I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom.

How to fix it: let shareholders be gradually bought out—much as slaveholders in Europe were—by (gasp) utility tokenholders. Think Shares in Disney Corp vs Disney Dollars. You transition from extractive shareholders to people who actually use and depend on the ecosystem. That eliminates the parasitic shareholder class that drives most of late-stage capitalist enshittification, rent extraction, and negative externalities.

For clarity, here are just some of those externalities that flow directly from quarterly-earnings-driven incentives:

  destruction of ecosystems
  deforestation and rainforest loss
  collapse of fisheries and ocean systems
  factory farming / industrialized animal suffering
  desertification of farmland
  strip mining and toxic waste dumping
  privatization and depletion of freshwater
  carbon emissions and climate destabilization
  environmental injustice and poisoning of local communities
  lobbying to block regulation and accountability
  social media addiction design for engagement metrics
  monopolization and killing off smaller competitors
  offshoring, wage stagnation, and worker precarity
  financialization of everything (housing, healthcare, education)
  political capture to preserve the whole machine

The entire model of late-stage shareholding is flawed. Corporations exist because governments grant them charters. Government sets the rules for how shares work—and can change those rules. Buying shares is not like buying bonds. Shares are residual claims with far higher risk. So we can absolutely add another risk: that shareholders may be gradually bought out and the institution wound down, the same way the FDR administration forced private gold holders into a buyout under the Gold Reserve Act.

That was far more authoritarian, because gold is a physical asset you own in self-custody. Shares, on the other hand, only exist because a third-party company continues to operate in ways that profit you. That dependency already implies higher risk. Therefore, we can add the additional risk of a structured, government-mandated transition away from extractive shareholder capitalism—just like Europe did when ending slavery. And let's be honest: late-stage financialized shareholding has been a blight on the planet.

And none of this is historically radical. Before the modern era, the idea that shareholders should dominate everything simply didn’t exist.

Pre-1960s:For much of the 20th century, a broader "stakeholder theory" was the norm. Management balanced employees, customers, suppliers, and communities—not just shareholders.

1960s:The turn began with Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only responsibility is maximizing shareholder profits (1970 NYT Magazine). 1980s:Shareholder primacy took over.

  Hostile takeovers forced boards into short-termism.
  Executive compensation was tied tightly to stock price.
  Financialization embedded all of this into corporate DNA.

If that ideology got us enshittification, ecological collapse, and a sociopathic corporate culture, then yes, we can fix it the same way other harmful institutions were fixed: buy the incumbents out and transition to a saner governance model.

While I get your frustration, the root cause of the issue is not shareholder value maximisation, it's the failure modes of the free market.

Monopolies, lack of transparency, lack of competition, regulatory capture, failure to price in externalities are what allows this to happen.

And these failure modes are allowed to persist due to lobbying, normalised corruption, and the desire for a small/weak government.

The latter is useful for corporations, as it limits regulation, which is the main way these failure modes are supposed to be managed. Yes, too much/bad regulation is detrimental, but so is no/weak regulation.

The more baffling thing is that the modal American voter supports lax regulation and pro-corporate rules at their own personal expense.

I'm curious what you think VCs, etc. who are investing in all these private companies want to do?

The only difference with public companies is we actually have data about their finances.

The private companies are doing it all under wraps.

We can still have shares and pay out dividend. Then when you want to sell your shares they are like a fixed price?