by EGreg | 2025-12-08 08:42:39+00:00
I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom.

How to fix it: let shareholders be gradually bought out—much as slaveholders in Europe were—by (gasp) utility tokenholders. Think Shares in Disney Corp vs Disney Dollars. You transition from extractive shareholders to people who actually use and depend on the ecosystem. That eliminates the parasitic shareholder class that drives most of late-stage capitalist enshittification, rent extraction, and negative externalities.

For clarity, here are just some of those externalities that flow directly from quarterly-earnings-driven incentives:

destruction of ecosystems deforestation and rainforest loss collapse of fisheries and ocean systems factory farming / industrialized animal suffering desertification of farmland strip mining and toxic waste dumping privatization and depletion of freshwater carbon emissions and climate destabilization environmental injustice and poisoning of local communities lobbying to block regulation and accountability social media addiction design for engagement metrics monopolization and killing off smaller competitors offshoring, wage stagnation, and worker precarity financialization of everything (housing, healthcare, education) political capture to preserve the whole machine

This is not some random accident, this is the inevitable equilibrium of shareholder primacy.

The entire model of late-stage shareholding is flawed. Corporations exist because governments grant them charters. Government sets the rules for how shares work—and can change those rules. Buying shares is not like buying bonds. Shares are residual claims with far higher risk. So we can absolutely add another risk: that shareholders may be gradually bought out and the institution wound down, the same way the FDR administration forced private gold holders into a buyout under the Gold Reserve Act.

That was far more authoritarian, because gold is a physical asset you own in self-custody. Shares, on the other hand, only exist because a third-party company continues to operate in ways that profit you. That dependency already implies higher risk. Therefore, we can add the additional risk of a structured, government-mandated transition away from extractive shareholder capitalism—just like Europe did when ending slavery. And let's be honest: late-stage financialized shareholding has been a blight on the planet.

And none of this is historically radical. Before the modern era, the idea that shareholders should dominate everything simply didn’t exist.

Pre-1960s:For much of the 20th century, a broader "stakeholder theory" was the norm. Management balanced employees, customers, suppliers, and communities—not just shareholders.

1960s:The turn began with Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only responsibility is maximizing shareholder profits (1970 NYT Magazine). 1980s:Shareholder primacy took over.

Hostile takeovers forced boards into short-termism. Executive compensation was tied tightly to stock price. Financialization embedded all of this into corporate DNA.

Shareholders were not always in control. Their dominance "waxed and waned," and the current form of shareholder primacy is a late-20th-century financial ideology posing as an eternal law of nature.

If that ideology got us enshittification, ecological collapse, and a sociopathic corporate culture, then yes, we can fix it the same way other harmful institutions were fixed: buy the incumbents out and transition to a saner governance model.