What Capital Never Told You About Rent
Whether you want innovation, profit, cognitive security, or clean air, this is for you.Source: Unequal Scenes – Brazil“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. But when we map the flows of economic value, we see that the modern world has not been built on profit, but on rent. The story most of us grew up on never bothered to make this distinction.Profit is what we earn by creating value, by seeing an opportunity to meet others’ needs, and exchanging it for something you need more – normally something that gives you more options, like money.
- ▪Whether you want innovation, profit, cognitive security, or clean air, this is for you.Source: Unequal Scenes – Brazil“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.
- ▪But when we map the flows of economic value, we see that the modern world has not been built on profit, but on rent.
- ▪The story most of us grew up on never bothered to make this distinction.Profit is what we earn by creating value, by seeing an opportunity to meet others’ needs, and exchanging it for something you need more – normally something that gives
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (Front Page) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.humansontheloop.com/p/rent |
| Publication time | Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:38:48 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-22T15:08:50.979Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-22T15:08:50.979Z |
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Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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What Capital Never Told You About RentLifting the veil on institutional extraction✨ Michael GarfieldSep 22, 2026ShareEvery invoice you have ever paid contains rent you cannot see.In this piece originally published on the Atlas Research Group blog, reformed former Amazon UK finance manager Simon Quarmby and I trace how rent extraction, not profit, built the modern world — from the enclosure of the commons to Big Tech’s current bid for metered intelligence — and why the smartest move for capital right now is to compost it back into the systems sustainable wealth depends on.
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