Ethics Is a Feature

There’s a story unfolding right now that I can’t stop thinking about. A company refused to let its technology be used in ways that violated its principles. Not because of PR. Not because of legal exposure. Because the people running the company genuinely believed it was wrong. The response from the establishment was swift: they were labeled a risk. A liability. Meanwhile, a competitor jumped in and said they’d do whatever was asked, no questions.

And something interesting happened. People noticed. They didn’t just notice, they moved. They cancelled accounts with the company that bent the knee and signed up with the one that stood its ground. Not because of features. Not because of pricing. Because one company stood for something and the other didn’t.

I think people are starving for this.

The Hunger

We live in a moment where most people feel like they’re being marketed at constantly. Every interaction is optimized to extract something from them. Every “personalized experience” is just a more sophisticated funnel. Every “we care about our customers” mission statement is wallpaper over a growth-at-all-costs machine.

People know it. They feel it in their bones. And they’re exhausted by it.

So when a company actually means what it says, when the actions match the words, even when it costs them something, it registers. Not as a marketing strategy, but as relief. Finally, someone who isn’t trying to pick my pocket while shaking my hand.

The Exhaustion of Being a Target

Ask most people and they’ll tell you their phone is listening to them. That they talked about hiking boots at dinner and saw ads for hiking boots an hour later. Whether or not that’s literally true is almost beside the point. People believe it because the world they live in makes it completely plausible. We’ve built a commercial ecosystem so pervasive in its surveillance and so aggressive in its targeting that “my phone is spying on me” is the most reasonable explanation most people can come up with.

But it’s not really the surveillance that bothers people. It’s the leverage.

The price isn’t the price. The price for you is probably different than the price for me, based on what some algorithm has determined about our willingness to pay. Shop for an airline ticket today, check again tomorrow, and watch the price inflate. Look at a hotel room twice and suddenly it costs more. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a documented business practice with a polite name: dynamic pricing.

What people are actually exhausted by is the constant information imbalance being used against them. Every transaction requires vigilance. Every interaction might be a funnel. Every “free” service is harvesting something. You have to be on guard, all the time, just to not get taken advantage of as a baseline consumer.

It’s maddening. And it doesn’t have to be this way. All of this is someone’s idea of how to extract maximum revenue from people. But people hate being extracted from. They feel it, even when they can’t name it exactly. And that fatigue is cumulative.

Enshittification Is a Betrayal

Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” gets thrown around a lot, but the reason it resonates isn’t really about product quality declining. It’s about betrayal.

Think about why people loved early Amazon or Zappos. It wasn’t just the product selection or free shipping. It was the feeling that someone actually cared about the experience. That if something went wrong, they’d make it right. People will forgive almost anything if they believe you’re genuinely trying.

The enshittification pattern is a rug pull. You build trust, you build loyalty, you build dependence, and then you start extracting. Prices go up. Quality goes down. Customer service becomes a maze designed to make you give up. The product gets worse because the product was never the point. You were the product. Your attention, your data, your habit, your switching costs.

What makes people furious isn’t that the product got worse. It’s that they were conned. Someone pretended to care, and they didn’t. That’s what stings.

And this gets at something deeper. Human beings are a peculiar animal. We’re social and antisocial at the same time, constantly building in-groups and out-groups, constantly calibrating who we can trust. Nothing breaks a social bond faster than deception. Than manipulation. Than the realization that someone was taking the dollar bill out of your pocket with a smile on their face, hoping you wouldn’t notice.

That’s what extraction-based business ultimately is: antisocial behavior wearing a social mask.

And antisocial initiatives are doomed. You will eventually run out of people to extract from, because you don’t have any authentic gravity. Everything has to be manufactured. You have to keep tricking people, and when you run out of people to trick or your tricks stop working, whatever you’ve built dies. It was never alive to begin with.

The Faustian Deal

Almost every incentive in business pushes you toward trading your ethics for something. Money. Speed. Growth. Notoriety. Market share. The next round of funding.

And the deal always looks reasonable in the moment. Cut this one corner, just this once. Overpromise a little. Underdeliver where nobody’s looking. Charge for something you know isn’t worth it. Ignore the problem that hasn’t blown up yet.

Every founder I know has faced this. I’ve faced it. The temptation isn’t dramatic. It’s not a villain twirling his mustache. It’s subtle. It’s the meeting where someone says “nobody will notice.” It’s the moment where doing the right thing means losing a deal. It’s the night where you realize the ethical path is six months longer and half as profitable.

What I’ve learned after 25 years: it’s always a Faustian deal. You can trade your ethics for short-term gain, but you can never buy them back. And the person you become in the process, the one who’s learned that cutting corners works, that person will keep cutting corners. The slope only goes one direction.

You can’t build a house with rotten logs. And you can’t lie your way to anything that lasts.

When Ethics Actually Matter

Ethics don’t matter when everything is going well. When the sun is shining and money is flowing, everybody has principles.

Ethics matter when there are actual stakes. When you have something to lose. When the easy path is right there and nobody would blame you for taking it.

I’ve seen this play out dozens of times in my own work. A project goes sideways. A deliverable falls short. Something breaks that shouldn’t have. Those moments are where the real decision happens. Not on your website’s About page. Not in your employee handbook. In the room, in real time, when it’s going to cost you something to make it right.

And something that sounds like it can’t possibly be true but is: some of the most loyal, long-term relationships I’ve built came from exactly those moments. Not from the projects that went perfectly, but from the ones where something went wrong and I made it right. Where I owned it, fixed it, and ate the cost because that was the fair thing to do.

People remember that. Not the mistake. They remember how you handled it.

Mission Statements Are Just Words

I want to be clear about what I mean by ethics, because this gets co-opted and diluted until it means nothing.

I’m not talking about what’s printed on the wall in the break room. I’m not talking about the values slide in the new employee orientation deck. I’m not talking about the social media posts where companies perform their values for engagement.

Those are words. Ethics are what you do.

Ethics are what you do consistently, whether someone is watching or not, whether you’ll get credit or not. Often when it seems like it will actually hurt you. That’s specifically when it counts, when there’s a cost. When doing the right thing means doing the slow thing, the expensive thing, the thing that doesn’t scale, the thing that doesn’t make the quarterly numbers look better.

The Killer Feature

I might lose some people here, and I’m fine with that.

I don’t think ethics are just “nice to have.” I think in a growing number of industries, ethics are the killer feature. The actual differentiator. The thing that makes people choose you and stay with you and tell their friends about you.

Not because people are naive. Because people are pattern-matching. They’ve been burned enough times to develop a finely tuned sense for who’s real and who’s performing. And when they find someone who’s real, someone who actually cares about the problem they’re solving, who treats them like a person and not a revenue line, they hold on tight.

A killer business strategy is to just be decent. Just care. Just try to be of service. Honestly, genuinely try. It sounds almost stupidly simple, but look around at how rare it is. That’s your opportunity.

Not a Trick

I want to be very precise about who this post is for, because this gets misread.

I am not writing a playbook for sociopaths to cosplay having ethics. That doesn’t work, and the world has enough of that already. “Authenticity” as a brand strategy is just another flavor of manipulation.

This is for people who already have a strong ethical sense and are being told, by the market, by competitors, by investors, by the entire culture of modern business, that it’s a handicap. That they’re leaving money on the table. That they need to be more “aggressive” or “strategic” or whatever euphemism people use for “willing to screw people over.”

I’m saying the opposite. Lean in. Make it the center of what you do. Your ethics aren’t holding you back. They’re the foundation of the only kind of success that doesn’t eventually collapse under its own weight.

Just Tell the Truth

As a middle-aged person, I often joke that one of the most powerful life hacks is just telling the truth. It makes your life so much simpler because you never have to keep track of what you’ve said, to whom, and when. You can just say what’s real.

More than that, telling someone a vital truth when they need to hear it can literally save them years. A hard conversation that takes ten minutes can prevent a decade of wasted effort. It takes courage. Simple doesn’t mean easy. But honesty is the most efficient communication protocol ever invented.

The same thing applies in business. The flywheel everyone is trying to build, the “virtuous circle” that every growth strategist talks about, isn’t actually that complicated. It’s an organization where everybody is better off because of their interaction with you. Not dramatically better off, necessarily. Just a little. But consistently. Over time. You’re generative, not extractive.

People want to be treated fairly. They want to not have to watch everything you do because you’re constantly trying to get one over on them. It’s like any relationship. Trust is built by telling the truth, doing the right thing, and when you screw up, telling the truth about that too. Then trying to make the wrong thing into the right thing. That’s it. Over and over, forever.

There are no shortcuts. There’s only the way and not the way. And vastly more often than not, the way is found by being decent and telling the truth and actually caring about the experience of other people.

The Long Road

I won’t pretend this is easy. Building something the right way, at the right pace, turning down money that comes with strings you’re not willing to attach, it can be a long, winding, lonely road. There will be competitors who grow faster because they don’t care about the things you care about. There will be moments when you wonder if you’re just being stubborn.

You’re not. You’re building something durable. The people who cut corners will eventually get found out. Enshittification is not a strategy, it’s a death spiral that most companies enter willingly because the short-term numbers look good. The companies that actually last, that build real loyalty, that become the kind of business people recommend to their friends unprompted, those companies did the hard work of earning trust and then not betraying it.

That’s the whole game. Earn trust. Don’t betray it. Repeat forever.

Money follows value. Value follows service. Service follows caring. You can try to shortcut that chain, but every shortcut is temporary and every shortcut costs you something you can’t get back.

The Opportunity

If you’re reading this and you’re building something, a company, a product, a practice, a career, and you actually care about doing it right, I have good news. The bar is on the floor. So many businesses have spent so long optimizing for extraction that simply being honest and competent and caring feels revolutionary.

That’s not a critique. It’s an opportunity. The greatest competitive advantage available to you right now is one that can’t be copied, can’t be automated, and can’t be faked for long: actually giving a damn.

Not as a strategy. As who you are.