly is the crime?

I take those arguments seriously. But two things keep pulling me back.

First, the million dollar story is the exception. On these platforms, a small group at the top takes most of the money while the typical creator earns very little. The visible winners work like advertisements for a lottery that most people lose.

Second, something can be good for each person and still be bad for everyone. Picture a stadium. One person stands up to see better, and it works. Then the people behind him stand. Soon everyone is standing, nobody sees any better than before, and everyone is tired. Every individual choice was rational. The result is worse for all.

In 1714, Bernard Mandeville wrote “The Fable of the Bees,” arguing that private vices create public benefits: greed and vanity keep a society rich and busy. Three centuries later, I wonder if we are living the opposite fable. Private gains, public costs. Millions of small, reasonable choices adding up to something no one chose.

The novel or the cigarette?

I have to admit something else. Every generation thinks the new thing will destroy the young. People once panicked about novels, said they would rot the minds of young women. Then jazz. Then comic books. Then television. Society survived all of it, and the people who panicked look foolish now.

But not every panic was wrong. People worried about cigarettes too, and they were right. The tobacco companies spent decades insisting otherwise.

So the honest question is not whether this is new. It’s which kind of thing it is. Is pornography the novel or the cigarette?

I don’t think I can answer that fully. But I notice one difference. A novel ends. You close the book. What we have now has no last page. It’s free, infinite, and shaped by algorithms that learn exactly what keeps each person watching. The novel asked for your imagination. This asks only for your attention, and it is very good at taking it.

The evidence for harm is strongest where you’d expect: children exposed far too early, people who can’t stop, and those exploited in production. Claims that it is collapsing civilization are harder to prove. But a society doesn’t have to collapse to lose something. It can simply become a little more distracted, a little more lonely, a little more used to treating intimacy as a product, one subscription at a time.

What one person can do

I can’t shut down a website visited billions of times a month. I can’t outbid private equity or rewrite the law. If I’m honest, the world will move on whether or not I write this.

But the Stoics drew a line I keep coming back to: some things are in our control and most are not. The market is not in my control. My attention is. What I watch, what I build my days around, what I teach anyone younger who looks up to me: these are mine.

Tomorrow night the bodega will be open again. The fridge will be full, the lottery machine will be humming, and somewhere a server farm will be counting billions of clicks. None of it will notice me. But I’ll notice it. Nobody has to be evil for a society to lose something. And nobody has to be a hero to hold a little of it back.