Why I'm Anti-Corporate But Not Anti-Capitalist
People assume I hate money because I take swings at Big Tech and laugh at guru marketing.
Wrong building entirely.
I'm anti-corporate. I'm not anti-capitalist. The gap between those two words is wide enough to drive your whole creative life into, and most people fall in.
What anti-corporate actually means
A corporation feeds on shareholder value before it feeds on anything else. It has to. The hunger is welded into the charter.
Cory Doctorow named the disease. Enshittification. A platform shows up useful, then turns extractive in slow motion. First it's good to you to get you in the door. Then it bleeds you to please its business customers. Then it bleeds everyone to make the quarter.
Twitter became X. Medium reinvents how it pays you every few months. YouTube demonetizes people in the dark, no warning, no appeal worth a damn. Facebook strangles your reach until you pay it ransom.
Same pattern every time. Offer value, breed dependency, harvest.
Capitalism didn't do that. Something wearing capitalism's coat did.
What capitalism actually looks like
Real capitalism is dumb-simple. You make something good, somebody hands you money on purpose, both of you walk away better.
I write something useful. You find it. You subscribe, or you buy the thing. I eat, your problem shrinks. Fair trade, done in daylight.
No manipulation. No bait-and-switch. Nobody strip-mining your data to resell to advertisers while your cut rounds to zero.
When a platform takes your work, your audience, and your attention, then auctions all three to advertisers and pays you in scraps, call it what it is. Digital sharecropping.
Why this matters for creators
Most creators build the whole operation on rented dirt. Years poured into an audience that lives on a platform they will never own.
Then the landlord changes the locks. The algorithm shifts and your reach flatlines overnight. A new policy makes your work contraband. The company gets bought and Tuesday's rules are gone by Thursday.
You wake up and find out the business with your name on it was never yours.
This is a pro-creator stance to the bone. You should own what you build. My father used to tell me not to worry about things I couldn't control. Renting your entire livelihood from a company that can evict you in your sleep is the opposite of that. You hand them the thing you can't afford to lose.
The alternative isn't harder
Own the ground you stand on. Email list, personal site, a way to take payment directly. Land with your name on the deed.
Use social media as a road sign, not a home. Point strangers toward the rooms you actually own.
Charge a fair price for real work. Build relationships with the people who give a damn.
It scales slower. It also survives. A corporate platform can vanish between one nap and the next. Your list and your site stay put.
It's about control
I want you to make money. Stacks of it. From work you'd put your name on, sold to people you respect, priced like it matters.
What I don't want is you hooked to a system built to drain your labor and drip-feed you just enough to keep you producing for it.
The internet was supposed to hand creation and distribution to everybody. Instead we built plantations with better UX. The creators sweat. The corporations bank it.
You can walk off the field. Start small. Own your platform. Serve your people straight, no middleman skimming the top.
That's capitalism doing the one thing it was built to do.
What you make belongs to you. Build like you believe it.