The parallel was too tidy. The pattern went much further back.

I started with a simple question: why does wealth extraction feel so relentless right now? Gig work, algorithmic rent-seeking, AI displacing workers while stock prices soar. My assumption was that capitalism was broken and I was wondering what "post-capitalism" would look like. But now I think I was wrong about capitalism. 2/8

I was starting from a position of "knowing" the truth and trying to justify it rather than discovering the truth.

The deeper I dug, the more uncomfortable the evidence became. Sumerian temple economies centralized grain surpluses, then extracted labor from dependent populations. Athens ran on slave-worked silver mines. Rome displaced small farmers, creating a landless class pacified with bread and circuses (the "lazy Romans demanding handouts" trope is grade-A bullshit). 3/8

If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, the 2000-year-old Chinese dynastic cycle covers this with the "Mandate of Heaven." We can also document this behavior in ants, hyenas, birds, and other creatures: if you can get away with it, it takes less energy to steal than to create.

The pattern keeps repeating: gain leverage over something people need, then extract. It doesn't matter whether the leverage is grain, land, trade routes, or algorithmic lock-in. 4/8

Ibn Khaldun documented this cycle in the 14th century. Acemoglu and Robinson formalized it as "extractive institutions" (and won a Nobel prize for it). It's not new.

And then I started thinking about @pluralistic's enshittification framework: attract users, lock them in, extract value. That's not a description of platform capitalism. That's a description of Ur. Of Athens. Of Rome. Of the East India Company. Same pattern, different API.

This isn't a "capitalism is bad" argument. 5/8

Wealth extraction is a recurring institutional failure mode that predates capitalism by millennia. Hell, it looks like it predates humanity. Capitalism is just the current operating system running old malware. (And I have a neat chapter show how both Libertarianism and Communism make the same error in their "fix" for our woes).

This matters because if enshittification is only a capitalism problem, replacing capitalism fixes it. 6/8