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[–] 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

If I create an SAT analogy from that quote and the other Matrix quote that inspired the vulture capital firm Bending Spoons, I have a great idea for a company.

We can call it Biting Onions. And instead of using capitalistic principles to enshittify, it will subvert capitalistic principles to block enshittification.

For example:

  • Buy distressed patent assets or R&D explicitly to dedicate them to the public domain.
  • Counterbid evil investors for tools or platforms to avoid extreme harm from other bidders (e.g., imagine a counterbid for Twitter).
  • Seed-fund unions in underleveraged, corporate wage-theft-common industries, requiring only that the new unions to contribute parts of their dues back to the fund to accelerate more seed-funding of unions.
  • Venture capital tech startups with explicit caps on executive pay and barriers on anti-human/customer/citizen conduct (e.g., a lowest-to-highest-paid-employee metric or prohibiting SaaS/subscription fee business models baked into contractual funding requirements).

Some of this requires altruism and is likely money-losing (I mean, Twitter was never worth what Musk paid for it, unless you factor in the "value" to an evil sociopath), but like Valve, I think companies that have a set mission and that reach stability would actually have competitive advantages. After all, "suck blood until host dies" is a model that is self-sabotaging in the end.

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