Technology and Wealth: The Straw, the Siphon, and the Sieve (Essay)

This essay is adapted from the Frankly video released 01/16/2026 titled, “Technology and Wealth: The Straw, the Siphon, and the Sieve.”

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A few months ago, I did a Frankly on oil production and “the straw,” where I likened shale drilling and unconventional oil to a “wider straw” as opposed to accessing a “bigger milkshake.” Essentially, we’re not so much finding more resources but extracting existing ones faster and moving closer to what I called “the slurping sound.” Today, I want to take that same idea and apply it more broadly, beyond oil, to technology and wealth itself.

The Relationship Between Technology and Wealth

So, let me open with a few simple questions.

How does technology relate to wealth?

What does our culture assume about this relationship?

And what does a wider, longer-term view suggest is the actual answer?

Most of us are taught – implicitly or explicitly – that technology creates wealth, innovation makes us richer, and productivity growth equals real prosperity. I’ve come to believe that this conventional framing doesn’t hold up when you zoom out spatially or temporally. At large scales, technology tends to do three things:

1. Technology acts like a straw: increasing the rate at which we draw down the stocks of the natural world (such as fracking).

2. Technology operates as a siphon: concentrating the gains.

3. Technology functions as a sieve: filtering long-term wealth away from the rest of life and toward one species: us. Additionally, it often filters wealth toward a small subset of our species.

None of what I’m about to unpack comes from any hostility toward technology. Rather, it comes from trying to understand what technology does once it operates at a civilizational scale.

What is Wealth, Really?

To make sense of the relationship between technology and wealth, we first need to define what wealth actually is in this context.

When I say “wealth,” I don’t mean money, bank accounts, or financial claims. I mean usable energy, organized matter, and the stocks and flows that make life possible, viable, and enjoyable.

Stocks are things like forests and the services they provide: topsoil, fresh water stored in aquifers, productive fisheries, mineral deposits, fossil hydrocarbons, the biodiversity woven through the web of life – and even less tangible things like social trust and institutional stability. Flows are things like sunlight, rainfall, nutrient cycles, pollination, and (more abstractly) human care and attention.

If you really think about it, these stocks and flows are not just the foundations of real wealth, they are real wealth – everything else is created from them. Every time we spend financial wealth, we ultimately spend these things or rely on them to make the transaction possible. Money, in this framing, is not wealth itself, it’s only a claim on wealth. Every good or service counted in GDP is first an energy and material transformation, second an interaction with the natural world, and only then a financial transaction.

As long as our financial claims grow in rough alignment with underlying stocks and flows, things feel stable. But when claims accelerate beyond biophysical reality, as they clearly are today, a gap opens up. That gap is where fragility lives. It’s where overconfidence and hubris live – and where we mistake abstract claims for abundance.

This is where a wider lens on technology becomes essential.

Technology as the “Straw”

Human technology and innovation doesn’t start out as a bigger straw. It usually begins as a local solution – an idea aiming to make improvements to life. It might look like a farmer trying to get a better crop yield, a business owner looking for a tool that saves time or effort, or a homemaker trying to reduce the burden of many tedious and repetitive tasks. At this scale, technology is helpful, and even restorative, as it solves real constraints, makes life easier, and creates value at the time and place where it’s applied.

But when a technology works, it spreads – especially in a globally-interconnected economy. When it spreads, it scales. And when technology scales across whole economies and decades, its role and impact changes. At the macro scale, technology acts as a set of tools that lets us pull “more” from the world per unit time as an economy and a species. Each major technological step – fire, plows, spinning looms, steam engines, electricity, and now server farms and data centers – has made the straw accessing the Earth’s stocks and flows wider (and usually faster).

That doesn’t mean technology is bad. Toolmaking is one of the most natural things humans do. We are technologists – it’s how we survived ice ages and spread across the planet. But it does mean that, at large scales, technology primarily extracts and rearranges real wealth. Contrary to common public narratives, technology doesn’t create wealth from nothing. At best it allows us to access energy or materials that were previously dispersed, slow, or difficult to reach. At worst it allows us to liquidate stocks so quickly that the systems underneath can’t regenerate.

Instead of oil, we can take food and agriculture as an example. For most of human history agriculture was limited by soil biology. Nitrogen came from microbes, manure, crop rotations, plus the temporal changing of the seasons. Yields were coupled to the slow regeneration of living systems.

Then we learned how to make fertilizer from fossil gas using the Haber-Bosch process. Suddenly the straw widened dramatically. We could pull fertility straight out of the atmosphere as long as we burned enough energy to do it.

Yields exploded, and as total food throughput surged, population followed. But the Earth’s soils also changed in the process. Across much of the world, living, carbon-rich soils became thinner, more eroded, and more chemically dependent. Rivers carried runoff downstream. Farming skills, expectations, and equipment gradually became locked into the cargo cult of continuous fossil energy subsidy.

From one lens it looked like extraordinary wealth creation. From a different perspective, it accelerated drawdown and looked a lot like transmuting wealth into income (because it was).

This pattern shows up again and again: technology allows us to front-load benefits and pulls future capacity into the present. It makes systems appear wildly productive in the short-term, while quietly narrowing their options later.

That’s what the “straw” of technology does with soil and food production. It sucks up more “liquid” to drink today, but means getting closer to the slurping sound at the bottom of the milkshake…or whatever sound dirt makes when it’s depleted.

Technology as the “Siphon”

There’s another effect at large scales that tends to accompany a wider straw: as extraction speeds up, the gains resulting from it tend to concentrate.

None of this is about ill intent, greed, or dark-triad psychology – at least not primarily. It’s about structure and network effects. Human networks reward size. Capital-intensive tools reward those who can finance them. Data compounds and early advantages reinforce themselves. Over the last several decades, and even more clearly in the last few years, we’ve seen this play out.

In most advanced economies, the share of income going to labor has declined over the past fifty years, while the share going to capital has increased. Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are near historic highs, and market concentration has risen across sector after sector – including energy, agriculture, and technology. In the U.S., for example, the top four firms now control over 40 percent of market share in most major industries.

Technology (especially of the mass-produced, assembly-line variety) lowers costs and increases output, but ownership of these systems has become increasingly concentrated. As technologies scale, something parallel happens that our cultural narrative mostly misses – the creation of chokepoints.

A chokepoint is simply a place where a lot of economic activity has to pass through a narrow gate. Whoever controls that gate doesn’t need to extract more resources or make better products, rather, they control access. Think about highways, ports, energy pipelines, electrical grids, or app stores – chokepoints exist everywhere.

Once a platform becomes the default route in a large network, opting out becomes costly or impossible because workers, businesses, and entire sectors depend on it. At that point, the platform can set terms, collect fees, and skim value from everything that flows through, not because it produces all the value, but because it sits between us and where the value has to pass. This tech dynamic didn’t exist at the local hardware store or when people were trading arrowheads. But today, the toolmaker often becomes the rent-taker.

So, as the straw widens, a siphon forms alongside it. Most people experience speed and convenience, but a much smaller group accumulates durable claims. This is why conversations about technology and inequality often talk past each other: one side points to rising output and falling prices, while the other points to precarity, concentration, risk, and loss of agency.

Both are describing real phenomena – just from two different perspectives within the same machine.

Again, I’m not bashing technology here, nor am I making any political statement. I’m trying to describe what technology tends to do when you look at it from a biophysical perspective.

Technology as the “Sieve”

There’s a third effect that’s easier to miss, because it still sits outside our usual accounting. At planetary scale, technology also acts as a filter – or a sieve. It reallocates energy, materials, and attention away from the rest of life and toward humans, often toward a particular subset of humans.

Over the last few centuries, the human share of Earth’s net primary productivity has surged to about 40% – not even including mining ancient sunlight. Wild biomass has declined sharply, and large animals have been replaced by people, livestock, and infrastructure. The technosphere – all the human built cement, plastics, asphalt, building, and more – now outweighs all living things on Earth. Not just animals but grasses, trees, and everything alive.

From the perspective of GDP, this looks like success. From the perspective of the living world, The Great Simplification is well underway.

Technology doesn’t just pull up resources faster and concentrate the gains, it also redirects flows. It reshapes ecosystems to serve one species’ priorities, often at the expense of resilience, diversity, and long-term stability. Again, this isn’t a complaint – despite me caring a lot about it – it’s a reasonably accurate description of what’s happening.

Productivity gains from new scalable tech can look and feel like – and even be like – wealth creation if your time horizon is short and your accounting and circle of concern are narrow.

Debt as Social Technology

There’s one more piece of this story that’s easy to overlook but equally important: debt. Debt functions a lot like technology in this system because it is technology – social technology.

When we take on debt, we’re making a claim on future energy, materials, labor, and ecosystems. We’re assuming those future stocks and flows will be there, and that they’ll be large enough to pay back today’s promises. In that sense, debt acts like a straw pulling the future into the present. It accelerates extraction by allowing us to immediately consume what hasn’t yet been produced.

Debt also acts like a siphon. Interest payments and financial claims concentrate returns toward those who can issue credit and create rent funnels, rather than those who do the physical or ecological work. Over time, more and more human effort is devoted not to meeting needs, but to servicing prior claims. Productivity gains get skimmed off upstream before they ever show up as security or well-being downstream.

Debt also acts like a sieve. Credit creation immediately converts non-human stocks and flows into human-directed throughput. A loan becomes demand: for electricity, fuel, timber, fertilizer, or fish. Other species never receive claims, benefits, or representation in that transaction.

Forests don’t sign contracts. Rivers don’t sit on balance sheets. Soils don’t get a seat at the table. The living world is silently and invisibly enrolled as collateral.

In short, debt makes systems look healthier than they are. It temporarily smooths over limits, delays feedbacks, accelerates overshoot, and allows drawdown to continue long after underlying stocks start weakening.

In a low-energy, slow-growth world, debt becomes harder to service. In a high-energy world, it becomes tempting to use more of it. Either way, debt intensifies our commitment to growth while shrinking the range of choices available to societies later.

This all matters a great deal because every major technological system we’re currently building, especially AI, is being built inside this debt-driven structure.

The Contemporary Case of AI

Fossil hydrocarbons reshaped the physical economy. AI is doing something similar – but in the cognitive economy. Same dynamics, just a different layer.

Fossil fuels multiplied physical labor. They gave us armies of mechanical workers with muscles made of steel, fueled by ancient sunlight. That transformed agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and war.

In contrast, AI multiplies our “cognitive armies” by scaling pattern recognition, prediction, coordination, language, and content generation – so many things we’ve historically used our own brains to do. Things that, until very recently, were bottlenecked by human attention and time.

Once trained, these systems can operate at near-zero marginal cost. A model built once can be copied endlessly and deployed everywhere. It can theoretically run continuously – as long as there’s enough electricity, water, and support. A small number of organizations with access to data, compute, and capital can now perform tasks that once required thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people spread across institutions.

This has consequences. First, it accelerates extraction – not just of energy and materials – but also of attention, creativity, and hominid decision space. Human time and attachment now becomes a resource to be harvested, optimized, nudged, and ultimately monetized at-scale.

Second, it enlarges the siphon even further by funnelling the value created by AI-enabled systems toward the owners of models, platforms, and infrastructure. This is the same ownership dynamic observed with industrial machinery, only faster, less obvious, and much more concentrated.

Finally, it acts as a turbo boost for our current cultural aspirations, metrics, and goals. AI is really good at optimizing for what we ask it to optimize for, but if soil health, ecosystem stability, or future generations aren’t part of the gameplan, they won’t be part of the outcome either. AI can absolutely be used to improve efficiency, reduce waste, optimize logistics, increase productivity, and improve scientific understanding and medicine.

But without new boundaries, feedback loops will also shorten. Decisions will get faster and responses increasingly automated. Scale will increase before consequences become fully visible – or visible at all! Systems will move more quickly than human governance, culture, or ethics can adapt…and it all draws on the natural world.

In that sense, AI steepens the same gradients we’ve already been riding, creating more throughput, more concentration, and less time and awareness to notice what’s being lost. AI doesn’t introduce a new set of dynamics, at least not yet – and I can’t imagine how it would unless our economic system changes first. When ‘successful’ by our system’s metrics, AI compresses time and amplifies whatever existing incentives are already in place.

Naming & Understanding these Dynamics Matters

Technology was, is, and will be powerful. But it’s also intertwined with physics and ecology in the hierarchy of reality. It moves claims around across time, people, and species. There’s no silver-bullet response to these dynamics, but I do think naming and understanding them matters.

This framing isn’t anti-technology or neo-Luddite. New tools at the scale of an individual, a village, or a small enterprise behave very differently than new tools operating across a global civilization.

The rules change with scale.

It’s also not lost on me that I’m using technology to explain and critique technology. So maybe the better way to end this isn’t with suggestions, but with questions:

1. At what point does scale change the moral and physical meaning of a tool?
   When does something that helps at a village level become destabilizing at a planetary one?

2. When we say “technology,” are we really talking about tools… or are we talking about large groups of humans doing what humans do best (problem-solving, innovating, and scaling)? If technology is inseparable from us, what does that say about responsibility?

3. If your circle of concern is yourself and your immediate family, and your time horizon is the next five or ten years, do the straw, the siphon, and the sieve even look like problems? Or do they mostly look like progress?

4. What would our economy look like if “wealth” meant the continuity of flows rather than the liquidation of stocks? Sunlight, rain, soil fertility, functioning ecosystems – not just this quarter’s output.

5. If money is a claim on real wealth, who or what is issuing those claims on behalf of the living world? What happens when no one is?

6. How much of what we call technological progress is really just borrowing from the future and calling it innovation? How would we know the difference?

7. What does “regenerative technology” actually mean once scale enters the picture? Is it still regenerative if it restores one system while degrading ten others?

8. Who benefits first from new technologies, and who absorbs the costs quietly and off-balance-sheet? Whether it’s other species, future humans, or distant communities – do we ever count them intentionally?

9. What would change if we treated speed as a risk variable rather than an unquestioned virtue? What would shift if slower systems weren’t seen as failures, but as systems with time to notice mistakes?

10. And perhaps the hardest question of all: How do these ideas play out when the incentives facing any one of us are very different from the outcomes we’d want if everyone acted together?

I don’t have final answers to any of these, but I do think about them, and I’m increasingly convinced that if we don’t start to ask them explicitly, technology will keep answering them for us by default. Those cultural and behavioral defaults are likely to continue to favor speed over stability, claims over foundations, and the present over the future. Probably…

That’s the lens I wanted to offer here.

Thanks for reading.

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