I love capitalism. Look at how far it has gotten us. Look at what it has brought us.

Fundamentally, money is a form of communication, and the free market enables people closest to the raw materials they are extracting or buying or working with to price them. It’s a decentralized approach to organizing production that has proven to be extremely successful.

I can’t fault capitalism for what it is good at. But it is clear that in organizing our lives around capitalism, we can lose important things.

There is an effect called “enshittification” that describes how, as a product becomes more popular, it becomes more and more engineered for things that the original users might not want. For example, adding lots of monetization and play-to-earn mechanisms to an otherwise fun game, or an otherwise great content creator just filling their content with sponsored posts and ad placements.

There is a need to make money to live that prevents anything from ever just being what it is. A simple idea that someone could put on Github is suddenly a whole startup entering Y-Combinator and trying to turn a framework into a B2B SaaS ecosystem. A free encrypted chat app has to start developing paid-only features and starts denying pull requests for the same things in the open source project.

The incentives between making money from doing what you love and just doing what you love for the people you love can and usually do become misaligned.

When I look at my own life, I can see how I’ve compromised and enshittified my own ideas, and in the end what I was working toward was not really what I wanted from those ideas in the first place. When I think about 3D metaverse, I don’t think about how exciting it would be to rebuild Amazon in VR and revolutionize ecommerce. Instead, I think about how I just want a place to hang out with my internet friends that feels a little more real than a Discord feed. I want a place to stream, and work, and I want to be around other digital nomads who do the same.

There are different kinds of free. There’s the free we think of when we think of open source– okay, here’s some software– but even that has some cost. I’m convincing you to buy into my thing, to star my Github repo, to give me attention, to become a user in my ecosystem so I can point out to a VC that I have an ecosystem.

Then there’s the free that comes from being able to just be. To not have to make any money off a thing, to just do it for the love of doing it.

Before I got serious about coding, I was a musician. I had a band. We toured, we put out records, we played shows. I emailed thousands of people. I booked tours. We played the same songs every night, fourty nights in a row, from 0 to 100 people on any night. Sometimes we opened for huge bands. But man, it was a grind.

What I loved about music was just sitting and making a thing and playing with my friends. I liked producing music. I liked collaborating and connecting with other people and getting to show them what I was good at. Music was always a very intimate experience to me. And while I found the music business interesting, turning my passion and my outlet into a business just wore me down. It wasn’t fun anymore, in fact it was incredibly stressful. Practicing music was work.

Capitalism is a constraint on freedom. Sometimes, that constraint can be beneficial– capital gets allocated to ambitious people who can create new and revolutionary things. But sometimes it can allocate time and energy away from things that are more important but only work if there is a genuine love for the thing and it doesn’t feel extractive.

I could make a lot of things, but I have become convinced that until I am free to just make something without needing to make money, it will never be what it could be. Either I am sacrificing time working on it to make money somewhere else, or I am turning it into a product with features that are there for making money, not because the user gets the perfect experience.

It isn’t capitalism’s fault that this is how it is. It just makes sense that there are tradeoffs to different things, and with capitalism you often have to trade off making something for yourself or your immediate community for making something for everyone. The 80/20 rule makes sense from a business perspective, but as a creator you will often find yourself among the 20%, and dumbing down the things that you yourself wanted to use to appeal to people you cannot relate to.

We need to win the game, of course. We need to make our millions, so that we can be free to choose what we want to build. We’re still getting there. But the goal of financial freedom, at least for myself, is to be able to answer the question– if I could build anything, with no constraints and no need to profit from it, what would I build?

I think that answering this question will also answer a lot of other questions: what is the next movement of art? how do people find meaning in their lives? how do we build a world where we can all be happy and fulfilled?

This idea of getting resources to buy moments of financial freedom is not new– it’s the essence of Burning Man, isn’t it? But we want it to be permanent, and sustainable. We don’t want to burn money– we just want to not have to worry about it. We want to do what we love, give back to our friends and family, fall in love with someone great and know that we’ll be taken care of when life gets beyond our control.

If I was truly free to build anything I wanted and didn’t have to worry about money, I’d work on solving the problems to get us there. I think a lot of people would.