Why I’m Anti-Corporate But Not Anti-Capitalist

People keep deciding I hate money because I take swings at Big Tech and laugh at the guru with the rented Lambo. Wrong building entirely.

I’m anti-corporate. I am not anti-capitalist. The gap between those two words is wide enough to drive your whole creative life into, and most folks are already down at the bottom of it, looking up, wondering how they got there.

The thing wearing capitalism’s coat

A corporation eats shareholder value before it eats anything else. The hunger is welded into the charter. It cannot want what you want. It is not built to.

Cory Doctorow gave the sickness a name. Enshittification. A platform shows up useful, sweet to you so you stay, then it turns in slow motion. Good to get you in the door. Then it bleeds you to please the advertisers. Then it bleeds everybody to make the quarter.

Twitter became X. Medium reinvents how it pays you every few months like a fever that won’t break. YouTube demonetizes you in the dark, no warning, no priest. Facebook strangles your reach until you pay the ransom.

Same pattern under all of it. Offer value, breed dependency, harvest. Capitalism didn’t do that. Something wearing capitalism’s coat did.

What the real thing actually is

Real capitalism is dumb-simple. You make something good. Somebody hands you money on purpose. You both walk away heavier than you came.

I write something useful. You read it, it helps, you buy the thing or you don’t. No middleman skimming your attention and selling it down the river while paying me in lint.

When a platform takes your work, your audience, and your attention, auctions all three to advertisers, and pays you in scraps, there is an old word for that arrangement. Digital sharecropping. You work the land. You sing while you do it. You own none of it.

Rented dirt

Most creators are building on rented dirt. Years poured into an audience that lives inside a company they will never own a brick of. Then the landlord changes the locks while they sleep.

The algorithm shifts and the reach goes flat as a struck deer on the shoulder of the road. A new policy turns your work into contraband overnight. The company gets bought and Tuesday’s rules are gone by Thursday and nobody tells you.

You wake up one morning and find out the business with your name on it was never yours.

My father told me not to waste worry on things I can’t control. Renting your entire livelihood from a company that can evict you in your sleep, and calling it a career, is the exact opposite of that advice.

Own the ground

So own the ground you stand on. An email list nobody can throttle. A website with your name on the deed. A way to take money straight from a hand into your hand. Use the social platforms as a road sign pointing home. Never the home.

Charge a fair price for real work and sell it to people who came looking for you. It scales slower. It also survives the next time a billionaire wakes up bored and breaks something.

The internet was supposed to hand creation and distribution to every last one of us. Instead we built plantations with better UX. The creators sweat in the heat and the corporations bank the crop and tell us we’re lucky to be on the platform.

You can walk off the field. Nobody is holding the gate. What you make belongs to you, and you can build like you actually believe that, starting with the next thing you put into the world.