Capitalism is not in and of itself evil. It emerged as a decentralised coordination mechanism: a way to allocate resources, distribute risk, and accelerate innovation in a world too complex for central planning. Markets lifted living standards, expanded technological capabilities, and enabled mobility across class and geography. Yet the same dynamics that reward initiative also reward extraction when guardrails fail. Predatory capitalism is not a different system so much as capitalism driven into pathological amplitude, where competitive advantage shifts into financial engineering, regulatory arbitrage, monopolistic consolidation, and the conversion of shared infrastructure into private leverage. The moral dimension matters, but structural incentives tend to outrun individual virtue. Responsible capitalism has existed in short intervals — regulated, reciprocal, genuinely productive — but it has not been the prevailing mode for a long time.
From the perspective of the shifting geometry of the communicative field, predation appears as a statistical attractor in systems where signals propagate faster than accountability. Information asymmetry, velocity, and scale bias the field toward actors who can convert complexity into concentrated advantage. The drift occurs not because people are uniquely immoral but because the feedback loops reward strategies that externalise cost and internalise gain, generating recursive amplification of behaviours that destabilise the wider system. Improvement becomes a design question rather than a moral one: reshape incentives, dampen harmful amplifiers, strengthen counter-gradients, and reward coherence over extraction. Getting past the bad side of the framework depends less on political ideology than on whether the system can be tuned so that predation is no longer the lowest-resistance path through the noise.
Capitalism is easier to understand if we treat it as a communication system rather than an ideology. Prices, contracts, incentives, and policy signals form a dynamic orbit between two necessary poles: the creation of wealth and the reproduction of the social and ecological conditions that make wealth possible. When the tension between these poles is balanced, capitalism delivers what it is best at: distributed decision-making, rapid innovation, and the ability to solve real problems through local knowledge and adaptive feedback.
Where it fails is equally clear. Left unmanaged, successful firms and asset holders reshape the rules around themselves. Competitive pressure drifts into monopoly; investment drifts into speculation; innovation drifts into extraction. Volatility and harm are pushed onto communities and environments least able to absorb them. In these moments the system is still called “capitalism,” but the underlying geometry has collapsed. One pole dominates, the orbit tightens, and the society begins paying costs that do not appear on any balance sheet until the damage is already done.
A realistic path forward does not require replacing capitalism. It requires restoring the recursive tension that keeps it viable. This means enforcing limits on concentration of power, taxing speculation while rewarding productive and low-carbon investment, building automatic stabilisers that respond when inequality or ecological damage pass critical thresholds, and giving workers, communities, and future-impact representatives a binding role in corporate governance. None of this is ideological. It is design.
If the world wants a capitalism that is stable, coherent, and survivable, the task is not to moralise it but to tune it. A system will always follow the path of least resistance; the challenge is to ensure that the easiest path is not the one that destroys the conditions on which the rest of life depends.
Daedelus Kite 