I think the main argument that it is theft, is that they contribute nothing to the continued surplus generated after their loan was repaid. So they effectively steal the profits like a parasite.
Why should they get ownership of the business? When you get a mortgage for your house, the bank doesn’t permanently own part of your house after you pay it off.
> Why should they get ownership of the business? When you get a mortgage for your house, the bank doesn’t permanently own part of your house after you pay it off.
Because the VCs are funding the startup on extremely favorable terms?
If the startup fails, the founders can just walk away. They are not personally liable for anything. They can (and often do) subsequently form another startup, often funded by the very same VCs who funded the one that just failed!
If, OTOH, you fail to pay your mortgage, the bank takes your house. And they make hard for you to get another mortgage from any bank by reporting the foreclosure to credit ratings agencies.
You absolutely can keep the equity (and surplus) for yourself… but you will need to personally guarantee the loan. You may need to declare bankruptcy if the startup fails, and all that entails.
VCs are happy to throw away money on 99 failed startups precisely because they are entitled to the continued surplus from 1 successful startup. Banks are happy to make failure to pay extremely unpleasant for you because they are not entitled to any surplus from business loans which lead to successful outcomes.
> VCs are happy to throw away money on 99 failed startups precisely because they are entitled to the continued surplus from 1 successful startup.
And why is this a good thing? I think the past decade and the current bubble point to this being a bug, not a feature. What I mean to say is that VCs seem far too eager to throw money at ventures with untenable business plans or that lack any edge over competing firms, which is a waste.
Ok, well, I personally really like driving a car with zero tailpipe emissions, and the cleaner air that comes from it (Tesla).
I think it’s awesome having a little rectangle in my pocket that sends text messages from anywhere on earth and summons an encyclopedia (Apple, Google, Starlink, Intel).
I enjoy talking to (and seeing) my friends and family while they are thousands of miles away (Cisco, Apple, and many others).
I think it is fantastic that we continue to find new labor-saving methods of farming so that fewer people need toil in the fields (the current batch of ag-drone and ag-AI startups).
This is like asking “well, why do we need that science mumbo jumbo anyhow?”
What do you mean "a bug"? A bug in what? If to someone it makes sense to pour money into an apparently non-viable business on the off chance that it succeeds, what exactly is it that you're saying is not functioning properly? The person's mind? So what do you want to do about it?
You're only reacting to a part of the system. You're starting from the axiom that businesses need a level of risky funding that only VCs will provide, and then congratulating VCs for swooping in and saving the day. But would it be possible to have a system where startups to require less funding? For example, by UBI, or normalizing bootstrapping?
Sorry, but your reply is so utterly disconnected from my question that I'm just going to assume you replied to me by mistake and ignore it. If it wasn't a mistake then you've completely missed the point.
You said this: "If to someone it makes sense to pour money into an apparently non-viable business on the off chance that it succeeds, what exactly is it that you're saying is not functioning properly?"
But this comment only makes sense when starting from a whole bunch of assumptions, which happen to be true right here and now, but are in no way universal.
Let me make a comparison: "If to someone it makes sense to carry a flamethrower to the grocery store to defend against thieves, what exactly is wrong with that?" What's wrong is a society where that kind of defense is necessary! We shouldn't be debating whether the individual should carry a flamethrower to the grocery store, we should be discussing how to improve society so they don't have to.
Also, rich people don't get to create a problem and also claim credit for solving it (with money).
>Let me make a comparison: Me: "People should be able to walk to work" You: "If someone can't walk 10 miles to work along the side of a road with cars whizzing by at 100mph, why should they be able to walk to work?"
Yeah, like I said, you completely missed the point of my comment. Here, let me fix the analogy for you:
A: The fact that people drive cars on roads is a bug, not a feature.
B: A bug where? Like, in people's minds for thinking that driving cars on roads is a practical mode of transportation?
C: People should be able to walk to work.
Do you see how C's reply to B is a non sequitur? It doesn't answer the question that was posed, it presents an irrelevant "should", and even if one is generous enough to grant that people should be able to walk to work, it doesn't make choosing to drive cars on roads for other purposes an irrational decision. And, and, it most certainly doesn't make it irrational in the world we actually live in.
EDIT:
>We shouldn't be debating whether the individual should carry a flamethrower to the grocery store, we should be discussing how to improve society so they don't have to.
I don't appreciate being told what is or isn't okay to talk about.
I'm sorry, but it is you who completely misses the point, and have so far failed to engage with your opponent's rhetoric on any meaningful level. (Using latin words like sequitur does not count!)
To borrow your analogy: there is, in fact, major issue in people driving cars on roads. This is why many cities elect to reduce car use by means of policy. This is accomplished because there's a dialectic where "should" translates into "must." It's called governance.
>so far failed to engage with your opponent's rhetoric on any meaningful level.
I have not failed to do it, I have chosen not to do it. I asked a specific question and received as an answer something that's totally irrelevant. I am decidedly not interested in whether "it would be possible to have a system where startups to require less funding, for example, by UBI, or normalizing bootstrapping". It has nothing to do with my original comment, and I'm not going to engage with it.
What if we created a system where startups didn't require as much funding? Is the system set up in such a funding-intensive way in order to benefit VCs, who can swoop in and save the day? If so, rich people don't get any credit for solving a problem rich people created.
For one, in a mortgage the loan is secured by the house. But more importantly: you can get simple loans for startups too! Banks provide loans that are personally guaranteed (ie if the business goes under the founder is still on the hook). But if you want more money or something that is limited in liability then your pool of people willing to give money is much smaller and they usually want a stake in the business as a condition.
The opposite argument would be that the default should behave like the house then, so ownership should switch over to the person providing the loan entirely - instead of passing on part ownership forever.
But that's obviously less desirable to the person providing the money, and they've obviously got all the cards... Hence the argument of this post.
I wouldn't call it evil myself, unless I wanted to classify capitalism as evil in it's entirety - which would feel disingenuous to me, considering the alternatives were always worse in hindsight.
You aren’t thinking this through. If a startup defaults, it is because they have no money left (which is because they do not have a viable business yet). So there is nothing of value to repossess.
This is the same reason the bank asks for an independent valuation of a house (and requires the buyer to maintain insurance) before releasing the money to pay for it: The value of the collateral needs to plausibly match the value of the loan, so that the value of the loan can be recovered in case of default.
The only way this works is for the founder to personally guarantee the loan. Which means the founder needs to have sufficient personal assets to keep the bank happy. It also means the founder risks personal bankruptcy if those assets are not enough to cover the loan if the startup defaults.
The company will have some value left on default. E.g if it's a software company it will have the IP for the software etc pp
Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk with the loan is another story and thus I could now quote my previous comment in its entirety
Failed startups don’t have value left at the end. They go until they run out of money. Then they liquidate the office furniture to make the last payroll. Sometimes they don’t wrap up early enough and the founder and board members are personally liable for it.
Nobody wants to buy the custom software needed to run “The pets.com for GenAI” because it would be cheaper to start from scratch than to understand the codebase and make it do what you want.
Companies like 23-and-me that accumulate valuable data while going bankrupt are the rare exception… but banks/VCs do not know a-priori which ones will be that exception! If they did, they just wouldn’t make the bad loans in the first place!
> Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk
Well, but it clearly isn’t, right? So everything else you wrote is sort of irrelevant.
I mean, why don’t you lend a startup $1000 on the condition they pay you back $1500 in two years[1] if they succeed and nothing if they fail? Pass the hat around your neighborhood and I bet you could fund a few real startups!
Except that.. oh.. when it’s your money on the line, suddenly you realize those are very stupid terms. You lose the whole $1000 90% of the time, break even 5% of the time and make a +$500 profit 5% of the time. The math isn’t mathing here.
So you’ll want to very carefully vet the founders and their plan. Be very picky about who you fund. Maybe you’ll ask them to personally guarantee some fraction of the loan. Suddenly, your highly moral terms look exactly like the business loans that approximately 0% of startups use because VCs offer them a better deal.
[1] Any more than that would be usury, which is immoral, right?
I think the main problem is that investors are investing in the wrong thing. They invest because they believe they can make a return, not because they think a valuable product will be made.
There's a subtle difference and it shows by how we even see wealth. We associate wealth with utility to society. That is, after all, why we create economies. We want to reward those who make society better.
But that's where there's been a disconnect. We figured out we could make money without pushing society forward. We'd historically refer to those people by different names... worse than that, we are focused on the short term. Silicon Valley has perfected the hype cycle. You get in cheap, pump up the price, sell, and do it all over again. It does not matter if it is vaporware, it matters that you can make a profit.
The problem is alignment. The economy is not aligned with its intentions.
Do we see much innovation these days? Is there even an incentive? No doubt there's innovation, but people are claiming it is accelerating. I'm unconvinced we're innovating faster than we did in the 90's. That decade changed society more than the 00's and 10's, even with the advent of the smartphone.
Unlike the author, I'm actually in favor of capitalism, yet I firmly believe that an economy still needs to by well regulated. There's very few economists who believe such regulation does not need to exist (we listen to partisans more than actual economists), and I've found even the most staunch free-market believers (often not actual economists) will have concessions. It's no secret that an unregulated market is not a free market. An unregulated market is a market regulated by the largest entities of the market.
It is probably no surprise that those who cannot think long term are unable to realize that the rise in popularity of socialism is due to the abuse of capitalism. Most people do not have a strong foundation in economics (why should they! They're spending years learning other skills than years reading textbooks, analyzing, and going to school). But people do know our system isn't working. Is it really more cost effective to build bunkers and buy private islands than it is to make the lives of the people better? I doubt it. But that's the same myopia I've discussed in my entire comment. The problem is how myopic we've become
For me, when you start to lobby, when you explicitly pay people to pass laws in your favour, that's when you cross a line. You go from playing within the rules of the system to making up rules that favour you, and it's wild that it's legal much less acceptable for corporations to do that.
While I agree it is unfair and it would be better if they didn’t, the reality is that there is a meta-game at a higher level and they are playing according to the meta-game rules. Part of the meta-game is to convince others to stay in the regular game sandbox which gives rise to the hypocrisy we are all familiar with. I don’t know what it would take to diminish the meta-gaming let alone eliminate it, it’s very hard to stop things that are very profitable. I also think we’re in the looting phase of corporatocracy. I think the result of this means the meta-gaming rapidly grows like a cancer to take over everything.
Imagine for a second that any time you borrowed money to buy something, like a home or a car, you paid that back not by actually paying the loan plus interest, but by a % garnishment of your lifetime wages. That is what equity capital is like.
Obviously, nobody would take that kind of deal. But what if regular loans were just flat out not made available to you? Like, if tomorrow, banks as a class individually decided they would only accept payment in this sort of lifetime wage equity. Then it's not really a choice anymore. One of the options has been taken away from you. If I take a fair deal and have one of the counterparties flat out remove some of the negotiating options - even if they were not the ones taken - is it still a fair deal?
In other words, the argument that fair exchange has been violated is based on the idea that market power can be a form of coercion. If you don't agree, then you can argue that every possible counterparty deciding to only offer you a bad deal is perfectly acceptable and non-coercive. "Natural shorts[0] are not coercion", in other words. But why stop there? I mean, even in outright theft, where I'm holding a literal gun to your head and demanding payment, you could still choose to eat lead. We can redefine theft and coercion down to excuse any behavior we want on libertarian terms. The tautology is not with the argument, it's with fair exchange itself.
[0] As in, "thing you need to exist". You have a natural short position in food, drink, and shelter.
> Imagine for a second that any time you borrowed money to buy something, like a home or a car, you paid that back not by actually paying the loan plus interest, but by a % garnishment of your lifetime wages. That is what equity capital is like.
Weird analogy. It's more like "what if you borrowed money to buy something, didn't have to return it, but if you made money with that thing, you give the lender a cut, forever".
Because the point is: it's not a loan, you don't have to pay it back, and you're not on the hook for it if things go wrong. That's the big upside and why lots of people do that instead of getting a loan. Because loans are available, but people don't want that risk and are willing to give up some of their ownership to avoid it.
The article is clearly written from a bit of a Marxian perspective and I think there's a lot assumed ... presuppositions about exploitation and value theory.
So yeah, even though on first skim I think I agree with the thrust of this article, I think you're right it's poorly defended, assuming it's at all for an audience outside of people who already think this way.
I haven't read Marx since I left college, but in my remembering the only thing that is "theft" in the capital is the initial accumulation. There is no idea that any form of ownership beside that is theft (I don't believe there is any notion of "evil" either.) To be honest, you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting. Marx is like those ancient greek phylosophers and classical scientists who are "quoted" more often than read.
One could probably say that the privatisation of human communication is a form of "initial accumulation", or maybe just another step toward appropriation of culture, but that's apparently not the angle that the author decided to explore (can't be sure, I couldn't do better than skim that text which looked wrong in too many ways).
Marx’s writing predates the US civil war. When you “own” someone and then “own” their labor the fruits of that labor aren’t yours any more than the person. By that reasoning, if you then use the fruits of that labor to buy a house it’s a stolen house.
"you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting"
Oh, ok. Anyways.
First section of Capital Vol I is all about "surplus value" and exploitation, with a heavy dose of the labour theory of value. It has nothing to do with "initial accumulation" at all, it's about ongoing extraction of surplus value in production, and no, Marx doesn't call it "theft" -- he calls it "exploitation" (which to him is actually somewhat of a value neutral world describing a technical process, actually).
Whether it's a defensible position in economics or philosophy is a whole other discussion. There's nuance.
As the other person who responded to me wrote, I might have misunderstood your comment. I believed that you associated the idea that "property is theft" with Marx, and that's this association that I wanted to warn against.
Marxism is back in vogue again. I guess people have tried reviving Naziism/fascism so now they’ve got to try reviving the other failed early 20th century totalistic political ideology.
I get that the status quo has huge issues, but can we have some new ideas maybe instead of continuing to try to revive late 19th century ones that have repeatedly and disastrously failed?
Certainly, to get new ideas it's better to start from a good knowledge of past ideas? If we had thrown an anathema on physics each time a rocket blowed up, nobody would have ever landed on the moon :)
> the other failed early 20th century totalistic political ideology.
I'm not sure how to square this statement with reality. Which countries were Marxist? The obvious "communist"/"socialist" country was the USSR, but it was Leninist/Stalinist.
As a person with Marxian leanings I can tell you it's not "back in vogue" in fact in both academia and general populace actual Marxist theory has probably never been less vibrant or popular?
Maybe some people get that impression because they've conflated "Marxism" with general socialist urges or even cultural "left" wing identity politics, but that in fact is proof exactly of the opposite. It's never been more heretical to advocate for wealth redistribution or dismantling or restricting parts of the capitalist market, even in the context of a total ecological crisis brought on by industrial production and exponential growth.
It's not even on the table of discussion in any western country, so I am not sure where you fear comes from. That a claim like this could be made shows me exactly how far to the right we've drifted since e.g. the 60s. That someone like Mamdani could be smeared or red-baited as a "Marxist" for advocating for rent control is hilarious really.
(But frankly I'm not here to debate the merits or get into a drive-by debate with your half-formed opinions, nor was that the aim or thrust of what my comment above was about.)
Nothing is ever going to be completely equal in society. Innovation is driven by labor being capital (thus profit), or by influence (state backed stuff loses money in exchange for influence). I have a right to make money with resources at my disposal. Taxes are exchanged for the privileges of citizenship, and hopefully, someday, the ability to not get screwed by insurance.
Correct me if I am wrong, I am open to ideas. My knowledge of economics is all from social studies class, my brother almost dying because insurance at first denied to pay for his surgery, and making money from yard work and fixing electronics because I am not old enough to get a legit job. I have never paid taxes, but I somewhat understand disdain towards taxation in an age where the cost of living is as high as it is relative to the amount of money one is capable of making.
Property is the only way that we can build complex things.
We couldn't have airplanes if property didn't exist. Anyone could just walk away with parts off the airplane if they felt like it. And in fact that's exactly what happens if you leave an airplane unprotected for too long.
Hydroelectric dams would be impossible. You couldn't even have light bulbs or computers because their production methods require so much coordinated effort as well as protection from theft and damage.
Without property, all you'd have are bands of foragers because without the ability to control access, any group efforts could be undone overnight by anyone.
I wasn't talking about about stuff you can walk off with, nor was the article author, nor was Proudhon in 1840. This is about the difference between owning things made my people versus owning people who make things.
Used to be that the people themselves were property, then it was the machines they used, now it's some abstraction related to shares and companies, but it's all the same: what you're doing belongs to me not because I bought it from you but because of something to do with my position in society as it relates to yours.
> Property is the only way that we can build complex things.
This assertion needs to be substantiated, even if it is true. You give an example of how property "allows us to build complex things", but you don't prove that it's impossible for any other system of ownership or of mediating access to resources/"things" to allow that.
> but you don't prove that it's impossible for any other system of ownership or of mediating access to resources/"things" to allow that.
You can’t prove a negative, so the onus is actually on you to show an example of a working alternative that does not rely on property.
And it has been tried in the 20th century. Several times, in fact. Despite all the industrial espionage committed by the Soviet Union (which saved them the resources to do the research themselves) and the slave labor of people who spoke or wrote about the “wrong” ideas (which surplus was given to the rest of the population), ordinary people in the USSR had much worse lives than those in the West.
Yes, it did[1]! Because they rather quickly discovered that you can’t build complex things without it. Which brings us back round to the original point!
[1] But… they did make a go of it without property before discovering that it wouldn’t work. It turns out (shockingly!) that indentured serfs (who make the food) like the idea of land reform when it means they own the land. But they don’t like it so much when it means nobody owns the land. And when they are not happy then you have no food. And then those quotes about “x meals until y” start to have some salience. And then you start to think about the most effective way to use the number of bullets you have on hand (which is smaller than the number of mouths you need to feed).
Fine. It's the only way we know of that unlocks the potential of building complex things. If you know of an alternative that is better, please tell us!
Please look up the difference between private property and personal property. When people decry "property is theft", they're not talking about personal property, they're talking about private property.
Also, socialist states with advanced economies built airplanes, hydroelectric dams and all kinds of complex things. This is a joke of an argument. Say what you will about the living conditions, fairness, corruption or other issues with socialist states, but to pretend they "didn't build complex things" is ridiculous when you look up the number of scientific achievements made first by the USSR.
The person who coined the "Property is theft" quote (Proudhon if I recall) clearly made a distinction between capital-p Property and personal possession. And I think most regular people do, too.
I don't necessarily think of my stocks and bonds in my retirement funds in the same category as my toothbrush, suit jacket, or even my house or garden or whatever.
Classical liberalism and its descendants want to blur the distinction between the two. And you're welcome to adopt that view. But you shouldn't assume there aren't legitimate challenges to that point of view.
Proudhon himself wasn't terrible coherent. Marx I think clarified the distinction between dominance and control of capital and production vs personal private property better.
From a certain perspective, capitalism has been the process of enclosing things that were once common, or could be common, into "private" property. And despite the rhetoric of free exchange and liberty, it has mainly done this by force and coercion since the acts of enclosure and the age of colonialism until now.
My 6 acres of "private property" that my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago. What does that do its status -- and to me -- now?
> my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago.
This argument can be used for practically any piece of earth, it's nonsensical to fixate on it.
The issue has always been that capital (and it's quiet sibling power) can compound itself endlessly absent any checks against it. Societal unification against power and wealth consolidation should be the same as it would be against a plague or cancer in a body.
If you're trying to argue "Group X should own it instead of Group Y" then you're right - there is no good argument to fix any particular Group X - there's only special pleading. Why should it be the group who controlled it in 1600 AD, not the group who controlled it in 1600 BC or the group who controls it right now?
But there are other philosophies that don't have this problem. Philosophies where there's no notion of ownership at all, or ownership is by the entirety of humanity/the world (which makes it meaningless), and one person can only borrow something for an extended period of time. This is how a lot of native peoples viewed land, which makes sense since it cannot be created or destroyed. Or philosophies where, for example, all humans collectively own all land and houses, but it's very practical to uniquely assign one human to each house, but there's nothing special about that connection, and it doesn't give the rights to, say, hold that object hostage for money. (This is how socialists view toothbrushes, I'm told.)
I'm not fixating on it really. My point is just that classical liberal arguments about free exchange and the market and property don't hold up to historical scrutiny.
My point is you can't form an ethical framework around property as intrinsic right because really property is less "theft" than it is power, so you end up at the end of the argument having to actually defend might makes right as your world view. (Which is why I see the logical end point of radical libertarianism as being a kind of fascism.)
Capitalism is an incredibly efficient machine. All that is solid melts, etc. etc. It is beautiful in its own way. I agree about the compounding. I suspect we mostly agree generally.
> My point is you can't form an ethical framework around property as intrinsic right because really property is less "theft" than it is power, so you end up at the end of the argument having to actually defend might makes right as your world view.
Personally, I'm thinking the whole point of libertarianism is to obscure a genuine belief that might makes right on behalf of some people who have a lot of might, and sell it to a bunch of rubes.
> (Which is why I see the logical end point of radical libertarianism as being a kind of fascism.)
That's especially clear with things like "anarcho-capitalism," where it's obvious that the kind of social relationships its proponents go on and on about at book-length are impossibly unstable and wouldn't last a nonosecond before decaying into something like feudalism.
Efficiency is the path to cybernetic issues of control and eventually the functional takeover from the processual, ie biology. Imposing function on evolution eventually embeds maladaption that is fatal to the species.
After thinking about this problem for a while, I think that there is a potential for someone to make a nonprofit software company for the public good. And yet it would still pay high developer salaries.
This article oversimplifies things...and then comes to some bold conclusions. It helps to look at different perspectives, rather than looking at everything through an ideological lens. I guess thats the age we live in, unfortunately.
What is the ideological lens that characterizes our society? Greed.
The individual owes nothing to society: no limit to what I can own. Society owes nothing to me: my share of the wealth is my own fault. Might makes right. A deal is fair regardless of the terms: a deal
is a deal. Workers don’t deserve a vote: they agreed to their servitude.
This seems like a throw back in time - as if one of the Communist propaganda arms of Eastern Europe wrote it. This article doesn’t understand tech or modern evil. It just spews worker vs equity owner arguments.
Any engineer today could start their own business. They could instantly become equity owners. Especially with AI. Many giants paid salaries and equity packages to the best, to keep them from starting competition.
En engineer can also leave a tech giant and in California, unlike NY, non-competes don’t apply. Tech work scales infinitely - so you can make a product for millions of users with your own two hands, unlike manual labor workers, who are limited by physics.
The evil not recognized is when the scalability of tech and AI is used to create and power up addictions that drain human brains, instead of giving them bycicles of the mind. Leaches on the brain. Industries where you can do well by the customers but you make a LOT more money if you do badly by them: Advertising (pumping ad impressions by refreshing pages, putting ads under common buttons to create unintended clicks that charge small businesses dollars per click, not delivering traffic or real audiences and making the small business pay even more thinking it’s their fault). Making gambling and games with horrible dark patter dynamics that wake users at night and expose them to chronic sleep depravation and wallet draining just to keep them addicted or with some status or in some league.
If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource - think about how much of it is killed by true evil. VC funding won’t be needed when AI is used to build things without the need for much funding anymore. What truly matters is not building evil things.
>If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource
But it's not, though. Human brain time (just in general, with no additional conditions) is pretty worthless, that's why people piss it away in idle activities. Just look at services like Mechanical Turk. The so-called attention economy is not about the attention itself. It's about getting the brains that give the attention to spend money.
The brains are being skewed with the content making fears disproportionate to reality and raising anxiety which disables rational thought and constructive activity.
That's simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. Optimistic because it assumes that someone, say, replying to a comment on Hacker News, is doing that instead of something incredibly constructive. Pessimistic because it also assumes that those negative emotions necessarily impact the person once the activity finishes. While that may be the case for some dysfunctional individuals, most people will not be compelled to quit their job and bunker themselves up in their room after reading a Reddit post.
As a democratic socialist, I find this article fails to back its claim that equity is theft. Workers at startups get equity; this is why they work so hard. Would a worker cooperative be better? Possibly, but there is little incentive for the person with the capital to risk their wealth if they don't get a stake that is commensurate to the risk they are taking. I think if anything, startups are a massive improvement over public corporations because they regularly provide a means for a talented person with no capital to become an owner. If I were to critique capitalism, I would hardly start with a startup, which is the closest thing we have to a worker cooperative. I would go after private equity, which is perhaps the most evil of all of capitalism in its various forms, the equivalent of a blood sucking creature straight out of the D&D Monster Manual.
Excellent, but was thinking more of a Cloaker, Soulleecher, or Succubus. These creatures seem safe/helpful or innocent, but then attack, draining your life force and leave you as a discarded husk.
Not really sure what he is but this comes immediately to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strahd_von_Zarovich
"He is a malignant narcissist trapped by his malignant narcissism – forever alone, forever feared and unable to change. Salvation is beyond him. He is framed as inhumanity personified, often serving as a cautionary tale: once you lose your humanity, you can never get it back."
Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company.
I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then.
I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then.
That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a very different creature, and lumping it in with them, seems like a cheap grab for Apple-haters.
The article is about the evils of capitalist profit maximization. I don’t see how Apple is any better there. If anything, they are the masters of profit maximization.
I’m not an Apple “hater” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I use their products more than Google’s or Meta’s. But I don’t like the trajectory they’ve been going down for the past decade or so, and the arguments made by the article fully apply to them.
That doesn’t change the fact that the context was inappropriate.
I completely agree with most of the stuff in the article, and even that I’m quite unhappy about Apple’s trajectory, recently.
But I still believe that looping in irrelevant data, poisons the dataset.
Either the article should expand its scope, or it shouldn’t include older SV companies into its dataset. Salesforce, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, Oracle, etc. have many of the same attributes as Apple (even worse, in some cases).
A fairly typical thing that some folks like to do, is attach unpopular people to their targets. It energizes people that might not otherwise care.
This is basically saying wage labor is theft, nothing to do with silicon valley as such
Comically though, it's also self-refuting, since it leads with how voluntary exchange of something for money is ok, even if someone gets a bad deal. Buy, you see, if you voluntarily exchange your labor for money - creating that something (notably your employer is not interested in your labor especially in the case of the startup, only that you give them the product); and then your counterparty voluntarily exchanges that product for somewhat more money with someone else, that is now theft, and also evil.
This is just propaganda. Collectivism is evil, startups are fine.
It's like accusing a pig of being a pig. Pig gonna do what pig does. What DOESN'T work is legally-enforced "norms" that we the people decide everyone has to follow.
Businesses are "people" now, according to the US Supreme Court, so it's our job to make them face consequences if they refuse to behave like actual "humans" bound by laws. But it's only if we elect representatives who are not corrupt grifters.
I think so. People will behave in the guardrails they are provided. If we have a problem with those rails, then in the US at least, democracy is (ostensibly maybe) the tool to make them more aligned with what we want.
I think we just need to get rid of corporate personhood. If you want to do something big, you need to have skin in the game. Criminal prosecution for corporate action taken under your purview should be more common. If you can't handle the heat, just come watch TV with the rest of us plebs.
i ask "what details does the piece offer about how to make the proposed
alternative happen?"
===
i'm told "Almost none.
The only concrete mechanisms mentioned are:
Founding worker-owned cooperatives instead of equity-based startups.
Raising capital as loans rather than selling equity.
“Creative ways to solve the political problem of capitalists’ monopoly on capital.” This is referenced but not elaborated.
No operational steps, no policy proposals, no institutional models, no financing frameworks, no examples of working co-op ecosystems, no strategy for scaling co-ops, and no plan to change investor incentives."
===
Dear author, please come back with more specific recommendations. I'm curious what you think early stage startup founders and funders should be doing instead of what they're currently doing. I think you want founders and funders to effectively make massively unilateral economic concessions to early employees, since they are "labor". And then you want those early employees to in turn make massive unilateral concessions to later employees because those are "labor" too.
But what about the rest of labor in society?
Why not instead have massive tax rates on the gains, so that all of society's labor can get in on the fruits, rather than the startups relatively few employees?
Just like their predecessors: Big Tobacco, Big Fossil, Big Tech.
The Playbook is always the same: Run global Propaganda (ads/PR), while behind the public's back extract the capital from the general public into the private hands of a select few and "socialise" the costs (health, mental-health, polarisation, extremism, populism, ...) to the state (taxpayer).
Basically: screwing the public and letting them pay the bill, but hidden by X-layers of obfuscation.
PS: Of course all the SV hipster boys and wanna-be billionaires (do you still believe you will make it?) downvote this. Well, let "that sink in" as your poster boy would say.
From the article:
> And I’m talking to you now, fellow workers of the Valley! If you really want to do no evil, to be good, disrupt the status quo and make the world a better place, then don’t create a capitalist firm: it’s a top-down dictatorship, where the dictators steal the money. There’s nothing progressive about this kind of social institution. Founding such a startup is deeply unethical, represents institutionalised theft, and is a prime cause of diverse social ills.
The argument that profit equals theft as a fundamental misunderstanding of system mechanics. The article relies on the outdated notion that labor is the sole input for value, ignoring the critical function of capital as fuel for risk. Investors and founders absorb the high probability of total system failure, which allows employees to receive guaranteed, low-latency salaries regardless of the product's success. If workers wanted the full residual profit, they would need to accept the full downside risk, including working for zero pay until revenue stabilizes.
The preference for traditional corporate structures over cooperatives is not a conspiracy but an optimization for speed and scalability. Centralized decision-making allows startups to pivot rapidly in competitive markets, whereas committee-based governance often introduces fatal latency. Furthermore, employment is a voluntary exchange where engineers trade skills for compensation, often including equity to align incentives. Labeling this voluntary cooperation as "evil" ignores that this model has driven the greatest reduction in information costs in history. We are not victims of a theft-based institution but participants in a high-performance engine that rewards efficiency and problem-solving.
I'm not sure this is allowed to be posted here, on the discussion forums of a Silicon Valley startup incubator. I don't think Y Combinator likes being called evil.
At the end of the day I don't think Silicon Valley represents anything fundamentally different from the world at large. The world is unfair, and it may become even less fair.
What is disturbing is how the hype-machine around "startups" and the unicorn myth encourages people to believe they can be the next big thing. But basic arithmetic makes that impossible: you can't have an abundance of unicorns when the attention economy, capital, and market share are structurally limited.
Silicon Valley is different in my mind because, well, back in the 1970's, it was arguably not evil.
Woz and the nerds were making machines at home, later hooking them up to one another with the janky telephone service as the interconnect. And this kid, just getting a taste of BBSs in Kansas in the mid 1980's, was so envious of the outrageous number of BBSs in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose…—all strange names to me. But I saw that they were all in California.
When a job offer got me to move out to the Bay Area in the early 90's there was still a kind of soft echo of those times. Plenty of electronics recycling warehouses you could wander through (and recognizing some of the same faces, often older men, as you moved through your morning circuit to the next warehouse). Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, etc.
I had a career there, raised a family there. I watched the dot-com boom/bust, the rise of the internet, Google, and the slow decline of the hardware focus of "The Valley".
When the last of my daughters left the nest, the wife and I sold the house and I retired back to the Midwaste where the two of us grew up. Weird Stuff Warehouse had recently closed up shop and that seems now as fitting a time as any to have said goodbye to The Valley.
I conjecture that what you're describing was deeply tied to the size, quality, and spirit of that original community (and consumers). A relatively small cluster of tinkerers, shared physical spaces, and a sense of discovery created a moral atmosphere very different from today's massive global tech hub shaped by billions in capital.
To put the scale shift in perspective: Apple sold only a couple of million Apple IIs in that entire era. Today, the iPhone sits in the multi-billion range since 2007. Once a technology ecosystem expands by three orders of magnitude, its culture cannot remain the same.
The early Valley wasn’t "good" in an absolute sense, it was simply relatively small, intimate, and guided by shared values. As growth, global competition, and finances took over, the culture changed in ways that were probably inevitable.
All that is different is that you and I have had bargaining power and scarcity far far beyond the average skilled worker.
That bargaining power came from our ability to surf the crest of the wave that was over and over crashing through existing industries, turning them on their head with the promise and practice of automating via computation. In many cases deskilling the jobs of other workers.
We could play the part of magicians who knew these arcane arts and get paid accordingly.
There is precisely zero guarantee that any of this will continue. In the latest wave it seems like it is we ourselves who are being submerged beneath the wave.
People have a tendency to think they're special, that they won't (or will) be the outlier. Gambling, unprotected sex, etc. We're not great at risk evaluation/comparison.
But hey, without this, our public schools wouldn't get funding from lottery tickets! So I'm forced to conclude it's a good thing.
The lottery paying for schooling is a clever self-defeating policy because it moves the tax-burden to the same people who would most benefit from a good public school system.
It is not your main point, I know - but for everyone I know who buys lottery tickets, they're more thought of as an entertainment purchase than a financial purchase.
I've heard this argument before about casinos, but never lottery tickets. I'm not sure I personally buy that, but let's go with it.
If they're entertaining, then presumably it's from the thrill of maybe winning. Why would winning be thrilling? Why, because you get money- potentially a life-changing amount of it. If they made a lotto game with a maximum payout of a dollar I'm reasonably certain nobody would play it. Or hell, anyone could write down a series of heads/tails on a paper and then flip a coin to see if they're a winner! Yet, we don't see that, even though it's free and (I would argue) has the same entertainment value.
So yeah, I'm sure entertainment is the facade, but underneath it all, it's financially motivated for the vast majority.
Might tell us more about the people you know than the typical lottery ticket purchaser?
(Or perhaps they're when they tell you it is "for entertainment" they're entertaining fantasies of winning—which is probably what you can say for a lot of people buying lottery tickets.)
True, people consistently overestimate their chances of being the exception. But in parallel, I think we also lack hype around the opposite direction: learning to live with less, intentionally and intelligently.
I'm not talking about UBI or forced austerity, but about developing smarter ways to live frugally without feeling deprived. That mindset would relieve a lot of the pressure that the "you must win the startup lottery" narrative creates.
That's antithetical to capitalism and consumerism. Not to mention human nature. While I agree with you in principle, I don't know how one would even start to effect any change here at a societal level. Especially when it's impossible to not be bombarded with marketing from people who are extremely good at using your emotions against you here.
Well, I suppose I do know of one. Mindfulness training I think has been shown to help with this, but that's still at a very personal level.
"Christ's teachings" (well, many religions in general) should also have that effect? (I'm an atheist though, so what do I know. Some of my best takeaways from the Second Testament though are that we should be kind, content…)
Capitalism or consumerism don't define human nature. Human behaviour existed long before those systems, and it will exist long after them.
What has changed, and this is where I agree with your point about difficulty, is the scale and precision of behavioural manipulation. We've never had a period where advertising, content, and emotional triggers were personalized with such speed and accuracy. Tobacco harmed the body, today's hyper-personalized content ecosystems can easily harm attention, mood regulation, and overall mental health.
So yes, it's hard to shift things at a societal level when the environment is engineered to keep people reactive.
On mindfulness: in its modern form it's often packaged as another consumer product, but its roots, like those of yoga, Zen, and other contemplative traditions, come from outside capitalist logic. The original practices were tools for resisting impulse and cultivating awareness, not selling calmness subscriptions.
At the heart of this article is the claim that buying equity is a form of theft.
That is an extreme claim (in the sense of surprising, remarkable, unusual, and one that needs a lot more support than ordinary claims).
It is inadequately defended here. The argument that it violates fair exchange is tautological.
I think the main argument that it is theft, is that they contribute nothing to the continued surplus generated after their loan was repaid. So they effectively steal the profits like a parasite.
Why should they get ownership of the business? When you get a mortgage for your house, the bank doesn’t permanently own part of your house after you pay it off.
> Why should they get ownership of the business? When you get a mortgage for your house, the bank doesn’t permanently own part of your house after you pay it off.
Because the VCs are funding the startup on extremely favorable terms?
If the startup fails, the founders can just walk away. They are not personally liable for anything. They can (and often do) subsequently form another startup, often funded by the very same VCs who funded the one that just failed!
If, OTOH, you fail to pay your mortgage, the bank takes your house. And they make hard for you to get another mortgage from any bank by reporting the foreclosure to credit ratings agencies.
You absolutely can keep the equity (and surplus) for yourself… but you will need to personally guarantee the loan. You may need to declare bankruptcy if the startup fails, and all that entails.
VCs are happy to throw away money on 99 failed startups precisely because they are entitled to the continued surplus from 1 successful startup. Banks are happy to make failure to pay extremely unpleasant for you because they are not entitled to any surplus from business loans which lead to successful outcomes.
> VCs are happy to throw away money on 99 failed startups precisely because they are entitled to the continued surplus from 1 successful startup.
And why is this a good thing? I think the past decade and the current bubble point to this being a bug, not a feature. What I mean to say is that VCs seem far too eager to throw money at ventures with untenable business plans or that lack any edge over competing firms, which is a waste.
> And why is this a good thing?
Ok, well, I personally really like driving a car with zero tailpipe emissions, and the cleaner air that comes from it (Tesla).
I think it’s awesome having a little rectangle in my pocket that sends text messages from anywhere on earth and summons an encyclopedia (Apple, Google, Starlink, Intel).
I enjoy talking to (and seeing) my friends and family while they are thousands of miles away (Cisco, Apple, and many others).
I think it is fantastic that we continue to find new labor-saving methods of farming so that fewer people need toil in the fields (the current batch of ag-drone and ag-AI startups).
This is like asking “well, why do we need that science mumbo jumbo anyhow?”
What do you mean "a bug"? A bug in what? If to someone it makes sense to pour money into an apparently non-viable business on the off chance that it succeeds, what exactly is it that you're saying is not functioning properly? The person's mind? So what do you want to do about it?
You're only reacting to a part of the system. You're starting from the axiom that businesses need a level of risky funding that only VCs will provide, and then congratulating VCs for swooping in and saving the day. But would it be possible to have a system where startups to require less funding? For example, by UBI, or normalizing bootstrapping?
Sorry, but your reply is so utterly disconnected from my question that I'm just going to assume you replied to me by mistake and ignore it. If it wasn't a mistake then you've completely missed the point.
You said this: "If to someone it makes sense to pour money into an apparently non-viable business on the off chance that it succeeds, what exactly is it that you're saying is not functioning properly?"
But this comment only makes sense when starting from a whole bunch of assumptions, which happen to be true right here and now, but are in no way universal.
Let me make a comparison: "If to someone it makes sense to carry a flamethrower to the grocery store to defend against thieves, what exactly is wrong with that?" What's wrong is a society where that kind of defense is necessary! We shouldn't be debating whether the individual should carry a flamethrower to the grocery store, we should be discussing how to improve society so they don't have to.
Also, rich people don't get to create a problem and also claim credit for solving it (with money).
Edit: much better analogy.
>Let me make a comparison: Me: "People should be able to walk to work" You: "If someone can't walk 10 miles to work along the side of a road with cars whizzing by at 100mph, why should they be able to walk to work?"
Yeah, like I said, you completely missed the point of my comment. Here, let me fix the analogy for you:
A: The fact that people drive cars on roads is a bug, not a feature.
B: A bug where? Like, in people's minds for thinking that driving cars on roads is a practical mode of transportation?
C: People should be able to walk to work.
Do you see how C's reply to B is a non sequitur? It doesn't answer the question that was posed, it presents an irrelevant "should", and even if one is generous enough to grant that people should be able to walk to work, it doesn't make choosing to drive cars on roads for other purposes an irrational decision. And, and, it most certainly doesn't make it irrational in the world we actually live in.
EDIT:
>We shouldn't be debating whether the individual should carry a flamethrower to the grocery store, we should be discussing how to improve society so they don't have to.
I don't appreciate being told what is or isn't okay to talk about.
I'm sorry, but it is you who completely misses the point, and have so far failed to engage with your opponent's rhetoric on any meaningful level. (Using latin words like sequitur does not count!)
To borrow your analogy: there is, in fact, major issue in people driving cars on roads. This is why many cities elect to reduce car use by means of policy. This is accomplished because there's a dialectic where "should" translates into "must." It's called governance.
>so far failed to engage with your opponent's rhetoric on any meaningful level.
I have not failed to do it, I have chosen not to do it. I asked a specific question and received as an answer something that's totally irrelevant. I am decidedly not interested in whether "it would be possible to have a system where startups to require less funding, for example, by UBI, or normalizing bootstrapping". It has nothing to do with my original comment, and I'm not going to engage with it.
What if we created a system where startups didn't require as much funding? Is the system set up in such a funding-intensive way in order to benefit VCs, who can swoop in and save the day? If so, rich people don't get any credit for solving a problem rich people created.
For one, in a mortgage the loan is secured by the house. But more importantly: you can get simple loans for startups too! Banks provide loans that are personally guaranteed (ie if the business goes under the founder is still on the hook). But if you want more money or something that is limited in liability then your pool of people willing to give money is much smaller and they usually want a stake in the business as a condition.
The opposite argument would be that the default should behave like the house then, so ownership should switch over to the person providing the loan entirely - instead of passing on part ownership forever.
But that's obviously less desirable to the person providing the money, and they've obviously got all the cards... Hence the argument of this post.
I wouldn't call it evil myself, unless I wanted to classify capitalism as evil in it's entirety - which would feel disingenuous to me, considering the alternatives were always worse in hindsight.
You aren’t thinking this through. If a startup defaults, it is because they have no money left (which is because they do not have a viable business yet). So there is nothing of value to repossess.
This is the same reason the bank asks for an independent valuation of a house (and requires the buyer to maintain insurance) before releasing the money to pay for it: The value of the collateral needs to plausibly match the value of the loan, so that the value of the loan can be recovered in case of default.
The only way this works is for the founder to personally guarantee the loan. Which means the founder needs to have sufficient personal assets to keep the bank happy. It also means the founder risks personal bankruptcy if those assets are not enough to cover the loan if the startup defaults.
Naw, you're making a claim that's just not true.
The company will have some value left on default. E.g if it's a software company it will have the IP for the software etc pp
Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk with the loan is another story and thus I could now quote my previous comment in its entirety
Meanwhile, back here in reality…
Failed startups don’t have value left at the end. They go until they run out of money. Then they liquidate the office furniture to make the last payroll. Sometimes they don’t wrap up early enough and the founder and board members are personally liable for it.
Nobody wants to buy the custom software needed to run “The pets.com for GenAI” because it would be cheaper to start from scratch than to understand the codebase and make it do what you want.
Companies like 23-and-me that accumulate valuable data while going bankrupt are the rare exception… but banks/VCs do not know a-priori which ones will be that exception! If they did, they just wouldn’t make the bad loans in the first place!
> Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk
Well, but it clearly isn’t, right? So everything else you wrote is sort of irrelevant.
I mean, why don’t you lend a startup $1000 on the condition they pay you back $1500 in two years[1] if they succeed and nothing if they fail? Pass the hat around your neighborhood and I bet you could fund a few real startups!
Except that.. oh.. when it’s your money on the line, suddenly you realize those are very stupid terms. You lose the whole $1000 90% of the time, break even 5% of the time and make a +$500 profit 5% of the time. The math isn’t mathing here.
So you’ll want to very carefully vet the founders and their plan. Be very picky about who you fund. Maybe you’ll ask them to personally guarantee some fraction of the loan. Suddenly, your highly moral terms look exactly like the business loans that approximately 0% of startups use because VCs offer them a better deal.
[1] Any more than that would be usury, which is immoral, right?
The residual value in the failed startup will be such a small fraction of the funding. You aren't making a convincing argument.
Did either of you actually read my comment?
I acknowledged as much... In both comments even.
I think the main problem is that investors are investing in the wrong thing. They invest because they believe they can make a return, not because they think a valuable product will be made.
There's a subtle difference and it shows by how we even see wealth. We associate wealth with utility to society. That is, after all, why we create economies. We want to reward those who make society better.
But that's where there's been a disconnect. We figured out we could make money without pushing society forward. We'd historically refer to those people by different names... worse than that, we are focused on the short term. Silicon Valley has perfected the hype cycle. You get in cheap, pump up the price, sell, and do it all over again. It does not matter if it is vaporware, it matters that you can make a profit.
The problem is alignment. The economy is not aligned with its intentions.
Do we see much innovation these days? Is there even an incentive? No doubt there's innovation, but people are claiming it is accelerating. I'm unconvinced we're innovating faster than we did in the 90's. That decade changed society more than the 00's and 10's, even with the advent of the smartphone.
Unlike the author, I'm actually in favor of capitalism, yet I firmly believe that an economy still needs to by well regulated. There's very few economists who believe such regulation does not need to exist (we listen to partisans more than actual economists), and I've found even the most staunch free-market believers (often not actual economists) will have concessions. It's no secret that an unregulated market is not a free market. An unregulated market is a market regulated by the largest entities of the market.
It is probably no surprise that those who cannot think long term are unable to realize that the rise in popularity of socialism is due to the abuse of capitalism. Most people do not have a strong foundation in economics (why should they! They're spending years learning other skills than years reading textbooks, analyzing, and going to school). But people do know our system isn't working. Is it really more cost effective to build bunkers and buy private islands than it is to make the lives of the people better? I doubt it. But that's the same myopia I've discussed in my entire comment. The problem is how myopic we've become
For me, when you start to lobby, when you explicitly pay people to pass laws in your favour, that's when you cross a line. You go from playing within the rules of the system to making up rules that favour you, and it's wild that it's legal much less acceptable for corporations to do that.
While I agree it is unfair and it would be better if they didn’t, the reality is that there is a meta-game at a higher level and they are playing according to the meta-game rules. Part of the meta-game is to convince others to stay in the regular game sandbox which gives rise to the hypocrisy we are all familiar with. I don’t know what it would take to diminish the meta-gaming let alone eliminate it, it’s very hard to stop things that are very profitable. I also think we’re in the looting phase of corporatocracy. I think the result of this means the meta-gaming rapidly grows like a cancer to take over everything.
The Atlantic just wrote an article that references this concept: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/marjorie-taylor-gr...
They also have several older articles directly targeting insider trading by politicians.
Insider trading by politicians is not really what's being discussed. Rich people and corporations lobbying politicians is different.
So who do you think should be allowed to lobby politicians & how would you avoid lobbying from bleeding through unofficial channels?
Imagine for a second that any time you borrowed money to buy something, like a home or a car, you paid that back not by actually paying the loan plus interest, but by a % garnishment of your lifetime wages. That is what equity capital is like.
Obviously, nobody would take that kind of deal. But what if regular loans were just flat out not made available to you? Like, if tomorrow, banks as a class individually decided they would only accept payment in this sort of lifetime wage equity. Then it's not really a choice anymore. One of the options has been taken away from you. If I take a fair deal and have one of the counterparties flat out remove some of the negotiating options - even if they were not the ones taken - is it still a fair deal?
In other words, the argument that fair exchange has been violated is based on the idea that market power can be a form of coercion. If you don't agree, then you can argue that every possible counterparty deciding to only offer you a bad deal is perfectly acceptable and non-coercive. "Natural shorts[0] are not coercion", in other words. But why stop there? I mean, even in outright theft, where I'm holding a literal gun to your head and demanding payment, you could still choose to eat lead. We can redefine theft and coercion down to excuse any behavior we want on libertarian terms. The tautology is not with the argument, it's with fair exchange itself.
[0] As in, "thing you need to exist". You have a natural short position in food, drink, and shelter.
> Imagine for a second that any time you borrowed money to buy something, like a home or a car, you paid that back not by actually paying the loan plus interest, but by a % garnishment of your lifetime wages. That is what equity capital is like.
Weird analogy. It's more like "what if you borrowed money to buy something, didn't have to return it, but if you made money with that thing, you give the lender a cut, forever".
Because the point is: it's not a loan, you don't have to pay it back, and you're not on the hook for it if things go wrong. That's the big upside and why lots of people do that instead of getting a loan. Because loans are available, but people don't want that risk and are willing to give up some of their ownership to avoid it.
The article is clearly written from a bit of a Marxian perspective and I think there's a lot assumed ... presuppositions about exploitation and value theory.
So yeah, even though on first skim I think I agree with the thrust of this article, I think you're right it's poorly defended, assuming it's at all for an audience outside of people who already think this way.
I haven't read Marx since I left college, but in my remembering the only thing that is "theft" in the capital is the initial accumulation. There is no idea that any form of ownership beside that is theft (I don't believe there is any notion of "evil" either.) To be honest, you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting. Marx is like those ancient greek phylosophers and classical scientists who are "quoted" more often than read.
One could probably say that the privatisation of human communication is a form of "initial accumulation", or maybe just another step toward appropriation of culture, but that's apparently not the angle that the author decided to explore (can't be sure, I couldn't do better than skim that text which looked wrong in too many ways).
I think you misunderstood his viewpoint.
Marx’s writing predates the US civil war. When you “own” someone and then “own” their labor the fruits of that labor aren’t yours any more than the person. By that reasoning, if you then use the fruits of that labor to buy a house it’s a stolen house.
"you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting"
Oh, ok. Anyways.
First section of Capital Vol I is all about "surplus value" and exploitation, with a heavy dose of the labour theory of value. It has nothing to do with "initial accumulation" at all, it's about ongoing extraction of surplus value in production, and no, Marx doesn't call it "theft" -- he calls it "exploitation" (which to him is actually somewhat of a value neutral world describing a technical process, actually).
Whether it's a defensible position in economics or philosophy is a whole other discussion. There's nuance.
Also I assuming you mean "citing", not "siting"
As the other person who responded to me wrote, I might have misunderstood your comment. I believed that you associated the idea that "property is theft" with Marx, and that's this association that I wanted to warn against.
But that's indeed not what you were saying.
Marxism is back in vogue again. I guess people have tried reviving Naziism/fascism so now they’ve got to try reviving the other failed early 20th century totalistic political ideology.
I get that the status quo has huge issues, but can we have some new ideas maybe instead of continuing to try to revive late 19th century ones that have repeatedly and disastrously failed?
Certainly, to get new ideas it's better to start from a good knowledge of past ideas? If we had thrown an anathema on physics each time a rocket blowed up, nobody would have ever landed on the moon :)
Ask the Chinese how poorly Marxism is treating them
> the other failed early 20th century totalistic political ideology.
I'm not sure how to square this statement with reality. Which countries were Marxist? The obvious "communist"/"socialist" country was the USSR, but it was Leninist/Stalinist.
As a person with Marxian leanings I can tell you it's not "back in vogue" in fact in both academia and general populace actual Marxist theory has probably never been less vibrant or popular?
Maybe some people get that impression because they've conflated "Marxism" with general socialist urges or even cultural "left" wing identity politics, but that in fact is proof exactly of the opposite. It's never been more heretical to advocate for wealth redistribution or dismantling or restricting parts of the capitalist market, even in the context of a total ecological crisis brought on by industrial production and exponential growth.
It's not even on the table of discussion in any western country, so I am not sure where you fear comes from. That a claim like this could be made shows me exactly how far to the right we've drifted since e.g. the 60s. That someone like Mamdani could be smeared or red-baited as a "Marxist" for advocating for rent control is hilarious really.
(But frankly I'm not here to debate the merits or get into a drive-by debate with your half-formed opinions, nor was that the aim or thrust of what my comment above was about.)
Worse thing is they preach like they are saviours
This x100.
Nothing is ever going to be completely equal in society. Innovation is driven by labor being capital (thus profit), or by influence (state backed stuff loses money in exchange for influence). I have a right to make money with resources at my disposal. Taxes are exchanged for the privileges of citizenship, and hopefully, someday, the ability to not get screwed by insurance.
Correct me if I am wrong, I am open to ideas. My knowledge of economics is all from social studies class, my brother almost dying because insurance at first denied to pay for his surgery, and making money from yard work and fixing electronics because I am not old enough to get a legit job. I have never paid taxes, but I somewhat understand disdain towards taxation in an age where the cost of living is as high as it is relative to the amount of money one is capable of making.
Is the author's point that every business should be an employee-owned cooperative? How do we get there?
Quit your job and start a co-op I guess.
Unionize
Aren't many or even most of the startups essentially "employee owned"? I've heard that the average employee at NVidia is worth $25m.
So 900b total among its 36000 employees for a total of 900b/4.3 trillion market cap. Or roughly 20% employee owned (if that 25m number is correct).
This article (warning: obnoxious ads) is the only one I can find that claims to know who nvidea’s shareholders are and puts the number at 4.3%
https://capital.com/en-int/analysis/nvidia-shareholder-who-o...
I would not consider that to be employee owned (although I certainly wouldn’t mind the 25m)
Property is theft. It was true in 1840, and its true today.
Property is the only way that we can build complex things.
We couldn't have airplanes if property didn't exist. Anyone could just walk away with parts off the airplane if they felt like it. And in fact that's exactly what happens if you leave an airplane unprotected for too long.
Hydroelectric dams would be impossible. You couldn't even have light bulbs or computers because their production methods require so much coordinated effort as well as protection from theft and damage.
Without property, all you'd have are bands of foragers because without the ability to control access, any group efforts could be undone overnight by anyone.
I wasn't talking about about stuff you can walk off with, nor was the article author, nor was Proudhon in 1840. This is about the difference between owning things made my people versus owning people who make things.
Used to be that the people themselves were property, then it was the machines they used, now it's some abstraction related to shares and companies, but it's all the same: what you're doing belongs to me not because I bought it from you but because of something to do with my position in society as it relates to yours.
> Property is the only way that we can build complex things.
This assertion needs to be substantiated, even if it is true. You give an example of how property "allows us to build complex things", but you don't prove that it's impossible for any other system of ownership or of mediating access to resources/"things" to allow that.
> but you don't prove that it's impossible for any other system of ownership or of mediating access to resources/"things" to allow that.
You can’t prove a negative, so the onus is actually on you to show an example of a working alternative that does not rely on property.
And it has been tried in the 20th century. Several times, in fact. Despite all the industrial espionage committed by the Soviet Union (which saved them the resources to do the research themselves) and the slave labor of people who spoke or wrote about the “wrong” ideas (which surplus was given to the rest of the population), ordinary people in the USSR had much worse lives than those in the West.
The legal system in USSR also had the concept of property.
Yes, it did[1]! Because they rather quickly discovered that you can’t build complex things without it. Which brings us back round to the original point!
[1] But… they did make a go of it without property before discovering that it wouldn’t work. It turns out (shockingly!) that indentured serfs (who make the food) like the idea of land reform when it means they own the land. But they don’t like it so much when it means nobody owns the land. And when they are not happy then you have no food. And then those quotes about “x meals until y” start to have some salience. And then you start to think about the most effective way to use the number of bullets you have on hand (which is smaller than the number of mouths you need to feed).
Fine. It's the only way we know of that unlocks the potential of building complex things. If you know of an alternative that is better, please tell us!
If it's about controlling access, why do we need both property rights and guns?
Please look up the difference between private property and personal property. When people decry "property is theft", they're not talking about personal property, they're talking about private property.
Also, socialist states with advanced economies built airplanes, hydroelectric dams and all kinds of complex things. This is a joke of an argument. Say what you will about the living conditions, fairness, corruption or other issues with socialist states, but to pretend they "didn't build complex things" is ridiculous when you look up the number of scientific achievements made first by the USSR.
> Also, socialist states with advanced economies built airplanes, hydroelectric dams and all kinds of complex things.
Yes, by having property … owned by the state!
...yet kids are pretty quick (and eager) to understand "mine"... and seem to struggle understanding "not mine" at first.
Transgenerational greed?
And still, not respecting these concepts make you the thief today. So, what now?
I'm all for experimenting on babies, but I can't understand what point you are trying to make with this.
Do you mean they naturally understand property, or do you mean they naturally understand theft, or what?
The person who coined the "Property is theft" quote (Proudhon if I recall) clearly made a distinction between capital-p Property and personal possession. And I think most regular people do, too.
I don't necessarily think of my stocks and bonds in my retirement funds in the same category as my toothbrush, suit jacket, or even my house or garden or whatever.
Classical liberalism and its descendants want to blur the distinction between the two. And you're welcome to adopt that view. But you shouldn't assume there aren't legitimate challenges to that point of view.
Proudhon himself wasn't terrible coherent. Marx I think clarified the distinction between dominance and control of capital and production vs personal private property better.
From a certain perspective, capitalism has been the process of enclosing things that were once common, or could be common, into "private" property. And despite the rhetoric of free exchange and liberty, it has mainly done this by force and coercion since the acts of enclosure and the age of colonialism until now.
My 6 acres of "private property" that my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago. What does that do its status -- and to me -- now?
> my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago.
This argument can be used for practically any piece of earth, it's nonsensical to fixate on it.
The issue has always been that capital (and it's quiet sibling power) can compound itself endlessly absent any checks against it. Societal unification against power and wealth consolidation should be the same as it would be against a plague or cancer in a body.
If you're trying to argue "Group X should own it instead of Group Y" then you're right - there is no good argument to fix any particular Group X - there's only special pleading. Why should it be the group who controlled it in 1600 AD, not the group who controlled it in 1600 BC or the group who controls it right now?
But there are other philosophies that don't have this problem. Philosophies where there's no notion of ownership at all, or ownership is by the entirety of humanity/the world (which makes it meaningless), and one person can only borrow something for an extended period of time. This is how a lot of native peoples viewed land, which makes sense since it cannot be created or destroyed. Or philosophies where, for example, all humans collectively own all land and houses, but it's very practical to uniquely assign one human to each house, but there's nothing special about that connection, and it doesn't give the rights to, say, hold that object hostage for money. (This is how socialists view toothbrushes, I'm told.)
I'm not fixating on it really. My point is just that classical liberal arguments about free exchange and the market and property don't hold up to historical scrutiny.
My point is you can't form an ethical framework around property as intrinsic right because really property is less "theft" than it is power, so you end up at the end of the argument having to actually defend might makes right as your world view. (Which is why I see the logical end point of radical libertarianism as being a kind of fascism.)
Capitalism is an incredibly efficient machine. All that is solid melts, etc. etc. It is beautiful in its own way. I agree about the compounding. I suspect we mostly agree generally.
> My point is you can't form an ethical framework around property as intrinsic right because really property is less "theft" than it is power, so you end up at the end of the argument having to actually defend might makes right as your world view.
Personally, I'm thinking the whole point of libertarianism is to obscure a genuine belief that might makes right on behalf of some people who have a lot of might, and sell it to a bunch of rubes.
> (Which is why I see the logical end point of radical libertarianism as being a kind of fascism.)
That's especially clear with things like "anarcho-capitalism," where it's obvious that the kind of social relationships its proponents go on and on about at book-length are impossibly unstable and wouldn't last a nonosecond before decaying into something like feudalism.
share all of your things with me, thief.
Doubt it. Grew up in communist bloc country. There was much theft and we barely had any property.
Efficiency is the path to cybernetic issues of control and eventually the functional takeover from the processual, ie biology. Imposing function on evolution eventually embeds maladaption that is fatal to the species.
After thinking about this problem for a while, I think that there is a potential for someone to make a nonprofit software company for the public good. And yet it would still pay high developer salaries.
There’s not because you can’t find the initial capital to start it
About the author, former Google intern
https://web.archive.org/web/20190204123209/https://notesfrom...
This article oversimplifies things...and then comes to some bold conclusions. It helps to look at different perspectives, rather than looking at everything through an ideological lens. I guess thats the age we live in, unfortunately.
What is the ideological lens that characterizes our society? Greed.
The individual owes nothing to society: no limit to what I can own. Society owes nothing to me: my share of the wealth is my own fault. Might makes right. A deal is fair regardless of the terms: a deal is a deal. Workers don’t deserve a vote: they agreed to their servitude.
This seems like a throw back in time - as if one of the Communist propaganda arms of Eastern Europe wrote it. This article doesn’t understand tech or modern evil. It just spews worker vs equity owner arguments.
Any engineer today could start their own business. They could instantly become equity owners. Especially with AI. Many giants paid salaries and equity packages to the best, to keep them from starting competition.
En engineer can also leave a tech giant and in California, unlike NY, non-competes don’t apply. Tech work scales infinitely - so you can make a product for millions of users with your own two hands, unlike manual labor workers, who are limited by physics.
The evil not recognized is when the scalability of tech and AI is used to create and power up addictions that drain human brains, instead of giving them bycicles of the mind. Leaches on the brain. Industries where you can do well by the customers but you make a LOT more money if you do badly by them: Advertising (pumping ad impressions by refreshing pages, putting ads under common buttons to create unintended clicks that charge small businesses dollars per click, not delivering traffic or real audiences and making the small business pay even more thinking it’s their fault). Making gambling and games with horrible dark patter dynamics that wake users at night and expose them to chronic sleep depravation and wallet draining just to keep them addicted or with some status or in some league.
If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource - think about how much of it is killed by true evil. VC funding won’t be needed when AI is used to build things without the need for much funding anymore. What truly matters is not building evil things.
>If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource
But it's not, though. Human brain time (just in general, with no additional conditions) is pretty worthless, that's why people piss it away in idle activities. Just look at services like Mechanical Turk. The so-called attention economy is not about the attention itself. It's about getting the brains that give the attention to spend money.
The brains are being skewed with the content making fears disproportionate to reality and raising anxiety which disables rational thought and constructive activity.
That's simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. Optimistic because it assumes that someone, say, replying to a comment on Hacker News, is doing that instead of something incredibly constructive. Pessimistic because it also assumes that those negative emotions necessarily impact the person once the activity finishes. While that may be the case for some dysfunctional individuals, most people will not be compelled to quit their job and bunker themselves up in their room after reading a Reddit post.
Excellent piece.
Seems a rather expansive definition of evil
As a democratic socialist, I find this article fails to back its claim that equity is theft. Workers at startups get equity; this is why they work so hard. Would a worker cooperative be better? Possibly, but there is little incentive for the person with the capital to risk their wealth if they don't get a stake that is commensurate to the risk they are taking. I think if anything, startups are a massive improvement over public corporations because they regularly provide a means for a talented person with no capital to become an owner. If I were to critique capitalism, I would hardly start with a startup, which is the closest thing we have to a worker cooperative. I would go after private equity, which is perhaps the most evil of all of capitalism in its various forms, the equivalent of a blood sucking creature straight out of the D&D Monster Manual.
You're saying Peter Thiel is a Beholder?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beholder_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons...
Excellent, but was thinking more of a Cloaker, Soulleecher, or Succubus. These creatures seem safe/helpful or innocent, but then attack, draining your life force and leave you as a discarded husk.
Not really sure what he is but this comes immediately to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strahd_von_Zarovich "He is a malignant narcissist trapped by his malignant narcissism – forever alone, forever feared and unable to change. Salvation is beyond him. He is framed as inhumanity personified, often serving as a cautionary tale: once you lose your humanity, you can never get it back."
> like an Apple, Facebook, or Google
One of these, is not like the others.
One of these has better marketing for sure.
Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company.
I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then.
I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then.
That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a very different creature, and lumping it in with them, seems like a cheap grab for Apple-haters.
The article is about the evils of capitalist profit maximization. I don’t see how Apple is any better there. If anything, they are the masters of profit maximization.
I’m not an Apple “hater” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I use their products more than Google’s or Meta’s. But I don’t like the trajectory they’ve been going down for the past decade or so, and the arguments made by the article fully apply to them.
That doesn’t change the fact that the context was inappropriate.
I completely agree with most of the stuff in the article, and even that I’m quite unhappy about Apple’s trajectory, recently.
But I still believe that looping in irrelevant data, poisons the dataset.
Either the article should expand its scope, or it shouldn’t include older SV companies into its dataset. Salesforce, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, Oracle, etc. have many of the same attributes as Apple (even worse, in some cases).
A fairly typical thing that some folks like to do, is attach unpopular people to their targets. It energizes people that might not otherwise care.
We’re seeing quite a bit of that stuff, nowadays.
This is basically saying wage labor is theft, nothing to do with silicon valley as such
Comically though, it's also self-refuting, since it leads with how voluntary exchange of something for money is ok, even if someone gets a bad deal. Buy, you see, if you voluntarily exchange your labor for money - creating that something (notably your employer is not interested in your labor especially in the case of the startup, only that you give them the product); and then your counterparty voluntarily exchanges that product for somewhat more money with someone else, that is now theft, and also evil.
This is just propaganda. Collectivism is evil, startups are fine.
It's like accusing a pig of being a pig. Pig gonna do what pig does. What DOESN'T work is legally-enforced "norms" that we the people decide everyone has to follow.
Businesses are "people" now, according to the US Supreme Court, so it's our job to make them face consequences if they refuse to behave like actual "humans" bound by laws. But it's only if we elect representatives who are not corrupt grifters.
Is it really so crazy to extend democracy to the enterprise?
I think so. People will behave in the guardrails they are provided. If we have a problem with those rails, then in the US at least, democracy is (ostensibly maybe) the tool to make them more aligned with what we want.
Absolutely, unless we're going to start jailing tons of executives from tons of companies.
Sounds good to me
I think we just need to get rid of corporate personhood. If you want to do something big, you need to have skin in the game. Criminal prosecution for corporate action taken under your purview should be more common. If you can't handle the heat, just come watch TV with the rest of us plebs.
i ask "what details does the piece offer about how to make the proposed alternative happen?"
===
i'm told "Almost none.
The only concrete mechanisms mentioned are:
Founding worker-owned cooperatives instead of equity-based startups.
Raising capital as loans rather than selling equity.
“Creative ways to solve the political problem of capitalists’ monopoly on capital.” This is referenced but not elaborated.
No operational steps, no policy proposals, no institutional models, no financing frameworks, no examples of working co-op ecosystems, no strategy for scaling co-ops, and no plan to change investor incentives."
===
Dear author, please come back with more specific recommendations. I'm curious what you think early stage startup founders and funders should be doing instead of what they're currently doing. I think you want founders and funders to effectively make massively unilateral economic concessions to early employees, since they are "labor". And then you want those early employees to in turn make massive unilateral concessions to later employees because those are "labor" too.
But what about the rest of labor in society?
Why not instead have massive tax rates on the gains, so that all of society's labor can get in on the fruits, rather than the startups relatively few employees?
Just like their predecessors: Big Tobacco, Big Fossil, Big Tech.
The Playbook is always the same: Run global Propaganda (ads/PR), while behind the public's back extract the capital from the general public into the private hands of a select few and "socialise" the costs (health, mental-health, polarisation, extremism, populism, ...) to the state (taxpayer).
Basically: screwing the public and letting them pay the bill, but hidden by X-layers of obfuscation.
PS: Of course all the SV hipster boys and wanna-be billionaires (do you still believe you will make it?) downvote this. Well, let "that sink in" as your poster boy would say.
From the article:
> And I’m talking to you now, fellow workers of the Valley! If you really want to do no evil, to be good, disrupt the status quo and make the world a better place, then don’t create a capitalist firm: it’s a top-down dictatorship, where the dictators steal the money. There’s nothing progressive about this kind of social institution. Founding such a startup is deeply unethical, represents institutionalised theft, and is a prime cause of diverse social ills.
I don’t think any silicon valley leaders believe themselves to be progressive at this point.
There are many reasons why SV and its culture are terrible and have been a negative force on the world over the past few decades.
None of those reasons are related to Marxist bullshit. Grow up.
The argument that profit equals theft as a fundamental misunderstanding of system mechanics. The article relies on the outdated notion that labor is the sole input for value, ignoring the critical function of capital as fuel for risk. Investors and founders absorb the high probability of total system failure, which allows employees to receive guaranteed, low-latency salaries regardless of the product's success. If workers wanted the full residual profit, they would need to accept the full downside risk, including working for zero pay until revenue stabilizes.
The preference for traditional corporate structures over cooperatives is not a conspiracy but an optimization for speed and scalability. Centralized decision-making allows startups to pivot rapidly in competitive markets, whereas committee-based governance often introduces fatal latency. Furthermore, employment is a voluntary exchange where engineers trade skills for compensation, often including equity to align incentives. Labeling this voluntary cooperation as "evil" ignores that this model has driven the greatest reduction in information costs in history. We are not victims of a theft-based institution but participants in a high-performance engine that rewards efficiency and problem-solving.
It's just a simple primitive far leftist piece not worthy of any discussion, just a commie junk.
I'm not sure this is allowed to be posted here, on the discussion forums of a Silicon Valley startup incubator. I don't think Y Combinator likes being called evil.
At the end of the day I don't think Silicon Valley represents anything fundamentally different from the world at large. The world is unfair, and it may become even less fair.
What is disturbing is how the hype-machine around "startups" and the unicorn myth encourages people to believe they can be the next big thing. But basic arithmetic makes that impossible: you can't have an abundance of unicorns when the attention economy, capital, and market share are structurally limited.
Silicon Valley is different in my mind because, well, back in the 1970's, it was arguably not evil.
Woz and the nerds were making machines at home, later hooking them up to one another with the janky telephone service as the interconnect. And this kid, just getting a taste of BBSs in Kansas in the mid 1980's, was so envious of the outrageous number of BBSs in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose…—all strange names to me. But I saw that they were all in California.
When a job offer got me to move out to the Bay Area in the early 90's there was still a kind of soft echo of those times. Plenty of electronics recycling warehouses you could wander through (and recognizing some of the same faces, often older men, as you moved through your morning circuit to the next warehouse). Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, etc.
I had a career there, raised a family there. I watched the dot-com boom/bust, the rise of the internet, Google, and the slow decline of the hardware focus of "The Valley".
When the last of my daughters left the nest, the wife and I sold the house and I retired back to the Midwaste where the two of us grew up. Weird Stuff Warehouse had recently closed up shop and that seems now as fitting a time as any to have said goodbye to The Valley.
I conjecture that what you're describing was deeply tied to the size, quality, and spirit of that original community (and consumers). A relatively small cluster of tinkerers, shared physical spaces, and a sense of discovery created a moral atmosphere very different from today's massive global tech hub shaped by billions in capital.
To put the scale shift in perspective: Apple sold only a couple of million Apple IIs in that entire era. Today, the iPhone sits in the multi-billion range since 2007. Once a technology ecosystem expands by three orders of magnitude, its culture cannot remain the same.
The early Valley wasn’t "good" in an absolute sense, it was simply relatively small, intimate, and guided by shared values. As growth, global competition, and finances took over, the culture changed in ways that were probably inevitable.
All that is different is that you and I have had bargaining power and scarcity far far beyond the average skilled worker.
That bargaining power came from our ability to surf the crest of the wave that was over and over crashing through existing industries, turning them on their head with the promise and practice of automating via computation. In many cases deskilling the jobs of other workers.
We could play the part of magicians who knew these arcane arts and get paid accordingly.
There is precisely zero guarantee that any of this will continue. In the latest wave it seems like it is we ourselves who are being submerged beneath the wave.
People have a tendency to think they're special, that they won't (or will) be the outlier. Gambling, unprotected sex, etc. We're not great at risk evaluation/comparison.
But hey, without this, our public schools wouldn't get funding from lottery tickets! So I'm forced to conclude it's a good thing.
The lottery paying for schooling is a clever self-defeating policy because it moves the tax-burden to the same people who would most benefit from a good public school system.
It is not your main point, I know - but for everyone I know who buys lottery tickets, they're more thought of as an entertainment purchase than a financial purchase.
I've heard this argument before about casinos, but never lottery tickets. I'm not sure I personally buy that, but let's go with it.
If they're entertaining, then presumably it's from the thrill of maybe winning. Why would winning be thrilling? Why, because you get money- potentially a life-changing amount of it. If they made a lotto game with a maximum payout of a dollar I'm reasonably certain nobody would play it. Or hell, anyone could write down a series of heads/tails on a paper and then flip a coin to see if they're a winner! Yet, we don't see that, even though it's free and (I would argue) has the same entertainment value.
So yeah, I'm sure entertainment is the facade, but underneath it all, it's financially motivated for the vast majority.
Might tell us more about the people you know than the typical lottery ticket purchaser?
(Or perhaps they're when they tell you it is "for entertainment" they're entertaining fantasies of winning—which is probably what you can say for a lot of people buying lottery tickets.)
True, people consistently overestimate their chances of being the exception. But in parallel, I think we also lack hype around the opposite direction: learning to live with less, intentionally and intelligently.
I'm not talking about UBI or forced austerity, but about developing smarter ways to live frugally without feeling deprived. That mindset would relieve a lot of the pressure that the "you must win the startup lottery" narrative creates.
That's antithetical to capitalism and consumerism. Not to mention human nature. While I agree with you in principle, I don't know how one would even start to effect any change here at a societal level. Especially when it's impossible to not be bombarded with marketing from people who are extremely good at using your emotions against you here.
Well, I suppose I do know of one. Mindfulness training I think has been shown to help with this, but that's still at a very personal level.
"Christ's teachings" (well, many religions in general) should also have that effect? (I'm an atheist though, so what do I know. Some of my best takeaways from the Second Testament though are that we should be kind, content…)
Capitalism or consumerism don't define human nature. Human behaviour existed long before those systems, and it will exist long after them.
What has changed, and this is where I agree with your point about difficulty, is the scale and precision of behavioural manipulation. We've never had a period where advertising, content, and emotional triggers were personalized with such speed and accuracy. Tobacco harmed the body, today's hyper-personalized content ecosystems can easily harm attention, mood regulation, and overall mental health.
So yes, it's hard to shift things at a societal level when the environment is engineered to keep people reactive.
On mindfulness: in its modern form it's often packaged as another consumer product, but its roots, like those of yoga, Zen, and other contemplative traditions, come from outside capitalist logic. The original practices were tools for resisting impulse and cultivating awareness, not selling calmness subscriptions.