Capitalism has bad aesthetics and offends our moral sensibilities because technology's scaling effects turn minor advantages into runaway feedback loops. Someone with marginally better starting conditions like talent, money, connections can now leverage those into exponentially growing gaps. What used to be linear differences become nonlinear divergences. But at the same time, technology also provides you with countless micro-niches to hack your own status games on orthogonal dimensions. So it's not that bad. The internet has genuinely flattened access to eyeballs, know-how, and toolkits in ways that weren't possible before. Someone can bootstrap a tribe, acquire competencies, or mint value in micro-markets that didn't exist a generation ago. But this doesn't equally benefit everyone; having the slack, steadiness, and taste-capital to navigate these new affordances is itself a privilege. 

And it's easy to see this difference in privilege from the pov of the disadvantaged than it is to see from the pov of the advantaged. 

Most affluent people never really appreciate how good they have it. They tend to credit their success more to their own efforts and less to the conditions that made those efforts possible. And it's not malicious. It's not like they're trying to be assholes, like the woke "Billionaires should not exist" crowd would have you believe. But when you've always had decent wifi, a quiet room to think in, or folks who knew which fork to use and kept their shit together, in a house that wasn't scraping by and fighting over every petty penny, it's tough to really get what it's like living without that cushion. It's hard to viscerally understand what it's like without those things. 

What's far less obvious though, especially to people from affluent backgrounds, is that the technology that creates new opportunities often requires a specific type of cultural fluency that's almost invisible to those who have it. Having internet access is one thing, but having the cultural aptitude and fluency is quite another. Today, someone from a working-class background technically has the same access to YouTube or TikTok, but they're less likely to understand the nuances of personal branding, the importance of consistency, or how to optimize for discoverability. They don't have taste or know which aesthetic choices signal credibility to certain audiences. 

This same cultural gap can sometimes also work in reverse, where people from disadvantaged backgrounds can bring fresh takes that resonate powerfully online. But it's rare. And even then, they often lack the meta-knowledge about how to systematically leverage these advantages because they've never understood capitalism or how fame or money works. Meanwhile, the privileged think they succeeded because they "Worked harder" at content creation, when really they succeeded because they fluently spoke the cultural language that platforms reward, had the financial cushion to experiment without immediate returns, and possessed the social capital to get initial amplification. And as these platforms mature and become more systematized, they increasingly tend to favor people who can treat content creation like a business, further advantaging those who are already raised to think like entrepreneurs and not like employees. 

Now, none of this is meant to excuse anyone's failures or deny anyone's successes. Plenty of people from disadvantaged backgrounds do break through, and plenty of privileged people genuinely hustle and create value. The point isn't that circumstances determine everything or that individual agency doesn't matter — it's that the playing field tilts in ways that compound over time, making certain outcomes more probable for certain people. Technology does enable unprecedented upward mobility, but it also amplifies existing advantages in ways that make the overall distribution more skewed, not less. 

The Matthew Principle lies at the core of Capitalism x Technology. 

"To those who have, more will be given." 

Both capitalism and technology are presented as meritocratic systems. You're told that markets reward the best products and that algorithms surface the most relevant content. But in reality, both systems have strong preferential attachment dynamics, and success begets more success. Each advantage compounds exponentially, not linearly. This generates what appears as darwinian selection but is actually path-locked contingency. We spot the winners who made it through and assume they must have been the most adapted, when often they just had better starting positions or caught the right breaks. Sure, spotting and exploiting opportunities is core to capitalism; that the capacity to spot and "Leverage" any particular opening is literally what the word means. But now, you should obviously consider the whole stack of variables that make someone structurally primed to leverage. Step back and you'll notice how initial conditions — family, geography, timing — shape who gets to spot what. The game rewards those already positioned to play it. 

So, both narratives — "The system amplifies unfairness" and "There are more opportunities than ever" — are simultaneously true. But the former is obviously more useful and actionable than the latter. Because this inequality is simply the water we swim in; getting bitter about someone's better hand won't change your own cards, and resenting privilege mostly just corrodes your ability to play whatever game you can access. The unfairness is real, but hating the lucky for their luck is like hating gravity for making things fall; it's a waste of emotional energy that could be spent finding your own weird little arbitrage opportunities in the margins.