Moconomy

🏭 Six recent college graduates moved to Detroit, a city still recovering from decades of industrial decline and historic bankruptcy, to try to build companies from the ground up. Shot over 17 months, this documentary follows what actually happens when young people bet their savings, their careers and their relationships on an idea that might not work. 🍝 Among them, Brian Rudolph co-founded Banza, a chickpea pasta company that nearly collapsed when a $100,000 production run turned to mush. He spent months fixing the recipe in a factory in Northern Michigan. A year later, TIME Magazine named Banza one of the Top 25 Inventions of 2015. 💻 Max Nussenbaum and his partners bought an abandoned mansion in Detroit and turned it into a shared home and workspace for entrepreneurs. Their company Castle almost folded after running out of money, but was later accepted into Y Combinator, one of the most competitive startup incubators in the world. 🎓 The film also follows Labib Rahman, a first-generation college graduate from a Bangladeshi immigrant family, who had to choose between supporting his parents financially and pursuing his own ambitions. Directed by Academy Award winner Cynthia Wade and filmmaker Cheryl Miller Houser, this is an honest look at the side of startup life that rarely makes the headlines: the burnout, the imposter syndrome, the empty bank accounts and the question of whether it is all worth it.

▶️ Watch the full documentary on the channel.

1 day ago | [YT] | 7

Moconomy

Before Kickstarter, if a bank or a studio said no to your idea, the idea was usually dead. Then the internet handed that decision to a different group: strangers.

Two ways to read what happened next

3 days ago | [YT] | 8

Moconomy

A single ZIP code in Los Angeles can separate a $22 million mansion from a tent on the sidewalk.
In Santa Monica, some homes sell for the price of a small company. A few miles east, in Skid Row, thousands of people sleep on the same square mile of concrete. Same city, same economy, two completely different realities.
What the film really tracks is the group in the middle that used to sit between those two worlds: teachers, nurses, drivers, service workers. Many of them now live in vans, shared "pods," or one missed paycheck from the street. Not because they stopped working, but because the math of the city stopped working for them.
Here's the uncomfortable question: when the middle class of the richest cities starts sleeping in parking lots, is that a Los Angeles problem, or a preview of where every expensive city is heading? 🏙️
Full documentary is live on the channel now ▶️

5 days ago | [YT] | 0

Moconomy

Frances Haugen's testimony made one thing clear: the algorithm knows what it's doing to teenage users. The internal research was explicit. And the platform continued anyway.

Which means the question of how to protect adolescents from social media is not really a technical question. It's a political one. Someone has to decide who is responsible — and what they're required to do about it. 📱

Australia banned social media for under-16s in 2024. The UK introduced the Online Safety Act. The US has been debating federal age verification laws for years without passing one. Meanwhile, the platforms continue to operate exactly as Frances Haugen described — optimised for engagement, which for teenagers means optimised for anxiety, comparison and time on screen.

So we want to know what you actually think should happen: what is the most effective way to protect teenagers from harmful social media?

1 week ago | [YT] | 17

Moconomy

Frances Haugen worked inside Facebook. She saw how the algorithm made its decisions. And then she took thousands of internal documents and handed them to the press and to Congress.

The internal research was clear: the algorithm that maximised engagement also amplified outrage, misinformation and content that pushed users toward more extreme positions over time. Haugen's argument is not that the people inside Facebook are bad. It's more uncomfortable than that.

The question she leaves open is the one regulators, journalists and users have been circling for years: if a platform knows its product causes harm and continues anyway, what is the right name for that?
▶️ On the channel now.

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Moconomy

DJ fights for $15 an hour and wins a small victory at work — then faces the next obstacle. Amelia gets through addiction and starts rebuilding — then faces the medical bill. Jose and Elizabeth buy their first home — then the financial pressure shifts to somewhere new. 🏠

That's not a storytelling choice. That's the structure of economic precarity. It doesn't end. It moves.

This final episode brings together the threads that have run through all of them: the Fight for $15, medical debt, temp work, housing, education costs and the question underneath all of it — what does the American Dream actually owe the people who believed in it? 💸
▶️ On the channel now.

1 week ago | [YT] | 12

Moconomy

For most of the 20th century, the promise was simple: work hard, play by the rules, and your life will be better than your parents'. Buy a house. Send your kids to college. Retire with dignity.

That promise held for a while, for some people, under specific economic conditions that no longer exist in the same way.
Today, a college degree doesn't guarantee a job that covers the student loan that paid for it. A full-time salary doesn't guarantee rent in the city where the job is. And retirement looks less like a reward for a lifetime of work and more like a calculation most people are losing without knowing it. 📉

Which raises the question that sits underneath almost everything we cover on this channel: do you think upward mobility — the idea that hard work leads to a better life — still works?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 15

Moconomy

Donald Sterling was banned from the NBA for life. Stripped of his team a publicly humiliated on a global scale. He also walked away with $2 billion 💰

The story before the scandal is just as revealing. Sterling bought the Los Angeles Clippers for $12.5 million in 1981. He ran them into the ground for three decades: consistently one of the worst teams in the league, losing, for Donald Sterling, was a business model.

The documentary asks something harder: what does it tell us about a system where someone can be publicly condemned for racism, banned for life, and still end up richer than when they started?

▶️ On the channel now.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 6

Moconomy

13 years of mortgage payments. $0 paid off the principal.
That's not a personal failure. That's how amortisation works when the interest rate is high enough and the income is low enough. The bank gets paid first. It always does. 🏠
The documentary follows families doing everything right. Working full-time. Paying their bills. Showing up. And still finding that the gap between what they earn and what stability actually costs doesn't close. It stays exactly where it is, or widens.

Which raises a question that feels uncomfortable to ask out loud, but that more and more people are asking anyway: is the system designed to keep people working — or designed to help them get ahead?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 10

Moconomy

At its peak, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the United States. The arsenal of democracy. The city that built the cars that built the American middle class. 🏭

Then the assembly lines slowed. Then stopped. Then left.

What most people don't know is what happened next.
This documentary is not about Detroit's collapse. It is about the people who stayed — and why. The community workers rebuilding blocks that the city forgot. The artists who turned abandoned factories into cultural spaces. The immigrants who saw opportunity in a city that everyone else was leaving.

The politicians navigating a system designed for a Detroit that no longer exists. 🎶

Because Detroit didn't collapse. It emptied out. And then, slowly, on its own terms, it started filling back up again. 💪
▶️ On the channel now. Watch it and tell us in the comments: is Detroit's story unique — or is it a blueprint for what happens to every city when its core industry disappears?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0