To be fair, it was different for a while. Those companies started out with visionary product designers and engineers who cared about creating a great product that genuinely helps the customers. But once the product is out in the market the culture inevitably changes over to one of patent trolling lawyers, stock buyback schemes, layoffs, outsourcing, dishonest marketing, squeezing the customers with difficult-to-cancel subscription models, etc.
It is incumbent upon those of us who want better to build companies that do not do this. You don't need to be a unicorn startup, you can be a small company that employs a small handful of like-minded individuals who want to build good products for people, who reject the ravenous growth machine that plagues tech today.
Yes but only if you stay a private company. Once you issue stock, those like-minded individuals are going to be pressured to enshitify to maximize shareholder value. Or pressure the like minded to get acquired by a big pile of enshitification like Broadcom.
What people don't seem to realize is that the business cycle today mirrors your average ponzi scheme.
The company has a product, gets loans based on said product. The terms are front-loaded according to your standard S-adoption curve which under some representations mirrors a Ponzi curve.
The debt taken must eventually be repaid. The bankers know this which is why they loan to these entities to begin with, and I'm sure they get kickbacks when the debt defaults as it almost always does from market manipulation. Then someone comes in buys everything up for pennies on the dollar to enhance their monopoly.
Non-reserve debt issuance is money printing. The business either fails later when it should have failed overnight, or it becomes or gets acquired by a silent state actor that can be coerced.
This is the ugly reality. Bankers get rich off the usury, and bailouts, the market shrinks and dies. Eventually products vanish, and once you realize the game as an actual producer you stop playing into their hands.
When the entire environment is disadvantaged from the get-go, you stop participating, you withhold your intellect, and strike. Keeping the fruits of your mind for yourself, and others of like mind.
You are not imposing destruction by doing this, you are getting out of the way, because eventually the bill always comes due, and parasites kill their hosts and then die themselves.
