From Feudalism to Subscriptions
Musician and self-taught financial analyst Benn Jordan presents a sweeping historical argument that American capitalism has not merely entered a crisis but has fundamentally ceased to function as described in textbooks. The video essay spans centuries of economic history -- from sharecropping to subprime mortgages to Tik Tok shopping -- building a case that wealth accumulation has detached from productive enterprise and reattached itself to rent extraction, data harvesting, and information control.
The thesis is ambitious, perhaps overly so. Jordan covers ground that would fill several graduate seminars, and the connective tissue between sections sometimes stretches thin. But the central provocation deserves serious engagement: that the ultra-wealthy are not failing to preserve capitalism so much as deliberately moving beyond it.
What if capitalism's death wasn't a mistake or something that the ultra wealthy were trying to avoid? What if the pesky burden of labor laws and taxation could be avoided by deprioritizing the goal of financial profit, or maybe even money itself?
The Velocity Problem
Jordan anchors his economic argument in a fundamental concept: the velocity of money. His farmer-and-mechanic example is textbook Econ 101, and he wields it effectively to illustrate how an economy's health depends not just on how much money exists but how actively it circulates. The observation that private equity holding periods have reached 20-year highs -- meaning acquired companies sit idle rather than being flipped for profit -- is a genuinely striking data point that supports his broader claim.
His Coke Zero analogy, translating wages and investment returns into cans of soda, lands with unexpected clarity. A minimum wage worker in Iowa went from earning 43,360 cans per year in 2019 to 22,170 in 2025. An investor with $100,000 in a Vanguard fund gained 15,000 free cans over the same period. The metaphor makes visible what dollar figures obscure: inflation erodes purchasing power unevenly, functioning as a regressive tax that compounds over time.
The Blitz Scaling Critique
The strongest section of Jordan's analysis examines how venture-capital-fueled growth strategies have distorted markets. His distinction between "fast scaling" and "blitz scaling" is useful, and his lemonade stand metaphor makes the mechanics accessible. The Uber case study is particularly damning.
Uber has had over 25 rounds of funding that it has used to raw dog its way into the cab economy and pay for everything from lobbying local governments to settling hundreds of lawsuits. Naturally, once the traditional cab industry was more or less destroyed, the prices got jacked way up, and between 2018 and 2021 the average price for an Uber ride rose 92%.
This pattern -- subsidize losses to destroy competitors, then raise prices once the market is captured -- is well-documented by economists like Lina Khan, whose 2017 Yale Law Journal article on Amazon's antitrust paradox made precisely this argument. Jordan arrives at the same destination through a different route, and his framing as a broader post-capitalist transition rather than mere monopolistic behavior adds a provocative dimension.
However, critics of this view would note that Uber's stock price has actually recovered substantially since its disastrous IPO, and that the gig economy -- for all its labor problems -- does provide flexibility that some workers genuinely value. The binary framing of "capitalism versus post-capitalism" risks flattening a more complicated reality in which different sectors of the economy operate under different logics simultaneously.
The Rent-Seeking Thesis
Jordan's core argument crystallizes around the transition from an ownership economy to a rental economy. Software subscriptions, streaming services, leased vehicles, subscription meat deliveries -- the examples pile up persuasively. The observation that home ownership has declined sharply among millennials while the wealth gap between renters and homeowners has widened by 50 percent is backed by Federal Reserve survey data and represents one of the most consequential economic shifts of the past two decades.
Most of us do not realize that we are in a constant battle with billionaires who don't want us to own things but rent them. And when we don't own things, we lose control over our own budgets, lives, decisions, and ultimately our own destinies.
The rental economy argument is well-trodden territory -- Cory Doctorow, Aaron Perzanowski, and others have written extensively about the erosion of ownership rights in digital goods. What Jordan adds is the connection to private equity consolidation. When 25 percent of American businesses are owned by private equity (up from 2 percent in the 1990s), and when related businesses are held by the same firms, the conditions for a rent-extracting cartel emerge organically without requiring explicit coordination.
A counterpoint worth considering: subscription models are not inherently exploitative. Netflix replaced a world of late fees, limited selection, and trips to Blockbuster. Adobe Creative Cloud, despite legitimate complaints about its pricing, democratized access to professional tools that once cost thousands of dollars upfront. The question is not whether subscription models exist but whether consumers retain meaningful alternatives -- and on that front, Jordan's concern about market concentration is well-placed.
Data as the New Currency of Power
The final act of Jordan's argument moves from economics to epistemology. When wealth is measured not in dollars but in control over information flows, the game changes entirely. His reference to Cambridge Analytica's role in the 2016 election and Brexit is familiar ground, but he extends the analysis to AI-powered sentiment analysis in ways that feel genuinely urgent.
It would be very naive to think of digital assistants as your assistants. They are very much not there to help you but to help their owners.
Jordan's Stalin anecdote -- where no one in the Soviet leader's motorcade carried cash because their wealth consisted entirely of ideological power -- is the essay's most striking rhetorical move. The comparison between Soviet apparatchiks and Silicon Valley billionaires will strike some as hyperbolic, but the underlying logic is sound: when power derives from controlling systems rather than accumulating currency, money becomes a secondary concern.
The weakest element of this section is its scope. Jordan races through AI-driven advertising, algorithmic content curation, the decline of democratic information ecosystems, and the national debt ($36.5 trillion as of February 2025, with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 123 percent) without giving any single thread sufficient depth. The argument would benefit from a tighter focus on one or two mechanisms rather than attempting to connect everything into a single grand narrative.
What the Economists Say
Jordan describes himself as "a musician with no higher education whatsoever," and that self-awareness is both his greatest strength and his most significant limitation. His outsider perspective allows him to draw connections that academic economists might avoid -- the leap from sharecropping to Spotify subscriptions is the kind of move a disciplinary insider would never attempt. But it also means that some of his historical claims lack nuance. The characterization of the World War II economy as "communism" oversimplifies a complex system of public-private partnership. The New Deal era's high tax rates, while real, coexisted with extensive loopholes that meant effective rates were substantially lower than the nominal 92 percent marginal rate.
Economists like Thomas Piketty, Mariana Mazzucato, and Yanis Varoufakis have made more rigorous versions of many of Jordan's arguments. Piketty's central finding -- that returns on capital consistently outpace economic growth, concentrating wealth over time -- provides the theoretical backbone that Jordan's essay implies but never explicitly cites. Mazzucato's work on the "entrepreneurial state" directly challenges the narrative that private innovation drives growth, demonstrating how public investment underwrites the technologies that private firms later monetize.
Bottom Line
Benn Jordan's essay is more manifesto than analysis, and he acknowledges as much. The historical sweep is impressive if occasionally imprecise, and the central argument -- that American capitalism has been hollowed out and replaced by a rent-extracting, data-harvesting system that concentrates power rather than wealth -- resonates with a growing body of heterodox economic thought. The strongest contributions are the concrete examples: Uber's predatory pricing cycle, the Coke Zero purchasing-power comparison, and the private equity consolidation statistics. The weakest are the moments where the argument reaches for totalizing explanations that cannot bear the weight of the evidence marshaled. Still, for a video essay by a musician who started studying finance out of pandemic-era curiosity, the breadth of research and willingness to follow uncomfortable conclusions to their logical endpoints is genuinely commendable. The question Jordan poses -- whether the endgame of concentrated capital is control rather than profit -- is one that more credentialed voices have been reluctant to ask so directly.