> almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people.

Maybe this is just my lack of understanding in how most SaaS companies operate... But to me making software that people find valuable and charging them for that is not inherently immoral. Surely that is the majority of cases?

> This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS;

The original idea behind SaaS is to align the incentives of the customers and the software company.

Historically software companies made money on selling upgrades. This meant bug fixes were not a priority, and security fixes were something companies got shamed into doing.

SaaS fixes that incentive problem. With reliable ongoing revenue a company can keep software patched and updated and doesn't have to cram a bunch of new shiny marketable features in just to make a huge sale every 3 or 4 years, while engineers try and add whatever bug fixes they can after the shiny new features have been polished off.

It also means software companies don't have boom or bust cycles with hiring. Funding stays consistent, and so does staffing. It makes the financials much easier to manage. Companies used to hire a bunch of temp employees in the run up to a release.

Ongoing release cycles also led to better software engineering practices. More automated tests, reproducible builds, better version control systems, and a lot more things that we take for granted now days.

There are obvious downsides to SaaS as well, but the original idea was good.

I’ve never heard “intellectual property” phrased as “artificial scarcity” and it isn’t exactly wrong…

> Don't create artificial scarcity.

Nah. You know what the answer is? Get to a mental and physical state where you need very little. Right now the only way to win is not to play.

This is pseudo-intellectual drivel. Creating value and then charging for it is not creating “artificial scarcity”, any more than doing nothing is creating “artificial scarcity” by absence of value. There was no “infinite resource” that just happened to exist before the work was put in to create it. And creating value is - almost by definition - completely orthogonal to zero sum games.