The argument for noncompetes is this: modern industry is IP-intensive, and IP-intensive businesses *need* noncompetes, otherwise workers will take proprietary information with them when they walk out the door and bring it to a competitor. Who would invest in an IP-intensive firm under those circumstances?

2/

I'll tell you who would: Hollywood and Silicon Valley. These are two most IP-intensive industries in human history, both of which were incubated in California, a state whose constitution prohibits noncompetes and has done so through the entire history of those two industries.

3/

Indeed, we wouldn't have a Silicon Valley if California had noncompetes. Silicon Valley was founded by William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in inventing the silicon transistor (hence *Silicon* Valley). Shockley was a paranoid, virulent racist who couldn't produce a working chip because he was consumed by eugenic fervor and spent all his time on the road offering shares of his Nobel prize money to Black women who would agree to have their tubes tied.

4/

Lucky for (literally) everyone (except William Shockley), California doesn't have noncompetes, so eight of his top engineers ("The Traitorous Eight") were able to quit Shockley Semiconductor and start the first successful chip business: Fairchild Semiconductor. And then two of Fairchild's top engineers quit to found Intel:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the…

5/

It's not just Silicon Valley that's rooted in wresting IP away from asshole control-freaks: that's Hollywood's story, too. Ever wonder how it was that movies were invented at Edison Labs in New Jersey, but the film industry was incubated in California, literally as far away from Edison as you could possibly get without ending up in Mexico?

6/

In short: California got the motion picture industry because Edison was an asshole who used his patents to control what kinds of movies could be made and to suck rents out of filmmakers to license those patents. So the most ambitious filmmakers in America fled to California, where Edison couldn't easily enforce his patents, and founded Hollywood:

nytimes.com/2005/08/21/weekinr…

7/

And Hollywood stayed in Calfornia, a place where noncompetes couldn't be enforced, where "IP" could hop from one studio to another, smuggled out between the ears of writers, actors, directors, SFX wizards, prop makers, scenepainters, makeup artists, costumers, and the most creative professionals in Hollywood: accountants.

8/

Empirically speaking, the function of noncompetes is to trap good workers and good ideas in companies controlled by asshole bosses who can't get anything done. Any disinvestment that can be attributed to the absence of noncompetes is completely swamped by the dividends generated by good workers and good ideas escaping from control-freak asshole bosses and founding productive firms. As ever, money talks and bullshit walks.

9/

Today, one in 18 US workers is trapped by a noncompete, and those aren't the knowledge workers of Silicon Valley workers or Hollywood. So who *is* captured by this form of contractual indenture? The median US worker under noncompete is a fast-food worker stuck with the tipped minimum wage, or a pet groomer making the regular minimum wage.

10/

The function of the noncompete in America isn't to secure investment for knowledge-intensive industries - it's to stop the cashier at Wendy's from getting an extra $0.25/hour working the fry-trap at the McDonald's across the street.

Noncompetes are an integral part of the conservative project, which is the substitution of individual power for democratic choice.

11/

As Dan Savage puts it, the GOP agenda is "Husbands you can't leave [ed: ending no-fault divorce], pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate [ed: banning contraception and abortion], politicians you can't vote out of office [ed: gerrymandering and voter suppression."

Add to that: jobs you can't quit.

12/

It's not just noncompetes that locks workers to shitty bosses. When Biden's FTC investigated the issue, they revealed a widespread practice called "training repayment agreement provision," (TRAPs) that puts workers on the hook for thousands of dollars if they quit *or* get fired:

pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its…

13/

A TRAPped worker - often a pet-groomer at a private equity-owned giant like Petsmart - is charged $5,500 or more for three weeks of "training" that actually amount to one or two weeks of sweeping up pet-hair. But if they leave or get fired in the next three years, they have to pay back that whole amount:

pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its…

14/

A closely related concept is "bondage fees," which have been imposed on whole classes of workers, like doormen in NYC apartment buildings:

pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bon…

These fees trap workers in dead-end jobs by forcing anyone who hires them away to pay massive fees to their former employers. It's just another way to lock workers to businesses.

15/

The irony here is that conservatives claim to worship "voluntarism" and "free choice," and insist that the virtue of markets is that they "aggregate price signals" so that companies can respond to these signals by efficiently matching demand to supply.

16/

But though conservatives say they worship free choice as an engine of economic efficiency, they understand that their ideas are so unpopular that they can only succeed if people are coerced into adopting them, hence voter suppression, gerrymandering, noncompetes, and other heads-I-win/tails-you-lose propositions.

17/

Noncompetes aren't about preventing the loss of *IP* - they're about preventing the loss of *process knowledge*, the know-how to turn ideas into products. Bosses love IP, because it can be alienated, hoarded and sold, while process knowledge is ineluctably vested in the bodies, minds and relations of workers. No IP law can keep employees from taking process knowledge with them on their way out the door, so bosses want to ban them from leaving:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/pro…

18/

Biden's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide, for nearly every category of employment, deeming them an "unfair method of competition":

ftc.gov/news-events/news/press…

FTC economists estimated that killing noncompetes would result in $400b in wage gains for the American workforce over the next decade, as good workers migrated to good bosses.

19/

FTC Extends Public Comment Period on Its Proposed Rule to Ban Noncompete Clauses Until April 19

The Federal Trade Commission voted to extend the public comment period for its proposed new rule

^{Federal Trade Commission}

Of course this was challenged by the business lobby, which sued to get the rule overturned. Trump's FTC has not only declined to defend the rule in court, they've also decided to stop trying to enforce it.

Trump is now the king of wage-theft, and MAGA is a relentless engine of enshittification.

20/

After all, the thesis of enshittification is that companies make their products and practices worse for suppliers, users and business customers only when they calculate that they can do so without facing punishment - from regulators, competitors, or workers.

Trump's regulators are all either comatose or so captured they wear gimpsuits and leashes in public.

21/

They're not keeping companies in line. And his antitrust shops have turned into pay-for-play operations, where a $1m payment to a MAGA influencer gets your case dropped:

thebignewsletter.com/p/an-atte…

Trump neutered the National Labor Relations Board and now he's revived indentured servitude nationwide, formalizing the idea of government-backed jobs you can't quit.

22/

If you can't quit your job or vote our your politicians, why wouldn't your boss or your elected representative just relentless fuck you over? Not merely for sadism's sake (though sadism undoubtedly plays a part here), but simply to make things better for themselves by making things worse for you? It's exactly the same logic of platform lock-in: once you can't leave, they don't have to keep you happy.

23/

Formalizing the legality of noncompetes will only lead to their monotonic spread. When Antonin Scalia greenlit binding arbitration waivers in consumer contracts, only a tiny number of companies used them, forcing customers to sign away their right to sue them no matter how badly, negligently or criminally they behaved.

24/

Today, binding arbitration has expanded into every kind of contract, even to the point where groovy, open source, decentralized, federated social media platforms are forcing it on their users:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dog…

25/

Same for noncompetes: as private equity rolls up whole sectors - funeral homes, pet groomers, hospices - they will stuff noncompetes into the contracts of every employer in each industry, so no matter where a worker applies for a job, they'll have to sign a noncompete. Why wouldn't they? If workers can't leave, they'll accept worse working conditions and lower pay. The best workers will be stuck with the worst employers.

26/

And despite owing their existence to bans on noncompetes Silicon Valley and Hollywood will happily cram noncompetes down their workers' throats. If you doubt it, just read up on the "no poach" scandal, where the biggest tech and movie companies entered into a criminal conspiracy not to hire away each others' employees:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tec…

27/

The conservative future, folks: jobs you can't quit, politicians you can't vote out of office, husbands you can't divorce, and pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate.

28/

The most enshittification-proof way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do an end-run around the Amazon/Audible audiobook monopoly and disenshittify your audiobook experience in the process:

disenshittification.org

eof/