Why Are the Capital Sins Still Relevant?
Throughout history, cultures have tried to decipher the forces driving human beings beyond the surface of their actions. The Christian tradition developed a classification that has persisted across time and cultural changes: it identified seven fundamental movements of the psyche and named them the seven capital sins. These were not mere minor vices or behavioral deviations, but core powers that could unleash multiple disorders if left without direction. "Capital" came from capita, head: each one functioned as a principle, as an origin, as a root generating other errors and excesses. They were, at heart, maps to understand human desire in its purest form.
With the rise of capitalism—another word born from capita—the term "capital" acquired a new meaning: accumulated resources capable of generating more resources. Capital was no longer just an available fund, but a power that multiplies, an economic energy that, once set in motion, tends to expand. That capacity to generate more of itself turned capital into the organizing principle of the modern world. Just as the capital sins pointed to original sources of inner disorder, capital came to designate an external force capable of reshaping territories, institutions, and entire societies. In both cases, we speak of the same thing: power cores, original forces that, once activated, unleash chain effects.
In the 21st century, this genealogy of forces finds a new privileged stage: major tech companies. Their scale, their daily omnipresence in our lives, and their ability to reorganize the behaviors of entire societies have turned them into mediators between our impulses and the world. They are not, of course, the old sins embodied in the form of a logo, but they do amplify desires, comparisons, urges for control, and fantasies of totality that have accompanied humanity since its origins. The famous phrase attributed to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman—“every social network is built around one of the seven deadly sins”—is often quoted as clever, but points to something deeper: the technological ecosystem externalizes, amplifies, and reshapes human forces that have always existed.
If each network can be organized around a capital sin, we can extend this gesture and question not only specific platforms, but the global technological architecture. The proposal is not an analogy, but rather a metaphor questioning which primary forces—the same ones tradition named as capital sins—still operate today within our digital infrastructures at a systemic and planetary scale. This does not attempt to fix rigid equivalences or explain complex corporations through a single drive, but to use the metaphor as an instrument: to observe how those original forces now play out not only within individual consciousness, but also in global infrastructures that organize much of contemporary life.
Apple finds its fundamental drive in lust. Not sexual lust, but aesthetic lust: the most sensory and seductive form of desire. Apple is not only the manufacturer of the iPhone, MacBook, or Apple Watch; it is an aesthetic machinery turning every launch into a ritual and every device into an object designed to be desired before being used. Materials, textures, brightness, gestures, the theatricality of each "one more thing": everything is oriented to producing that sensation of immediate attraction. Lust is that desire feeding on itself, needing no concrete object, finding pleasure in the perpetual act of desiring. When this drive overflows, it ceases to be aesthetic appreciation and becomes a restless need.
Meta embodies envy, not in its crude sense, but as the force that emerges when one begins to evaluate oneself through what the other displays. Meta is not just Facebook: it is also Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, platforms structuring the social lives of billions. Their architectures make the lives of others visible, continuously so. Photos, stories, statuses, profiles: fragments that inevitably trigger comparison. Deep down, envy is not wanting what the other has, but seeing oneself in them and feeling incomplete. Meta turns this internal movement into a social atmosphere: comparison ceases to be occasional to become a permanent state of the modern emotional ecosystem.
Tesla finds its strength in sloth, understood as the desire to delegate effort to external systems. It is not merely an electric car manufacturer: it is Autopilot, the self-driving initiative, the intensive automation of factories imagining a future with minimal human intervention. Deep sloth is not mere laziness, but the aspiration to be free from the weight of the world. Tesla's promise is that machines will drive, assess risks, decide routes, execute tasks. The risk emerges when delegation stops being convenient and becomes dependence: the subject loses agency, delegating so much that their own capacity for action fades.
Google manifests epistemological pride: the aspiration to organize the knowledge of the world. Google is not just the search engine; it is Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Google Drive, and a suite of services that cross our ways of navigating, communicating, and remembering. It is a nearly total infrastructure shaping how we search for information, consume it, store it, and integrate it into our daily lives. Pride here is not personal arrogance, but a desire for totality: the conviction that everything can be indexed, linked, ordered. The risk arises when its way of organizing reality becomes the way we ourselves believe reality is organized.
Nvidia represents wrath, not as violent outburst, but as volcanic, overflowing energy that is hard to contain once set in motion. Its GPUs, designed for graphics computing and increasingly for artificial intelligence, support much of the current boom in machine learning, simulation, and scientific research. Wrath here names the power advancing faster than we can manage: unceasing acceleration, a force expanding before there's a structure to steer it. Creative energy risks becoming uncontrollable energy.
Microsoft can be read through gluttony: the need to integrate, absorb, extend its presence into every layer of the digital ecosystem. It is not only Windows: it is Office, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, Teams, Xbox Game Pass, its strategic partnership with OpenAI. Gluttony appears when accumulation no longer responds to utility, but to the impulse to embrace everything: more services, more spaces, more positions. The diversity of the technological landscape begins to be compressed under the expansion of a single actor that integrates, centralizes, and concentrates.
Amazon crystallizes greed, understood as the compulsion to accumulate and control resources. More than a store, it is Amazon Prime, AWS, Kindle, Amazon Logistics, a global web of distribution centers, fleets, algorithms, and proprietary rules regulating the lives of millions of sellers. Greed is not just the desire for wealth: it is the urge to govern from the center, to orchestrate the flow of goods, data, and business relationships. The problem arises when such concentration starts to reduce the economic and social diversity of the environment.
By gathering these metaphors, the aim is not to moralize or assign blame, but to show how what was once described as impulses of the individual soul now operates in infrastructures spanning continents. Lust, envy, sloth, pride, wrath, gluttony, and greed have not disappeared: they have changed scale. They have become systemic, operating planetwide. Moreover, the capitalist world has not only enabled their expansion, but has reorganized them as desirable objectives: turning lust into an economy of desire geared to constant seduction of the consumer; envy into an aspirational engine sustaining entire industries built on comparison and status; sloth into the promise of efficiency and absolute automation; pride into technological ambition legitimizing the idea that everything can be computed, predicted, and optimized; wrath into competitive acceleration measured by the speed at which it transforms the environment; gluttony into a strategy of continuous growth rewarding unlimited expansion; and greed into an ideal of concentration celebrating extreme accumulation as a sign of triumph and dominance. Within this logic, what was once considered a spiritual risk or inner disorder has become the structural language of the contemporary market.
This is where the other half of tradition comes into play: the virtues. In their original formulation, they were not merely behavioral corrections, but ways intended to contain and channel those inner forces. Temperance modulated lust; charity transformed envy into recognition of the other; prudence moderated wrath and overflowing power; diligence responded to sloth by restoring value to effort; humility limited pride and the pretension of totality; generosity balanced greed and accumulation; justice distributed the common burden against the gluttony of wanting to encompass everything.
If we accept that the metaphor of sins is insufficient, we must also accept virtues cannot remain restricted to the individual realm. Classical virtues acted within the soul; today we need systemic equivalents able to guide forces no longer residing only within ourselves, but in global platforms, economic networks, and algorithms affecting whole societies.
Temperance, against lust that relentlessly exploits our desire through marketing, addictive design, and fast consumption cycles, must translate into policies moderating the exploitation of desire and attention. Charity, against envy fueled by constant comparison on social networks, takes the form of structures reducing inequalities amplified by that exposure and by algorithms rewarding what is both aspirational and humiliating. Prudence, against wrath turned into unchecked technological acceleration, becomes algorithmic governance, robust audits, limits to the risks of systems unfolding faster than we can comprehend.
Diligence, against sloth that increasingly delegates functions to automation and autonomous systems, means rethinking the value of human effort, knowledge, and responsibility in a world tending to automate everything. Humility, against the pride of believing everything can be captured, measured, and optimized, demands institutions able to recognize their limits, accept uncertainties, and renounce the illusion of total control. Generosity, against greed concentrating wealth, data, and critical infrastructure in a few hands, shows up in redistribution, openness, interoperability, and diminishing monopolies. And justice, against expansive gluttony seeking to grasp ever more sectors, territories, and aspects of daily life, is expressed through regulatory frameworks ensuring that the organization of the digital world does not always fall on the same bodies and territories, nor systematically erode economic and cultural diversity.
Virtues, translated for the present, can no longer be just moral qualities: they must become institutional forms, political mechanisms, and economic criteria able to orient forces too large to be left to the market's or a few private actors' will. The goal is not to halt innovation, but to accompany it with structures ensuring that a world profoundly transformed by technology remains habitable.