No question, digital technology has created tremendous new avenues for growth. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many other corporations have created new opportunities and new millionaires. But as a result of their extractive, monopolistic practices, the landscape is left with less total activity and potential for growth. The pie is smaller, or at best staying the same, but these digital businesses have managed to get bigger pieces of it—making it harder for every other corporation around, including themselves in the long term.

In large part, this is because they’re still operating as if they were twentieth-century industrial corporations—only the original corporate code is now being executed by entirely more powerful and rapidly acting digital business plans. What algorithms do to the trading floor, digital business does to the economy. In the purely rational light of the computer program, a digital corporation is optimized to convert cash into share price—money and value into pure capital. Most of the people enabling this have no reason to believe it is harmful to the business landscape, much less to human beings