The most revolutionary, anti-capitalist act right now

Big business, social media, and tech are combining to sow division throughout the world—and rob us of our autonomy in the process.

I’ve always thought of myself as an incredibly successful Anti-Capitalist, Capitalist (ACC).

An ACC uses capitalism to escape capitalism. We’re good at making money, and often enjoy doing so (I love winning new marketing clients). We know that our own ambition often sets other beneficial societal wheels in motion, whether that’s creating jobs that pay for people to live and raise their families, or creating products and services that improve people’s lives.

At the same time, we recognize all the inherent corruptions of an unchecked profit motive, especially paired with bad regulation. We understand that it’s the combination of these two, often in an “unintended consequences” way, that enables things like rapacious monopolies, predatory rent-seeking, or absolutely insane, ahistorical wealth inequality.

But we know and accept that we exist within a capitalist system—i.e., we’re not revolutionaries, and we’re (rightly) weary and skeptical of revolutions. We just believe that the best way to escape capitalism is to use it well, to harness it toward our own needs.

So we don’t fall prey to lifestyle inflation or excessive consumerism. We resist the memetic desire to simply imitate the wealth-worshiping values of others. Our money is used to invest in assets and to generally increase our options and autonomy, even in the face of bad job markets, recessions, or other negative economic conditions.

Our goal is to make money not matter so much in our lives and ultimately, to divorce money entirely from that which gives us purpose and meaning.¹

When I was younger, I thought the most Anti-Capitalist, Capitalist thing you could do is grow your own food.

In the 90s, when I learned about what Monsanto was doing with seeds, I decided it was the most immoral, bad-for-society thing I’d ever heard of. The agriculture conglomerate had patented seeds that were genetically modified so they could only be used once; after that they would be sterile and unable to germinate. The idea was to actively prevent farmers from saving and reusing seeds to plant next season’s harvest, thus making them dependent on an annual contract with Monsanto.

Essentially, Big Ag was robbing society of its most basic capacity for self-reliance, enslaving farmers to its will, and trapping them in a cycle of paying for seeds and the chemicals needed to grow them.

Centuries of wisdom about how to grow food, wiped out by a chemical conglomerate.

What’s worse, as I watched Big Ag destroy small family farms, it appeared there was almost nothing we could do about it—forces of capitalism at work and all that. The Department of Agriculture had approved. Congress was subservient to donor interests and full of cowards. And perhaps most signficantly, the economics of it all left farmers little choice.

But there was one thing we could do: plant a garden and grow our own food.

At a young age, I decided this was the most revolutionary act possible. To grow your own food was to assert your basic right to live and exist outside the dictates of a socio-economic system that was doing everything in its power to make us subservient consumers, dependent on Big Business for our most basic needs.²

Growing your own food was an act of rebellion, but also an economic and environmental benefit. Saved from drives to the neon-lit grocery stores to buy expensive mini-bags of arugula packed into plastic. Savings on gas, savings on transport of food across continents, savings from not buying all that plastic. And a large chunks of your monthly grocery bill instead harvested directly from your little piece of land.

Planting a vegetable garden was the true mark of an Anti-Capitalist Capitalist. It allowed you to at least partially step outside of a completely corrupt system.

But that was then. Today, there’s arguably an equally important mark: reclaiming and reasserting control over our attention.

Of course, I’m not the first to say that our minds have been hacked. That there are Big Corporate Interests who spend billions to ensure we’re addicted and engaged to their mindless scrolling products. Nor am I the first to say that attention is the new currency, because it’s so clearly our attention that is being bought and sold: by social media companies, by streaming services, the news, the reels, the vids—by everyone.