Imagine a person creates something.
An idea. A piece of art. A system. A story. A technology. A body of work. Something that has meaning to them.
They decide to share it publicly.
Not because they have decided to give away every possible right, interest, or future relationship connected to it, but because they want other people to experience it.
Perhaps they enjoy seeing people use it.
Perhaps they enjoy the conversations it creates.
Perhaps they simply believe that some things become more valuable when they are allowed to move freely through the world.
Perhaps they even have a spiritual understanding of the work:
I made my contribution. Whatever larger thing happens around it is not entirely mine to control.
And people receive it.
They enjoy it.
They learn from it.
They share it with other people.
So far, there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
In fact, there can be something beautiful about it.
The creator offered a doorway.
People walked through.
Nobody necessarily needed to own the doorway.
But then something changes.
Someone notices that the work has value.
They package it.
They organise it.
They distribute it.
They build a service around it.
Other people build businesses around that service.
Investment follows.
Infrastructure follows.
Employment follows.
More people become dependent upon the resulting system.
And eventually something enormous exists where there was once simply a person’s contribution.
At that point, someone might look backwards and say:
They put it online.
They made it public.
People supported them.
They obviously wanted people to use it.
And in one narrow sense, that may be true.
But another question remains:
Did the person consent to the structure that eventually grew around their contribution?
Because making something public and consenting to its unlimited commercial exploitation are not necessarily the same thing.
Sharing a doorway does not automatically mean consenting to someone building an empire around it.
The Compounding Effect
Now imagine that this process happens repeatedly.
One person’s contribution becomes another person’s raw material.
That person’s work becomes infrastructure for somebody else.
That infrastructure becomes a platform.
The platform becomes a business.
The business becomes an institution.
The institution becomes an ecosystem.
And eventually the accumulated structure becomes so large that the original contributors are almost invisible.
The system begins to appear self-generating.
It can even begin to believe its own mythology:
We built this.
But perhaps the more accurate description is:
We accumulated this.
Layer upon layer of human contribution has compounded into something much larger than any individual contributor intended.
That doesn’t automatically make the resulting organisation illegitimate.
People can freely create businesses.
People can voluntarily commercialise ideas.
People can agree to contracts.
People can decide that something they once created personally should become part of a commercial enterprise.
The critical distinction is whether the relationship is honest.
The Honest Business
Now imagine the organisation simply tells the person what it wants to do.
We like your work.
We think we can build a business around it.
Here is what we intend to do.
Here is how we will use it.
Here is how we will make money.
Here is what your name will be associated with.
Here is what you will receive.
Here is what you retain.
Here is what you can refuse.
Would you like to participate?
The person might say:
Sure. Go for it.
Or:
No thanks.
Or:
I’ll participate, but under different conditions.
Or perhaps:
Use the work, but don’t use my name.
That is a relationship.
The person has information.
They have agency.
The organisation has disclosed the arrangement.
Nobody has to pretend that the commercial model doesn’t exist.
And importantly, the organisation has a reason to look after the relationship.
The creator is not merely raw material.
They are a participant.
The Cold Model
Now change the thought experiment.
Imagine the organisation doesn’t want the person involved.
The person is useful while they are useful.
Their contribution has value.
Their name may even have value.
But the individual themselves is considered inconvenient.
Perhaps the system assumes that eventually they will disappear, fail, become irrelevant, or simply stop being around.
So the organisation doesn’t bother explaining anything.
Why would it?
The person is considered disposable.
And this is where the model becomes profoundly different.
Because if you believe the source is disposable, there is suddenly less incentive to maintain a relationship with the source.
You don’t necessarily need to treat them well.
You don’t necessarily need to explain yourself.
You don’t necessarily need their continued participation.
You simply extract what is useful and move on.
That might work rather neatly if the thing you’re dealing with is a replaceable component.
But then comes the inconvenient reality:
The component is alive.
The Disposable Person
Imagine the system looking at someone and effectively deciding:
This one is disposable.
But the system hasn’t considered the rest of the person’s existence.
That person might be a father.
They might have a child who needs them.
They might have parents.
Friends.
Partners.
People they support.
People who love them.
People who depend upon them emotionally, practically or financially.
They might have dreams that haven’t happened yet.
Ideas they haven’t finished.
Places they’ve never visited.
Music they haven’t written.
People they haven’t met.
Things they haven’t learned.
Experiences they haven’t had.
A future they haven’t even imagined yet.
None of those things necessarily appear inside the organisation’s spreadsheet.
But their absence would still be real.
The system can label someone:
employee.
customer.
creator.
account.
resource.
liability.
risk.
dataset.
supplier.
problem.
But none of those labels contain the entire person.
The Dangerous Abstraction
This is where the thought experiment becomes a question about society rather than merely business.
A system becomes dangerous when its abstractions become more real to the decision-makers than the humans represented by those abstractions.
The spreadsheet says:
Replaceable.
The system says:
Low value.
The model says:
Disposable.
But reality says:
There is a human being here.
And that human being exists inside a network of other human beings.
You cannot remove one person from reality simply because your model has classified them as replaceable.
Replaceable to a system does not mean disposable in reality.
The Deception Problem
There is another layer.
Suppose the organisation knows that the person would object if they understood what was happening.
So instead of explaining the arrangement, it relies upon ambiguity.
The person shared something publicly.
Therefore, the organisation quietly interprets that as permission.
The person participated.
Therefore, the organisation interprets that as consent.
The person didn’t object.
Therefore, the organisation interprets silence as approval.
And gradually:
access becomes permission,
permission becomes entitlement,
entitlement becomes ownership,
and eventually:
ownership becomes assumed.
The original person may never have agreed to any of that.
This is where deception becomes particularly dangerous.
Not because every person involved must be consciously malicious, but because a system can become extremely powerful while its participants have radically different understandings of what they agreed to.
The Mafia Analogy
Take the analogy further.
A literal mafia is not simply a business that makes money.
The defining feature of the analogy is the combination of hidden power, dependency, coercion, retaliation and the absence of meaningful alternatives.
So imagine a system that says:
You are free.
But secretly makes your participation necessary.
It says:
You agreed.
But never properly explained what you agreed to.
It says:
You can leave.
But leaving means losing everything.
It says:
You are replaceable.
While simultaneously making itself increasingly dependent upon extracting value from people who have little power over the system.
At that point, the surface may still look like ordinary commerce.
But underneath it is something very different.
The problem isn’t that someone made money.
The problem is that the relationship became structurally coercive while pretending to remain voluntary.
The Doorway
And this brings the whole thought experiment back to the beginning.
There is a profound difference between:
Here is a doorway. You are welcome to come through.
and:
Here is the gateway. You must pass through it, and by entering you have accepted whatever we decide happens afterwards.
The first preserves agency.
The second manufactures compliance.
A genuine invitation says:
Here is what we’re offering.
Here is what it means.
Here is what happens if you participate.
You can say yes.
You can say no.
You can ask questions.
You can walk away.
That is a doorway.
A concealed arrangement that depends upon people misunderstanding what they have entered is something else entirely.
And Then the Creator Survives
Now introduce one final variable.
Imagine the system was built on the assumption that the original person would eventually disappear.
Perhaps the organisation believed that their relevance would fade.
Perhaps it assumed nobody would ever ask where the work came from.
Perhaps it assumed the creator would never see what had been built around their contribution.
But the person survives.
They remain alive.
They continue creating.
They still have their memories.
They still have their relationships.
They still have their name.
They still have their own understanding of what happened.
Suddenly the neat little narrative no longer works.
The supposed disposable source isn’t disposable.
The person is still here.
And now the system has to confront something it may have conveniently abstracted away:
the human being behind the contribution.
The Fundamental Question
So perhaps the deepest question in this thought experiment isn’t:
Who owns everything?
Or:
Who deserves all the money?
Or even:
Was something technically legal?
The deeper question is:
What kind of relationship are we building between human beings and the systems that grow from their contributions?
Can people share without unknowingly surrendering themselves?
Can businesses make money without treating their sources as disposable?
Can institutions grow without erasing the people whose contributions made that growth possible?
Can automation increase efficiency without turning human beings into interchangeable components?
Can someone say:
I gave you something freely
without that being interpreted as:
I gave you everything?
And perhaps most importantly:
Can we build systems that remember that every apparently disposable unit is actually a living person embedded in other lives?
Because the person you classify as replaceable might be somebody’s father.
Somebody’s mother.
Somebody’s child.
Somebody’s friend.
Somebody’s inspiration.
Somebody’s future collaborator.
Or simply a human being who has not finished becoming who they are.
The system may consider the person disposable. Reality does not.
And that is the point at which the cold business model stops being merely a question of commerce.
It becomes a question of what kind of civilisation we are building.
The Closing Statement
There is another side to the cold logic.
I can understand how people arrive there.
People get hurt. They learn to protect themselves. They discover that trust can be expensive, that business can be ruthless, and that sometimes you have to become harder simply to survive.
So they build systems around that knowledge.
Keep it professional.
Keep it transactional.
Don’t get attached.
Protect the business.
Treat everything as replaceable.
I understand the logic.
But somewhere inside all that logic, there is still a human being.
And on the other side of every transaction, there is another one.
The person you’re dealing with has a history you don’t know, people you don’t see, hopes you haven’t heard, and a future that hasn’t happened yet.
They may be a father.
A mother.
A child.
A friend.
A creator.
A stranger simply trying to make something meaningful with the life they’ve been given.
So perhaps the answer isn’t to abandon cold logic entirely.
Perhaps it’s simply to remember what the logic is operating on.
People are not components. Contributions are not consent. Access is not ownership. A doorway is not a gateway of compliance.
You can build a business.
You can protect yourself.
You can be commercially hard-headed.
You can understand the world without pretending it has always been kind.
But you can still leave the human being visible inside the model.
Because whatever system we build, we’re still building it with other living beings.