They promised frictionless convenience. What they delivered was a business model built on invisibility.
In the glowing blue light of your smartphone, everything feels smooth. Efficient. Benevolent. Your food arrives. You tip a euro. You move on.
But offscreen, a darker system has taken root one that exploits labor, undermines democracy, and sells the illusion of progress while accelerating collapse. Wolt,efood, and Delivery Hero don’t just deliver food. They deliver inequality, wrapped in branding and driven by algorithms.
No health insurance. No paid sick leave. No labor protections. No floor, no ceiling only churn.
This isn’t the future of work. This is the return of the piecework economy Victorian conditions dressed up in UX.
When Speed Becomes a Weapon
Every incentive in this system is structured to de-risk the platform by transferring all risk to the worker.
You crash your bike? You pay. You get sick? No income. You protest? You’re deactivated.
The algorithm doesn’t care if it’s raining, if you’re injured, if you haven’t eaten all day. It optimizes for speed, not survival. And when you are late, you are punished. Not by a human manager, but by a faceless system that auto-throttles your income. It is discipline by design.
In another era, we called this automated exploitation. Now, we call it the gig economy.
Cities Held Hostage
This isn’t just about labor. It’s about urban capture.
Our streets are increasingly flooded with underpaid workers trying to outrun the algorithm. Sidewalks blocked. Accidents rising. Noise, pollution, stress.
Companies like Wolt and Delivery Hero externalize the costs of their logistics infrastructure onto cities without paying for the damage. They add traffic, increase emissions, and then greenwash their way out with vague promises about sustainability.
It’s not just unfair. It’s parasitic.
Accountability Laundering
Let’s be clear: when your food is cold, late, or never arrives, there is no one to call. Platforms have built responsibility voids—legal and emotional. They point fingers at couriers or restaurants while hiding behind terms of service and automation.
No one is responsible. No one is reachable. Just bots, emails, and endless loops.
This is not surprising. This is what happens when platforms scale without checks.
They squeeze local restaurants with high commissions. They replace community-based ecosystems with vertical monopolies. And they do it all while masquerading as friendly middlemen.
This isn’t market disruption. It’s corporate colonization—a slow bleed of independence, masked as convenience.
Who Rides for Your Convenience?
Mostly immigrants. Mostly men. Often invisible.
They are the foot soldiers of platform capitalism—living in the shadows of our cities, working without protections, vulnerable to violence, burnout, and silence.
These are not isolated stories. They are structural outcomes. This is not the exception. It is the intention.
And the more we accept it, the more normalized it becomes.
The Illusion of Progress
Wolt, efood, and their peers don’t just sell meals. They sell a mythology—that technology is neutral, that growth is good, that gig work is freedom.
But what they are really doing is hollowing out the rights our ancestors fought for—making them optional, conditional, replaceable.
If we allow the gigification of work to continue unchecked, then the rights we still cling to paid leave, safety nets, dignity—will soon vanish for us too.
What was done to couriers yesterday is being beta-tested for all of us tomorrow.
Resist the normalization. Demand regulation. Protect labor. Reclaim your city.
And remember: every tap on your screen is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in.
You don’t really understand what a billion is. None of us do. Not because we’re stupid, but because we were never meant to.
The human brain evolved to keep track of faces in a village. Maybe food stores for the winter. Maybe the number of goats you own. But once you get past a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, the mental circuitry short-circuits. The numbers blur. Scale breaks.
Now think about this, which easier to understand:
A million seconds? That’s 12 days. A billion seconds? That’s 31 years.
Let it land. Not a metaphor. Not exaggeration. Just math.
So when you hear someone is worth a billion dollars, remember: That’s thirty-one years’ worth of seconds—but in money. Now imagine what one person could do with that. Now imagine ten people hoarding that. Now imagine 400 of them, and you begin to understand the spell we’re under.
We throw the word “billionaire” around like it’s a badge of genius. But it’s not genius. It’s gravitational collapse.
A billionaire isn’t just a rich person. They are a system malfunction. An organism that grew so large it began consuming everything around it—land, time, resources, attention, labor, politics, imagination.
The scale is so broken we don’t even blink anymore. We scroll past headlines that say someone made three billion this quarter, and we just keep scrolling. No alarm bell rings.
But if we could feel what a billion really is, we would riot.
Let’s break it down. Slowly.
If you spent a thousand dollars a day, every single day, it would take you 2,740 years to spend a billion.
If you gave someone one dollar every second, it would take 31 years to finish the handout.
And yet, one person can “make” that in a year and still ask their employees to skip lunch breaks.
Does that feel right to you?
We’re not talking about envy. This isn’t about “rich people are bad.” It’s about numbers that no longer belong in a sane societyand a healthy planet
A billionaire isn’t someone who worked harder. They’re someone who figured out how to bend the rules, extract value, avoid tax, and accumulate faster than time can flow.
They don’t run businesses. They run pipelines. And what flows through those pipelines is your time, your rent, your data, your exhaustion.
That’s not prosperity. That’s a pyramid. And you’re at the base.
We’ve been hypnotized. Taught to look at billionaires the way peasants once looked at kings—mystified, reverent, hopeful that maybe they’ll bless us with a job or a tweet.
But kings at least had to fake divine right. Billionaires just need a hoodie and a TED talk.
The worst part? We defend them. We say, “They earned it.” As if it’s even possible to earn a billion dollars in a world where nurses work double shifts to afford rent.
You don’t earn a billion. You extract it.
Here’s the trick: The system keeps you chasing survival so you don’t have time to question the scoreboard. But the scoreboard is rigged. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
A billion dollars is not success. It’s the proof that the game wasn’t meant for most of us to win.
So what now?
You don’t need to hate billionaires. But you do need to stop worshipping them.
Don’t build your dreams in their image. Force governments to build systems where wealth flows instead of accumulates. Where no one hoards lifetimes. Where no one wins alone.
You are not broken for struggling. Our world is broken for making that normal.
And maybe that’s the real revolution. Not rage. Not envy. But clarity.
Clarity that starts with one strange, sticky truth:
A billion seconds is thirty-one years. Now ask yourself—how many lifetimes is one billion dollars?
You didn’t choose the world you were born into. Not the language in your mouth. Not the flag in your classroom. Not the gods above your cradle.
Before you knew how to ask why, you were already absorbing the answers. By the time you could speak, the spell had taken hold.
They called it “education.” They called it “common sense.” They called it “truth.”
But what if it was just repetition, ritual, and reward? What if most of what you believe… wasn’t born in you at all?
Let’s begin there.
1. The Invention of Reality
Reality, as you know it, is a story. A beautifully edited, commercially optimized, state approved narrative.
You’ve been told who the heroes are. Which wars were justified. Which histories deserve statues. Which lives get headlines.
But behind every textbook is a committee. Behind every curriculum is a budget. Behind every fact is a filter.
History is not what happened. It’s what was written down—by the winners, for the obedient.
Ask yourself: If a truth threatens power, will it be taught in school? Will it air on prime-time? Will it show up on your feed?
2. The Comfort of the Cage
Your beliefs feel like yours because they fit you like skin. But that’s the trick. The most effective control doesn’t feel like chains. It feels like normal life.
Take your job. Your ambitions. Your idea of success. Did you choose them? Or did someone sell you a version of “enough” that keeps you chasing, exhausted, docile?
Take your body. Your shame. Your sexuality. Were you born with judgment? Or did culture install it?
You live inside invisible architecture—built by advertisers, governments, religions, family systems, algorithms. You call it “reality.” But it’s a mirror maze, and most of the reflections aren’t yours.
3. The Myth of the Individual
Even your “self” is a curated hallucination.
Your fears, your dreams, your taste in music, your goals they’ve been shaped by others more than you realize. Instagram tells you what to want. Netflix tells you what’s possible. Your childhood wounds whisper what to fear.
And the market listens. It maps you. Sells you back to yourself in pieces. It flatters you with uniqueness while nudging you toward conformity. All while whispering: This is who you are.
But who would you be… without the noise? If no one was watching, selling, liking, correcting, expecting—what would remain?
4. The Lie of Certainty
We crave certainty. That’s why we worship experts. That’s why we cling to ideologies like lifeboats in a storm.
But the world isn’t certain. It’s wild. Changing. Fractal. Science evolves. Morals shift. The facts you swore by five years ago may now be punchlines or crimes.
The deeper you go, the more things unravel. And in that unraveling, the question isn’t what do I believe now? It’s am I brave enough to live without needing to know?
Because the truth is not a fixed point. It’s a moving target. And wisdom is learning to dance with not knowing.
5. So, What Now?
This isn’t a call to despair. It’s a call to remember.
To remember that you are more than what you were told. To remember that most systems don’t want you awake—they want you functional, predictable, profitable. To remember that the deepest truths can’t be taught, only uncovered.
Let the illusions fall like old skin. Not all at once. Just enough to see the scaffolding. Just enough to ask: Who benefits if I believe this? And what might be possible if I don’t?
The Power of the Question
What if everything you believe is a lie?
Not because you’re foolish. But because you were raised in a world that profits from your sleep.
Wakefulness is painful. But it’s also power.
And now that you’ve seen behind the curtain, you can’t unsee it.
So ask yourself, one more time—gently, honestly, without fear:
