It’s not that internet founders are somehow more evil or rapacious than their forebears. It’s simply that when companies are platforms, survivability and scalability amount to the same thing. Just as winner-takes-all network effects lead to just one Taylor Swift and millions of penniless artists, these same dynamics promote the establishment of platform monopolies like Amazon.

The problem is less that these single platforms emerge than the fact that their business plans are taken from the obsolete play books of the industrial age, where extraction was the only game in town. While internet servers and financial capital can scale up almost infinitely, the real world cannot. Humans only have so much time and attention in a given day, and the topsoil only has so many nutrients in a given acre. As the merchants of abstracted digital products, like ebooks and streaming media, apply their same business models to the markets and environment on which real people depend for sustenance, power-law dynamics become a lot more dangerous.