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The Great Tech Heist
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.
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:
- Ridesharing apps connect drivers with passengers, then gorge themselves on 25–30% of every fare while drivers struggle to earn minimum wage
