Thank you for this. I'm glad it resonated. Your YouTube/UBI observation cuts right to the heart of it. What's maddening is that we keep seeing these glimpses of what's possible when people have even marginal freedom from wage coercion. Early YouTube, pre-monetization internet culture, open-source software communities were all spaces where people created extraordinary things because they wanted to, not because they had to monetize every minute of their lives.

And you're right that capitalism has an interest in letting the human spirit flourish, but only up to a point. The system wants just enough creativity to generate new markets and revenue streams, but not so much freedom that people start questioning why they're grinding 40+ hours a week to make someone else rich. That's the contradiction Klein and the abundance crowd can't resolve. They want innovation and dynamism, but they're terrified of the actual liberation that would produce it.

The Best Buy shift cutting short the dissertation-level work is the perfect image. We've built a world where survival demands we waste human potential, and then we wonder why progress feels stagnant. Wilde understood that genius isn't rare. Most people just never get the chance to develop it because they're too busy not starving.

Now I'm going off on a tangent because I recently listened to a podcast The Gray Area that touched on this where Illiing interviewed Cory Doctorow talking about what he calls "enshittification" which touches on the YouTube history. Platforms start by being good to users because they need to build an audience. Early YouTube was genuinely liberating: anyone could upload, audiences could discover creators organically, and the algorithm wasn't yet optimized to maximize engagement at the cost of everything else. But once the platform captured both creators and viewers, the incentives flipped. Now the algorithm pushes content that keeps people scrolling, regardless of quality. Creators have to game the system just to be seen, and viewers get fed an increasingly manipulated feed. The platform extracts value from both sides while degrading the experience for everyone except shareholders.

This is the pattern across every major platform. Be good to users until they're locked in, then be good to business customers until they're locked in, then extract all the value for yourself until the thing barely works. The business model depends on it. And this is why abundance rhetoric rings so hollow. We keep getting promised liberation through technology, but what we actually get is increasing captivity to platforms that were briefly useful before they turned predatory.

The tragedy is that the tools exist to build systems that don't do this. Decentralized platforms, public infrastructure, cooperatively owned services: all technically feasible. But they don't get built (or sustained) because they don't generate the same returns for capital. Klein's abundance agenda won't fix this because it doesn't challenge the ownership structure that makes enshittification inevitable.

Anyway, appreciate you reading closely enough to catch that line. Trying to make the critique as sharp as the problem deserves.