Stop Conflating Capitalism With Art

I posted an emotional tweet (they’ll always and forever be “tweets” to me irrespective of whatever that hellscape continues to devolve into)/LinkedIn post the other night when I was, as my dearly departed Southern grandmother would have said, “feeling my oats.” I proclaimed to the void: 

“We have conflated capitalism w art and we need to stop.”

I woke up the next morning with a certain degree of anxiety about this; not because I’m disillusioned enough to think anyone really cares about my bon mots, but because making this sort of statement off the cuff felt like the definition of sloppy intellectualism. 

But I’ve been wrestling with the statement and talking to people who I trust about it and while, yes, the initial “hot take” is indeed sort of sloppy, sometimes it takes an almost visceral, unformed reflexive statement (and a degree of in vino veritas) to force one’s brain to dive deeper and more soberly into something. 

Having now done so, I stand by what I said. Here’s why:

Capitalism exists on a spectrum like everything else. There are indeed virtuous, positive-sum capitalist gestures. This type of capitalism is not what I was referring to.

No, I was tweeting about the form of Randian, unfettered capitalism that inexorably evolves into an Ouroboros-like system that consumes all within its reach while, at the same time, consuming itself. A wholly self-centered closed loop that fools the Capitalist into thinking they are building something (because, money) when in fact its ultimate resolution is inevitable collapse and disappearance into itself and then - as if it was never there - a quick departure from the collective memory with only the vaguest sense of disgust and embarrassment lingering in the hearts and minds of those who had to exist during contemporaneously.  

The rules of these systems are so objectively simple as to barely require mentioning: Make as much money as possible by whatever means necessary while fooling yourself/quieting whatever vestige of humanity might slip through the maze of self-constructed distractions designed to keep those who are financially benefiting from the system believing they are somehow not simply profoundly shallow, selfish, humans who would rather do literally anything other than make the effort to unpack the obvious trauma that led them to this place. 

This type of person quite literally has no soul. 

And for those lacking soul, art is toxic. Because art, of course, is the one thing that can pierce the self-deluded person’s lizard-like armor and force them to peer into the void. 

And, of course, if you acknowledge that void, your days as a CEO (or wearer of any other mantle of Unfettered Capitalism) are numbered, because you are no longer “the man for the job.”

And this is the game. 

It is said that Satan’s greatest deception is convincing the world of his non-existence. The industrial media complex uses this as their road map. 

Obviously, the streaming services do not have artists’ benefit as one of their Capitalist KPIs any more than major record labels. No, their metrics are increasing share price. Such is capitalism. 

The problem is they delude artists into thinking otherwise, and through artful engineering and the vending of self-hope, combined with just enough examples of the beyond-remote possibility of actual benefit occurring to the rarest of rare…on they go perpetuating a system with no other objective than the increase of shareholder value by any and all means. 

Of course, artists are not shareholders.

A headline from March 25, 2026:

 “Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial.”

And from the next day:

“Meta hit with $375 million in damages in separate New Mexico trial”

I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for people to realize that these “Hooked Model” tactics of vending microdoses of dopamine / hope are objectively harmful. 

But they are. And the same harm done to unwitting literal children is being done to artists; vending false hope and dopamine and convincing them to feed the very machine that will only end up eating them and shitting them out just prior to eating itself.

That form of growth-at-all-costs capitalism should never be conflated with art; they’re antithetical.

But there is a form of capitalism that can and should be conflated with art. It’s a form of sustainable capitalism. One in which the stakeholders’ values are aligned and transparent. One in which the companies’ motives are not set by external funders who, necessarily, are adverse to artists’ needs. Ones where, yes, the business makes enough money to sustain itself, but in order to do so must — in as binary a way as possible — be able to exhibit that in so doing they are objectively providing artists with benefit that is aligned with the artists’ ability to sustain themselves.

Full stop.

This doesn’t mean that these types of businesses, just because of this value alignment will succeed (creating and building any type of business is hard), but it does mean that if and when these businesses do succeed they will do so because they are objectively helping artists to sustain and not in spite of artists succeeding. 

This is the conflation — the co efficiency — of capitalism and art that artists should be demanding and is, of course, what we’re (as are others) trying to do with Harmonic.

So, yeah, I stand by my tweet.