In a forgotten world of Bramwell millionaires and steam engine motorcars, the great American tycoons needed a man in England to call. The companies of the late nineteenth century were financed on U.K. treasuries. The railroads, steel mills, and shipyards were created by Americans and financed by London bankers who barely knew where America was. Yet within a few decades, these American industrialists became their own bank. Railroads, like the internet, are natural monopolies — you only need one. Their creation produced a surplus capital system so powerful that Wall Street was able to break free from private London investors entirely.
Around the turn of the century, the anti-trust mergers began, creating the first billion-dollar American corporations: U.S. Steel, then Morgan's International Harvester. The House of Morgan enabled U.S. Steel, AT&T, and General Motors to exist. It was the first instantiation of capital investment that recurs on end today. In a finance capitalist system, if your business is successful enough, it eventually becomes a bank. This was Finance Capitalism — and it lasted until quantitative easing buried it.
Many people understand the systemic effects intuitively: "Walmart ruined America," "I can't buy a house making $200k a year." That's how it's designed. Because it is not a capitalist system. In a capitalist system, I own my cow, the East India Company owns their ship, the bank owns you. America is not capitalist, and has not been so for roughly a century.
What we have is a techno-capitalist economy. Defined simply, techno-capitalism is a free market system where capital is generated by the invention of technology, the maintenance of existing technology, and the brokerage of repeated technology use. In the current system, you own nothing. You rent a phone, are provided a network, choose an application you neither own nor control, are licensed a domain, and are provided a login to create data which is repackaged and sold to insurance providers and data brokers.
This rent-based system was not designed by any single malicious actor. It is an evolution on an impermanent foundation. That foundation will not break on its own — but a flood is coming where credit and cryptocurrency merge. Three decades into the internet, everything built has been built on existing networks: the app store, the web, social media, AI agents, and almost all cryptocurrencies remain reliant on fiber optic cables and the old world's internet. Bitcoin is the singular exception.
Technology has not upgraded our individual or collective capacity. It has not been the "bicycle of the mind" Steve Jobs posited. It has made young people become boomers faster. How businesses operate has barely advanced. Elite finance firms remain solely dependent on Bloomberg Terminal. Banks still use email verification codes. There is nothing to prevent being debanked or having a web service provider ban an account for violating a vague user agreement.
The future of digital space is a war between X, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Palantir, and Enotrium. Enotrium is creating an ark — a new internet and a new trade system predicated on ownership and emergent economies. Most tech companies don't want users owning their data or the means of communication. Their profit is our data in exchange for low rent and no interest. Some day there will be a new regime. It is better if it is sovereign.