From My Brain to You: The Capitalist System and How to Tame It

In 2026 the world will spend around $740 billion on digital advertising, which is roughly 73 per cent of all the advertising there is. Three companies will take between 62 and 64 per cent of it: Meta at about $243 billion, Google at about $240 billion and Amazon at about $82 billion.

Those are not revenue figures in the ordinary sense. They are the price the world pays for access to human attention, collected by three intermediaries, and they describe an economy in which most people appear not as participants but as inventory.

The watercourse

We will talk about the interconnected and cohabitable business watercourse called the capitalist system. About how human beings are nodes of a savannah where companies interact with them, and how this causes and impacts the lives of these people, and how these people often become owners of immense companies in large proportion, this being consequent to the evolution of humanity led by the hand of a few human beings, while the great majority are simply customers. And how this impacts the conversion of companies, and the advertising within them, which allows them to sell all day long and to have massive and global reach to the whole of humanity, being a reality composed of realities that are woven according to the creators of existence, who turn out to be a few humans, while the rest live inside a game composed by them, which leaves freedom of choice and above all sophistication of thought in order to reach higher levels on the scale of creation for human beings.

And at the same time, how this situation creates trillion-dollar companies according to the desires of humanity, which may or may not in turn be the desires of the companies themselves, in a vicious circle guided by money that at the same time leads towards evolution. In short, some people guide existence towards where they want it to go, and those are all the big companies. Grateful for that art, which allows us to move forward as a race as far as possible without hitting destructive protocols.

It had never been so simple

Stripping bare the economy, the capitalist system and the human being as a node of a machinery.

This is basically the thinking of a brain understanding how the capitalist system and the market work, and how the large conglomerates think, which parametrise their products based on those cited principles. It is not complicated to understand, nor can you contradict it. It is common sense.

If everything can be intermediated and everything can be analysed statistically, then I can sell whatever is most in demand.

Everything in the world can be analysed and everything can be sold. There is no need for you to do it yourself: you can use others to work for you, use someone who hires people to work for you.

So I can sell everything that is possible, according to research based on the statistics of all the products and services in the world, and in that way build an organisation across the whole world.

It was always like this. That is my own research.

In short: you can intermediate everything according to the supply and demand of the market, based on the statistics of products or services anywhere in the world. So if I can intermediate everything and I can analyse everything statistically, I can sell everything.

See what sells the most. Simple. But we will not do it ourselves; we will have someone else do it for us.

I will consider only three types of human being: those who want to do it, those who pay to have it done for them, and those who use others to pay to have it done for them.

How a person becomes a node

The mechanism is not hidden and is worth stating precisely, because the vocabulary of the industry is more honest than the vocabulary of its critics.

A person using a connected device is represented in these systems as an identifier, a profile of attributes inferred from behaviour, and a set of predicted propensities: how likely this identifier is to buy a given category of thing, within a given window, at a given price. When a page or a feed loads, an auction is held for the right to place something in front of that identifier. The auction resolves in milliseconds, several times per screen, billions of times a day, and the winning bid is determined by what the bidder expects that specific person to be worth.

Afterwards the loop closes: whether the person bought is measured and fed back, so the estimate improves. That measurement is the actual product. It is why this industry concentrated and the older one did not: a newspaper could tell an advertiser how many people saw a page, while these systems can tell them which people acted, and that difference is worth more than every creative idea in the history of the business.

This is the savannah. Companies move across a terrain of people, each person legible as a set of probabilities, and the ones that read the terrain best grow. There is no malice in the design and no central plan in it. There is an incentive, which is that accurate measurement of behaviour at scale is the most valuable commodity in commerce, and everything else followed from that.

Who holds the wheel

The second fact is in the documents these companies file every year.

Mark Zuckerberg controls 60.8 per cent of the voting power of Meta while holding roughly 13.5 per cent of its shares. Larry Page and Sergey Brin together control 52.7 per cent of the voting power of Alphabet. The mechanism is a dual-class share structure: the founders' shares carry ten votes each and the public's carry one.

In 2026 shareholders at both companies voted on proposals to end that arrangement. The proposals received 26.5 per cent support at Meta and 31.2 per cent at Alphabet. Both failed, and they failed for the reason they were filed: the only votes that could abolish the structure are the votes the structure assigns to the people it protects. No commentary improves on that sentence. It is simply how the instrument works, it is disclosed in full, and every investor who bought those shares bought them knowing it.

So the claim that a small number of individuals direct a large part of what humanity sees, buys and believes is not a theory. It is an arrangement described in a proxy statement, with percentages.

Nobody designed this

It is tempting to read those two facts together as evidence of a plan. The evidence does not support that, and the truth is more interesting.

Dual-class structures exist because founders asked for them and investors accepted them in order to be allowed into the deal. Advertising concentrated because measurement rewards scale, and scale compounds: more users produce more behavioural data, which produces better prediction, which produces higher prices per impression, which funds more users. Nobody had to intend the outcome. The incentives selected for it the way a landscape selects for a species, and the firms that fitted the landscape grew into it.

That distinction matters, and not for politeness. A designed system can be redesigned by whoever designed it. A system produced by incentives changes only when the incentives change, which is a far harder and slower thing, and which is why nearly every proposal to reform this industry addresses conduct rather than the measurement advantage underneath it.

What competition actually does

Against all of the above sits the force that has done more for ordinary people than any policy of the last century, and it is worth setting out with prices rather than with adjectives.

Where entry into a market is possible, competition moves the surplus from the producer to the customer, and the evidence is not theoretical. It is the price of things.

Putting a kilogram into low Earth orbit cost roughly $54,000 on the Space Shuttle. On a reused Falcon 9 it now costs in the region of $3,000, and the vehicle that flew to orbit for the first time last week is aimed at a figure closer to $100. That market had been stable for forty years. One entrant, with a different idea about whether the hardware should be thrown away, moved it by more than ninety per cent, and everyone who buys a launch today captured the difference, including the entrant's competitors.

A lithium-ion battery pack cost around $1,100 per kilowatt-hour in 2010. In 2025 the average was $108, which is ninety per cent lower, and the figure for stationary storage fell forty-five per cent in a single year to $70. Nobody legislated that. Overcapacity, a shift to cheaper chemistry and a very large number of manufacturers trying to undercut each other did it.

Sequencing a human genome cost $2.7 billion in 2003. In 2026 a consumer can buy one for between $169 and $495.

In each case the gain went to the buyer rather than the seller, which is precisely what a competitive market is for, and in each case it happened because entry was possible. That is the whole condition. Competition is not a moral force and it does not care who deserves what; it is simply what happens to prices when a newcomer is allowed in.

Which is also why it has not happened everywhere. In the advertising market described earlier, the price paid by advertisers has not collapsed, because the product being sold is measurement and measurement improves with scale: the larger the audience, the better the prediction, the more each impression is worth. A newcomer cannot undercut that by being cheaper, because the thing being bought is accuracy.

So competition did not disappear from that market. It moved. It now takes place inside the platform rather than between platforms: millions of advertisers bidding ferociously against one another, in an auction run by a party that is not competing in it. The contest is real and the surplus it generates goes to the auctioneer. Understanding that one displacement explains more about the modern economy than any argument about monopoly.

The door

The other half of this, which is as true and much less reported, is that the people holding the wheel today came out of the crowd one generation ago, and that the cost of attempting what they attempted has collapsed.

Consider what reaching a global audience required within living memory. A factory or a printing press. A distributor with shelf space. A bank willing to lend against assets you did not have. A licence, in many countries. Permission, at several desks, from people who could say no without explaining.

Consider what it requires now. A cloud account, billed by the hour and cancellable. A developer account costing less than a pair of shoes per year. A self-serve advertising account with no minimum spend, on the same auction described above, which will sell a person in another hemisphere the attention of a stranger for a few cents. Payment rails that will take money from any country into an account opened on a phone. None of these asks who you are, where you were educated, or whether anyone vouches for you.

That is a genuine historical rupture and it deserves to be stated without decoration: the permission layer is gone. For the first time, the gate between an individual with an idea and the entire population of the planet is priced in cents and granted automatically.

The odds, without decoration

It is also true that almost nobody gets through, and any account of this that omits the next paragraph is advertising rather than journalism.

Of new businesses in the United States, about 20 per cent fail in the first year, about 49 per cent within five years and about 65 per cent within ten. Among high-growth ventures specifically, the failure rate is approximately 90 per cent. For companies that attract professional investment, research on roughly 2,000 venture-backed firms found that 75 per cent never returned cash to their investors and that investors lost their entire stake in 30 to 40 per cent of cases. The probability that a seed-stage, venture-backed company reaches a billion-dollar valuation is in the order of one in forty, and that is already a population filtered by investors paid to select winners.

The returns are distributed accordingly. In the portfolios that fund this economy, one or two investments out of thirty generate 80 to 90 per cent of everything; one long-running study found that 6 per cent of deals produced 60 per cent of returns. This is the shape of the whole system: a very small number of enormous outcomes paying for an enormous number of small failures.

Both halves are true at the same time. The door is open, unlocked and free, and most of the people who walk through it will not arrive anywhere. Neither fact cancels the other, and a person deciding what to do with their life is entitled to hear both.

Who owns the machine

There is a third position besides node and founder, and it is the one most people overlook: owner.

In the United States, 58 per cent of adults own stock in some form, down from 62 per cent a year earlier. Ownership of the actual value is far narrower. The top 1 per cent hold roughly half of all stock market wealth, about $31.3 trillion between some 3.3 million people. The bottom half of the population holds around 1 per cent of it, roughly $628 billion between 165 million people, which works out at about $3,800 each. Among adults in households earning over $100,000, 87 per cent own stock; among those under $50,000, 28 per cent do.

This is the quiet asymmetry of the arrangement. Being a customer of these companies is the default state and requires nothing. Being an owner of them requires a decision and, before the decision, money that is not already committed to rent and food. The second condition is the one that does most of the sorting, and no amount of resolve substitutes for it.

The cohabitation

Seen whole, this is not a hierarchy of winners and losers but a set of players who cannot function without each other, each supplying something the others cannot.

The customer supplies attention, money and, increasingly, the behavioural data that makes the whole apparatus work. Without them there is no terrain to read.

The builder supplies the one thing no institution can produce on demand, which is somebody willing to spend years on an outcome that probably will not arrive. Their function in the system is recombination: taking parts that already exist and arranging them in a way nobody had tried.

The investor supplies money shifted forward in time and, more importantly, absorbs the failures. The power law described above is not a defect of venture capital; it is its job. One or two outcomes in thirty pay for the rest that did not work, which is how an economy can afford to run thousands of experiments that mostly fail.

The employee supplies execution, and since equity compensation became standard, is the main route by which a person who founded nothing nevertheless ends up owning something. That instrument is the bridge between the two states described in this piece, and it is the most underrated piece of financial engineering of the last fifty years.

The platform supplies distribution and measurement, and takes a toll for it. The supplier of the means of production, whether a foundry or a seller of accelerators, takes a toll at the other end. Both are intermediaries that have made themselves unavoidable, and both are paid accordingly.

The regulator supplies the boundary, slowly and usually late, which is a feature rather than a fault: a referee who changes the rules in the middle of the game does more damage than one who changes them afterwards.

And underneath all of them sit the arrangements that make the game playable at all, which are legal rather than technological and are almost never mentioned.

Limited liability, which allows a person to risk a venture without risking their family's existence, and without which almost nobody would ever start anything. Enforceable contracts, which allow a person to do business with a stranger on another continent whose language they do not speak. Survivable bankruptcy, which ends a company without ending a life, and which is cited repeatedly as a reason why attempts are denser in some jurisdictions than in others. Property records and payment rails, which make ownership transferable and money movable.

Those are the protocols. None of them runs on goodwill. They hold because every player needs the others to keep playing, and a participant who breaks them is removed from the game by the other participants rather than by any authority. Cohabitation here is not harmony. It is mutual dependence, which is a great deal sturdier.

What the real barrier is

And also, how individual interests and individual freedom stand ready so that any human being can grow as much as they wish, the obstacles to getting wherever you want to get being mental myths, in order to stop being a node and to become a free and sophisticated creator, a worthy human being of existence.

Which allows the honest version of the question of what actually stops a person.

It is not permission, which as shown above is now free and automatic. It is not information, which is also free, and more completely free than at any previous moment. It is not capital in the early stages, because the early stages now cost almost nothing.

It is time and the capacity to absorb risk. Building something that compounds takes years during which it pays nothing, and the ability to survive those years without income is distributed as unevenly as the equity above. That is the binding constraint, it is material rather than mental, and it is the reason the same handful of universities and cities keep producing the same handful of outcomes.

Everything else, though, really is in the head. The belief that you need to be chosen. The belief that someone must grant you a licence, a platform, an audience or a title. The belief that the people on the other side of the wheel were a different species rather than people who were, one generation ago, exactly where everyone else is. Those beliefs were accurate for most of human history and stopped being accurate within the last twenty years, and a great many people are still operating on the old information.

How this shaped the economy, and what it did to the idea of a person

And how this has been shaping the economy throughout history, and not only the economy but the sense of humanity itself. Going deep into both, bearing in mind that history, the now and the future are built by us, the humans, no matter where we come from, but it does matter where we go, from the origin of determining consciousness.

None of this began in Silicon Valley. The same operation has been performed perhaps a dozen times in recorded history: somebody takes what already exists, arranges it differently, and the arrangement spreads until it has rebuilt the economy around itself. What is less often noticed is that each of those rearrangements also changed the answer to a different question, which is what a human being is for.

Surplus and the ledger. Agriculture produced more food than was eaten, and surplus had to be counted. The counting came first and the writing came out of it: the clay tokens used in Mesopotamia to record quantities of grain and livestock are the direct ancestors of writing. The economy gained property and debt. The person gained a place: you were where you were from, and what you were owed and owed to others.

The coin. When value became portable and anonymous, a stranger stopped being a threat and became a counterparty. Trade no longer required kinship or a shared god. The person became someone who could be dealt with on terms, by people who knew nothing else about them, which is the beginning of the modern idea that what you can do matters more than who your family is.

The ledger with two sides. Double-entry bookkeeping, codified in Venice in 1494, looks like an accounting technicality and is not. It made an enterprise auditable, which made it fundable, which made it able to outlive the person who started it. The firm became a thing separate from its owner. For the first time an institution could be responsible for something, and a person could put their work into a structure that would survive them.

The pooled risk. The joint-stock company let strangers share a venture, and limited liability, generalised in the nineteenth century, let them do it without wagering their homes. This is the quiet hinge of the entire modern economy. Before it, attempting something large meant risking everything you and your family had; afterwards, it meant risking what you put in. The number of people willing to attempt anything changed permanently.

The press. The cost of copying a mind collapsed, and authority moved from whoever held the manuscript to whoever could argue well enough to be reprinted. The person became a potential author.

The engine. Work was decoupled from muscle, wind and water, and gathered into factories, and the day was divided by a clock instead of by daylight. The economy gained wages and cities. The person gained an occupation, and with it the modern habit of answering the question of who you are with the name of your job.

Scale. Electricity and the assembly line made volume the organising principle of production, and gave the age its vocabulary: the masses, mass production, the mass market. The person became a unit of demand, standardised like the goods.

The box. The shipping container, introduced in 1956, cut the cost of moving goods so far that production detached from consumption geographically. The person discovered that their work could be done, at a quarter of the price, by someone they would never meet.

The transistor and the network. The cost of copying and distributing fell to approximately zero, which produced goods that cost nothing to reproduce, markets where the leader takes most of the value, and the measurement economy described earlier in this piece. The person became a profile: an identifier, a history, a predicted propensity.

Set them in a row and the sequence is legible. Land, then craft, then occupation, then consumer, then node. At every stage the economy was rebuilt by a small number of people doing something unreasonable with the tools of their moment, and at every stage the rest of the population inherited both the benefits and a new definition of what they were.

The open question of this decade is what follows node, and the honest answer is that the position is unoccupied. The permission layer has gone, the cost of attempting has collapsed, and the tools that used to require an institution now require an account. Whether the next answer is owner, or creator, or something nobody has named, is not decided by technology. It is decided by how many people act as though the door is open, because for most of history it genuinely was not and the belief that it still is not is the single most expensive inheritance of the old world.

What would become of humanity without them

Asking at the end: what would become of humanity without people who step out of the mass towards their objectives? Without romanticising it, because at the end of the day it is what a sane person does with themselves.

The answer, stated without romance, is that nothing would move. Every item in the list above came from somebody who was not satisfied with the arrangement they were born into, and who was, by the standards of their neighbours, difficult. They were not better people. Many were worse. A considerable number of them were ruined, and for every one whose name survives there were many whose attempts cost them everything and left no record at all, which is a fact that any honest account of this has to carry.

Nor were they self-made in the sense the phrase usually implies. Every one of them inherited institutions they did not build, knowledge they did not discover and a legal order that let them try. The container ship needed the limited company; the software company needed the container ship. Recombination is the mechanism, and recombination requires a stock of things already made by people who are dead.

So the romance is unnecessary and also inaccurate. Stepping out of the mass is not heroism and it is not a gift. A society that produces none of them does not collapse. It simply stops: it keeps doing competently what it already knew how to do, until something external arrives that it has no answer for.

Where a person came from has never been the variable. Where they decided to go has been the only one.

Being honest, to all of you: if a machine exists it has a positive side, you can use it as you please to grow and to orient yourself towards wherever seems right to you, as long as you use your environment and what you know analogically towards your mission, among other deeper things that every respectable human being should know from beginning to end, because, well, we are human, and we were born to evolve constantly towards the unlimited. So, do you feel proud to be a human being today? Because you have the machine free to direct existence in this game of powers called the capitalist system.

What it adds up to

A system in which three companies intermediate most of the attention on Earth, in which three individuals hold majority control of two of them by an instrument that cannot be voted away, in which the cost of trying has fallen to near zero and the probability of succeeding remains brutally low, and in which the distinction between being used by the machine and owning a piece of it comes down, for most people, to whether there was anything left over at the end of the month.

None of that was planned. All of it is disclosed. And the only thing that reliably moves a person from one side of it to the other is ownership of something, which is the one subject on which this entire industry maintains a complete and respectful silence.

The objective of this is, as such, an invitation to the creation of existence for all possible players and new promises who have what is needed to achieve it, because it is simply fun to watch a soul burn towards where its own evolutionary DNA dictates, but in a sophisticated and elegant way instead of a desperate and hurried one, and how this improves people's lives and likewise contributes to the evolution of humanity, respecting protocols all the time, because it is the only real way that exists of getting where you want to get. And in the end, a world where the cards and the plays change and improve humanity on the basis of pure intellect and individual elegance. For that reason, it is great to be a creator of existence who defines and creates the reality we live in on this planet, because in the end each person is responsible for their own brain.

Sources

Filed documents. Alphabet's proxy statement for its 2026 annual meeting, for share classes, votes per share and the outcome of the shareholder proposal on the dual-class structure (Form DEF 14A). Meta's proxy statement for the same year, for Mr Zuckerberg's voting power and economic ownership and for the equivalent proposal; the shareholder side of that filing is public as an exempt solicitation.

Institutional data. Stock ownership rates are from Gallup's annual Economy and Personal Finance survey (April 2026). The distribution of equity wealth is from the Federal Reserve's distributional financial accounts, as reported by Axios. Business survival rates are from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. The study of roughly 2,000 venture-backed companies is the Harvard Business School research widely cited in the literature on venture outcomes; the concentration of returns figure is from Horsley Bridge's analysis of its own portfolios.

Forecasts, identified as such in the text. Global digital advertising spend and the platform shares for 2026 are projections published by eMarketer and reported in the trade press (Marketing-Interactive, The Next Web). Figures for startup failure and the probability of reaching a billion-dollar valuation are compiled estimates and vary by methodology and by definition of a startup.