Lately, I’ve been thinking about the job I had two decades ago, when I was a janitor at a machine shop in Fort Worth, Texas. Even as a hungover 20-year-old, my internal monologue would debate the ethics of the parts I packaged. We produced tiny components for Halliburton and Lockheed Martin. Slivers of aluminum machined to tolerances so fine you could miss their imperfections with the naked eye.

Beneath the fluorescent hum of the shipping and handling department, I’d rub a widget between my fingers and imagine the journey it would take: lifted from a Texan warehouse into the Middle Eastern theatre where our nation’s wars burned. Small enough to disappear in my palm, large enough to disappear into someone else’s rubble. Which is why I keep thinking about those widgets as the NBA tries to regulate morality.

In 2023, the league suspended Ja Morant after he brandished a firearm on social media. The punishment was swift, framed as protection of the NBA’s image. It was easy to have an opinion. Visible misconduct invites visible discipline. Morant’s transgression was on camera, and not the first time he had crossed the line. The NBA, a corporation, was there to smack his hand. It had to. His gun-toting spectacle was bad for business. Yet the league has said little about the far murkier entanglements of its billionaire ownership class.

But when harm travels through distributors, export licenses, shell vendors, firmware updates, when it moves at the speed of supply chains instead of Instagram Live, who is there to smack that hand? Corporations are built to discipline the visible because visibility threatens the brand. They are not built to discipline the slower systems churning in the background that make them money. Which is why the recent Ubiquiti story matters.

Investigative reporting by Hunterbrook Media and commentary from journalists, including Pablo Torre, have raised questions about communications technology manufactured by Ubiquiti, the company founded and led by Memphis Grizzlies owner Robert Pera that has appeared on the frontlines of Russia’s war in Ukraine. (The Hunterbrook investigation discloses that the firm’s affiliated investment arm held short positions in Ubiquiti at the time of publication).

Open source analysis and battlefield imagery suggest Ubiquiti devices have been used within Russian military communications networks, including for coordinating drone operations. “Experts told us this technology enables precision drone strikes against Ukrainian civilians, the types of attacks the United Nations has described as crimes against humanity,” Hunterbrook reporter Sam Koppelman told Torre. Pera, whose net worth is $36.3bn, owns 93% of Ubiquiti.

There is no evidence that Pera personally directed sales to Russia; there is no billionaire owner personally wiring drone coordinates from courtside seats. Ubiquiti has said it ceased direct sales to Russia in 2022. However, according to Hunterbrook, “dozens of exporters in countries like Turkey and Kazakhstan sprang up to take Ubiquiti’s place and continue the flow of Ubiquiti shipments to Russia”. There is no evidence to suggest that Ubiquiti violated US sanctions law, though the investigation raises questions about diversion through intermediary exporters. Ubiquiti, the NBA, and the Grizzlies have not responded to requests for comment from the Memphis Commercial Appeal following the report.

So there is no smoking gun. But it raises questions about how the league differentiates between right and wrong. How should we describe a league that regulates a player’s social media use while an owner’s multinational supply chain appears in Russia’s drone war?

It also raises questions for NBA fans. In the early 2000s, I used to go looking for photos of the violence my tax dollars were funding. I didn’t have a smartphone then – just a BlackBerry with a broken trackball that required surgical patience to scroll. So after work, still smelling faintly of Hexane, I’d stop at a Barnes & Noble with a kind of morbid curiosity I mistook for civic responsibility. I’d flip through Newsweek or Time, past the perfume ads and celebrity divorces, until I found the war. A flattened neighborhood in Baghdad. Concrete peeled back like skin. Exposed rebar protruding like bone. I would stare at the cratered streets and wonder if my widget was somewhere in the rubble. I often pushed the magazine into my pants and walked out with an empty promise to read it later. I still continued in my job that helped supply that war; I still watch the NBA now.

The Pera/Ubiquiti story is also a brutal litmus test for American media literacy and attention span. Dan Le Batard admitted to Torre that he feared no one would care because this topic is complicated, involves export controls and supply chains, and centers on a billionaire most fans can’t pick out of a lineup. It’s true. Torre hasn’t received the usual flood of podcast invites to unpack this subject. Nothing like the inbounds he got during the Kawhi Leonard saga. While that story had someone to crucify in real time, this one requires reading and research. It requires sitting with ambiguity. Not to mention the faraway violence of free market capitalism. That’s a lot to ask of a society pulverized by TikTok brainrot.

For example, Donald Sterling was easy to punish. Old white billionaire says racist thing on tape. You couldn’t ask for a better-drawn villain. But Pera is an obscure tech magnate whose company’s hardware appears in a war marked by drone strikes on civilians. That’s harder to metabolize between doom-scrolling and OnlyFans spending. We’ve become fluent in scandal and illiterate in systems. Or is it that systems are deliberately engineered to resist literacy?

That’s not the league’s failure alone. It’s ours to own. The complexity of the Hunterbrook report is exhausting. It feels like every day the public is asked to wade through files revealing the soft, white underbelly of America.

I return to the widget in my palm. How something so small could travel so far and become something so large once it left my hands. No one person sees the whole machine. I surely didn’t. While I would pose philosophical inquiries to sober myself, the questioning stopped once I clocked out. I went right back into the passive sleepwalk in between shifts.

Thinking about the global ramifications of one’s working life would drive anyone insane. Does Pera struggle with the same quandaries? Only magnified by billions? Would my moral clarity survive proximity to the kind of power I critique, or does it depend on the safety of distance? Even more difficult to answer: is my trying to analyze all this in a 1,000-word essay just another form of spectacle? Another trick power plays on the rest of us – keeping the have-nots arguing in public while the haves move quietly in private?

That’s how power works in the US. It hides inside things that look ordinary. The league can discipline a player in public because the “harm” is visible and super viral. But does it have the appetite to follow a product, a dollar, a signal, all the way to where the damage actually lands?