If capitalism is supposed to be efficient and, guided by the invisible hand of the market, eliminate inefficiencies, how is it that the tech industry, the purported cradle of innovation, has become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity?

The compulsion to launch new projects in order to scale the corporate ladder has become so ubiquitous that employees call it the LPA cycle: launch, promo, abandon.

As one Google employee posted on Hacker News: “You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you ‘launch’ something big. So what do you get when you add all of these perverse incentives? Nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty-three chat apps.”

As a result, management is forced into a vicious cycle of upselling their team’s importance in order to be allocated a higher headcount, meaning they then have to come up with new projects to justify the new headcount. The more workers there are, the more important the work must be, and the more important the work is, the more people must work on it.

This model of innovation is also the reason Google employs more people than it needs, according to the employee, who added that because the company may never “strike it lucky [again] . . . they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.”

Where industrial firms extract profits from the gap between value produced and what workers get paid in wages, internet platforms rely foremost on rents, which generate profit on the basis of existing property, intellectual or otherwise.

However, if in aggregate, profits are generated through extractive practices that do not require the labor force these companies have built up, what leverage do these workers have? The obvious answer is that they can withhold future profits by halting the creation of new products and revenue streams. But even this won’t work if the projects they work on are bullshit.