The Great Tech Heist - How "Disruption" Became a Euphemism for Theft

I've lost count of how many times I've been cornered at conferences by men in meticulously over-casual $300 t-shirts, evangelizing their startups with religious fervor. "We're DISRUPTING the entire industry," they insist, with the insufferable confidence of someone who believes their "Uber for X" app constitutes a revolution on par with penicillin.

"The old model is completely broken," they insist, with messianic certainty and a salesman's ambiguity.

As they drone on about their company's world-changing approach to (inevitably) shuttling burritos from point A to point B, the truth becomes painfully obvious: their "revolutionary" business model consists of wedging themselves between existing markets and participants, then bleeding both sides dry with escalating fees and commissions.

This has become the dominant tech playbook.

What venture capitalists celebrate as "disruption" is, with damning frequency, nothing more than a moderately sophisticated way to extract rent from existing systems that functioned perfectly well before tech entrepreneurs arrived to "save" them.

Digital Vampirism

We can catalogue this as a repetitive, predatory behavior:

1. Ridesharing apps connect drivers with passengers, then gorge themselves on 25-30% of every fare while drivers struggle to earn minimum wage
2. Food delivery apps strangle restaurants with 15-30% commissions while simultaneously gouging customers with deceptive fees, pushing beloved local eateries to the brink of collapse
3. Short-term rental platforms hollow out communities and exacerbate housing crises while skimming 3-15% of every transaction
4. Gig economy platforms ruthlessly exploit workers' desperation while pillaging 20-40% of their earnings for the privilege of being denied basic labor protections

...Etc, etc, etc.

When a rideshare app devours 30% of a driver's fare for providing what amounts to a matching algorithm and payment processing (which itself costs ~3%) it's digital vampirism.

When a food delivery app extorts a struggling restaurant for 30% of an order's value while simultaneously king-hitting the customer with fees, it's trussed up exploitation.

I won't pretend these platforms create net zero value.

Yes, the apps are pretty.

Yes, the experience can be convenient.

The disproportion of the value they capture compared to the value they create is grotesque - it's a organized wealth transfer from workers and small businesses to venture capitalists and tech executives.

The Stygian Tech Playbook:

1. Target an industry where actual workers create actual value
2. Build a slick app that makes transactions marginally more convenient
3. Burn billions in venture capital to subsidize artificially cheap services until you've killed the competition
4. Once the alternatives are dead, bleed everyone dry

It's an infernal racket. And it works thanks to a handful of malevolent and indefensible mechanisms:

The Predatory Subsidy Period. "Disruptive" startups operate as loss-making machines designed to destroy existing businesses. Uber incinerated approximately $30 billion before claiming profitability in 2023. By using investor money to artificially subsidize below-cost services, tech companies can price-gouge established businesses into extinction. It's not "disruption through innovation" it's "disruption through having a bottomless war chest of other people's money to throw on the fire of your economic arson."

Monopolistic Network Effects. Tech platforms weaponize network effects to create digital fiefdoms. As more people use them, alternatives become non-viable, creating de facto monopolies where users have nowhere else to go. Once this power is secured, platforms can squeeze both sides of their captured markets with impunity, gradually ratcheting up their extortion as users become dependent.

Regulatory Lawbreaking. Tech "disruptors" succeed by flagrantly breaking the laws that legitimate businesses follow. Ridesharing companies deliberately operated outside licensing requirements, insurance mandates, and labor regulations that applied to taxis. This isn't clever "regulatory arbitrage" - it's lawbreaking at scale, backed by enough venture capital to fight the consequences in court while established businesses that followed the rules are destroyed.

Exploitative Software Economics. Software's near-zero marginal costs create unprecedented opportunities for exploitation. Once a tech platform achieves dominance, it can siphon wealth with virtually no additional costs, creating obscene profit margins built on the backs of the workers who provide the actual service.

Innovation vs. Theft

Technical innovation creates genuine new value and capabilities that weren't previously possible:

• Scientists developing mRNA vaccines that save millions of lives
• Engineers advancing solar technology to combat climate change
• Researchers creating new medical treatments for previously incurable diseases

Technological parasitism finds increasingly sophisticated ways to steal value from those who actually create it:

• Social media platforms that monetize user-generated content while creators receive no compensation for driving engagement
• Content aggregator sites that republish articles and videos while stripping original creators of attribution and ad revenue
• Music streaming services that pay artists fractions of a penny per stream while building billion-dollar businesses on their creative work

Both can make investors obscenely rich.

Both involve "groundbreaking" technology.

But they represent moral opposites.

Technical innovation expands human possibility and generates new wealth. Tech parasitism sucks value from existing systems and redirects it to already-wealthy investors.

The former builds the future.

The latter loots the present.

The Propaganda Machine

"Disruption theory," Clayton Christensen's originally benign observation about manufacturing, has been retconned into a toxic ideology that shields exploitative business models from criticism. Any destructive, saprophytic business can now hide behind the incantation of "disruption," as if destroying livelihoods is somehow praiseworthy simply because an app is involved.

The nauseating "move fast and break things" mantra reframes the deliberate violation of protective regulations as heroic rather than sociopathic. "Software is eating the world" presents vulturine feeding as an inevitability, rather than a deliberate choice that we could and should reject.

Language itself has been corrupted to mask exploitation. They don't run "gig economies"—they operate "sharing economies." They don't exploit "workers"—they empower "partners." They aren't "marketplaces" that take excessive cuts—they're "platforms" that "facilitate connections." This corruption of language serves one purpose: to mock up digital feudalism as liberation.

If honesty prevailed, we'd hear "Uber is a taxi company that exploits regulatory loopholes to avoid labor laws, steals 30% of drivers' income while pushing them below minimum wage, and used predatory pricing backed by Saudi money to destroy the livelihoods of taxi drivers worldwide."

That's the truth they've spent billions to obscure.

On Contributions

"But these companies DO innovate!"

Yes, in service of the grand con, tech companies occasionally have to solve actual technical problems.

Woe is them.

Uber needed functional map integration and routing algorithms to better exploit their drivers. Airbnb developed trust mechanisms and review systems to more efficiently turn housing into hotels. DoorDash created logistics systems to maximize their accumulation of wealth from restaurants and gig workers.

Fine, fine. But I can't help noting: this is akin to praising a bank robber for their innovative vault-drilling technology. And at this point, I'm far more sympathetic to the bank robber's activities.

The technical sophistication of the heist doesn't make it any less of a heist.

These companies spend astronomically more on marketing, lobbying, and legal maneuvers to avoid regulation than they do on actual R&D. Their "innovations" are predominantly focused on increasing their unearned yield rather than creating genuine value. Whatever modest technical advances they make are almost always proprietary and wildly disproportionate to the economic and social damage they inflict.

When a company distributes billions of dollars to its operators while driving workers into poverty, developing a slightly better dispatch algorithm doesn't balance the moral ledger.

Ending the Parasitic Model

None of this is fuckery is inevitable—it's the product of a series of policy choices.

Choices that can be undone and dismantled.

1. Shatter the Monopolies. These digital fiefdoms depend on monopolistic power. We need to resurrect aggressive antitrust enforcement and break these companies into pieces. In a future world where Donald Trump is no longer piledriving the United States into the muck, the Department of Justice should dismantle Google. Amazon should be split into multiple competing entities. No more gentle slaps on the wrist—we need the trustbusting zeal of Teddy Roosevelt aimed at Silicon Valley. And we need that zeal in every democratic nation.
2. End Worker Misclassification. The entire gig economy is built on an illegal fiction—that people working for app companies aren't employees. Rigorous enforcement of existing labor laws would force these companies to provide minimum wages, benefits, and protections that would make their nonsensical - and nonviable - models unsustainable. When California attempted this with AB5, tech companies spent $200 million to buy their own law (Prop 22)—showing exactly how central exploitation is to their business model, and how vulnerable it makes them.
3. Build Public Digital Infrastructure. We don't need venture capitalists to own the digital rails of our economy. Any economy. Cities and states can and should develop public digital infrastructure of their own. Every dollar that flows through Silicon Valley's toll booths is a policy failure.
4. Tax Predatory Business Models. If a company's revenue comes predominantly from inserting itself as a middleman and charging rent, it should face punitive tax rates that make this model unsustainable. We can and should use the revenue to support workers harmed by these models and to fund public alternatives.
5. Empower Worker Ownership. Driver-owned ridesharing. Restaurant-owned delivery platforms. Worker-owned home service marketplaces. These models function sustainably, retaining value for those who create it. But they need the regulatory support, preferential tax treatment, and public investment that consistently flows instead to the lobbyist employing billionaire class who operate tech's web of exploitation.
6. Expose the Propaganda. The most powerful weapon Silicon Valley has is its narrative control. It's time we challenged the language that frames exploitation as innovation and/or selflessness. "Gig work" is precarious labor without protections. "Disruption" is the destruction of functional systems. "Platforms" are just digital company stores taking exorbitant cuts. Words have power. Use them.

Will these changes lead to tradeoffs?

Absolutely.

Apps might be less polished. Services might cost their true price rather than being artificially subsidized by venture capital. Tech-holes might only find it within the boundaries of their resources to own a single, solitary Lamborghini.

To me, that exchange seems broadly worth it.

The tech apologists and accelerationists will claim I'm being "luddist" or "one-sided."

They'll insist I acknowledge that taxis were sometimes unreliable, that food delivery was limited, that finding vacation rentals could be cumbersome.

These defenses are both pathetic and revealing.

Yes, previous systems had flaws. But the appropriate response to those flaws is to fix them—not to replace them with techno-oligarchy that extracts unprecedented wealth while creating precarious poverty. The modest convenience improvements these platforms offer users come at catastrophic costs to workers, small businesses, and communities.

The driver who couldn't afford a taxi medallion now works 60 hours a week for sub-minimum wage with no benefits, slowly destroying their own vehicle while the overlords take 30% of their earnings. The "monetized spare bedroom" becomes multiple full-time rent-on-demand properties that devastate housing markets. The small restaurant reaches "new customers" while the pitch deck wielding assholes juice over-the-top fees that push it toward bankruptcy.

Even by the most charitable assessment - and my charity is running low these days - the value these companies capture is wildly, obscenely disproportionate to the value they create.

When tech founders proclaim "we're disruptive," what they really mean is "we've found a legally dubious way to build wealth on the back of a system that worked fine before we showed up." Their "disruption" is a form of digital colonization—invading functioning markets and leaving devastation in their wake.

The obscenity isn't just the elicitation itself—it's the squandering of human potential. Imagine if the brilliant minds and vast capital currently dedicated to building increasingly sophisticated digital toll booths were instead focused on our existential challenges: climate catastrophe, preventable disease, systemic poverty, the collapse of democracy.

What actual problems have the most celebrated tech "unicorns" of the past decade solved? Did Uber cure a disease? Did DoorDash address climate change? Did Airbnb solve the housing crisis—or worsen it?

This is a society-wide failure of resource allocation.

It's a moral catastrophe masquerading as innovation.

If you're a tech founder: prove this assessment wrong. Show me, show us "disruption" that genuinely creates new, class-crossing value instead of reallocating it. Build something that addresses human needs instead of inventing elaborate new ways to insert yourself as a Rentier in existing transactions. Stop using "innovation" as a smokescreen for exploitation.

For everyone else: when the MBA in a designer hoodie that costs more than a starter car tells you he's "disrupting" an industry, translate it correctly: "I've found a way to skim money from people who actually create value, and I'm hoping you'll call me a visionary instead of an execrable leech."