> The question is whether we are comfortable with an economic model where creative and technical labour consistently produces outsized returns captured by capital, not by the people who actually built the thing.

You have two mistakes in your thinking.

1. You assume that people are not comfortable with this economic model, when in fact millions of people are making the choice to be on the labor side of this model on a daily basis, who could actively afford to be on the ownership side. 2. You mistakenly believe that "the thing" that produces returns is the product/service/offering when in reality it's the entire business.

Let's start with #2.

Producing and capturing value is about more than just building the offering, i.e. coding something. Millions of people have coded something "valuable" and made $0, because building something is not enough. You have to make sure people learn about the thing, and they have to find it good enough to pay you for it, and then actually pay you for it, and you have to be able to make this happen repeatedly, a sufficient number of times and at a high enough price point to sustain and ideally grow the endeavor.

This goes far behind simply building a product. It requires building a business.

And let me tell you, my friend, software engineers at FAANG companies are only building the software, not the business. The people building the business are the ones making the biggest earnings.

Creators in every industry do not like to hear this. Take the music industry, for example. Everyone who can sing or create music hates the "middlemen". The record labels and whatnot. The DJs. They hate the grind. Every creator wishes that simply creating was enough, and many naively believe that it is. But we live in the real world, which has these things called markets and people and psychology. Markets are competitive, and people and psychology are complex, and someone who works to build a business (an offering + market research + a marketing/sales/distribution process + a viable business model) is going to beat the pants off someone who only wants to create the offering and do nothing else.

Building a business is incredibly difficult, and incredibly risky.

It's more likely than not that you will lose a ton of money and a ton of time. Most people would rather not face this challenge, take this risk, or endure these losses. Most would rather learn a fraction of the skills required (e.g. just the programming part, just the design part, just the singing part, etc.), then allow someone else to do the hard work of starting the business and turning it into something from nothing.

Most people would rather sell their time and services for a comfy salary instead of trying to become an owner. Which is why there are large numbers of well-paid white collar workers who make this choice every day, rather than quitting to start a business.

This is not slavery, it's people being content with what they have and trading risk for security. (God I hate writing any sort of sentence "it's not X it's Y" because AI has ruined this phrasing.)