How the 2020’s Spawned the British “Extractive Class”

Has anybody else noticed how society has changed for the worst since the COVID-19 paused life for millions in the UK and around the world? And no, this is not a lazy op-ed that seeks to romanticise the 'good old days' in order to talk down working from home. There are obviously more pressing issues that have emerged from the pandemic than workers having a work-life balance, which has been proven to be a net positive for the economy by improving productivity.

However, keeping ourselves apart from people outside of our 'bubble' was bound to have an impact on the way we interact with them, what we think of 'others', and most importantly, how much we care about them. In fact, evidence shows that around half of Britons now feel disconnected from society, trust in neighbours plummeted, and short-lived surges in support for welfare quickly returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Together, these trends suggest that broader social cohesion has weakened, with individualism, initially embedded by the Thatcherite politics of the late 1970's, has gone further than ever before. Building on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, where he identifies a Rentier Class emerging from landlordism, I argue that the 2020s have spawned a new class, focused on 'extracting' capital exploitatively rather than through productive work and business, is widening inequality and eroding what remains of our social fabric.

Context: The Extractive Mindset

To understand the emergence of what I describe as the Extractive Class, it is necessary to revisit an older figure in British political economy: the petit bourgeoisie of the Thatcher era, often caricatured as the 1980’s “Essex Man.”. This group, typically small business owners, white van man tradesman, and self-employed workers, were not wealthy in any traditional elite sense, but were culturally and ideologically distinct from the working class they had recently left behind. Thatcherism offered them something more powerful than material security: the promise that they could one day join the owning class that bought economic power with it. Ironically, the term Essex Man does, indeed, have its roots in the centuries that preceded the 20th century; they were a product of people that wanted to break free from the shackles of the owning class, which proves how temporal capitalism can be.

This promise reshaped political behaviour. The petit bourgeoisie increasingly abandoned collective identity and solidarity, voting against trade unions, welfare protections, and redistributive policies, not because these no longer benefited them materially, but because they had internalised the idea that they were temporarily embarrassed capitalists. In buying into capitalism as a game to be played rather than a system to be questioned, community became a liability and empathy a weakness. The goal was no longer stability or fairness, but upward mobility at any cost.

What the 2020s represent is not a break from this mindset, but its intensification. Decades of neoliberal ideology laid the groundwork, but COVID acted as an accelerant. As traditional labour was disrupted, wages stagnated further, and social life fractured, individual survival increasingly replaced collective progress as the organising principle of society. The result is not merely heightened inequality, but the emergence of a class whose defining feature is extraction itself: wealth generated not through production, innovation, or service, but through the exploitation of scarcity, attention, volatility, and grievance.

Who are the Extractive Class?

Property Extractors

The most familiar wing of the Extractive Class is an extension of what Thomas Piketty describes as the modern rentier class. Property extractors include landlords, short-let investors, and developers who generate income through ownership rather than labour. Their wealth is derived from the control of a finite necessity, housing, within an artificially constrained market.

In the UK, housing has been steadily transformed from shelter into a financial instrument. COVID accelerated this process: low interest rates, quantitative easing, and institutional investment pushed property prices further out of reach for wage earners, while buy-to-let portfolios and short-term make up 4.7 million houses, a quarter of landlords having expanded their portfolios in 2025, and landlords with over 5 properties making up nearly half of the market. Crucially, this group often sees itself not as exploitative but as savvy, having “found a gap in the market.” The social cost of this extraction, from homelessness to generational inequality as this has driven up rental prices, is morally dismissed.

Online Grifters and Platform Extractors

If property extractors monetise physical scarcity, online grifters monetise psychological and emotional vulnerability. This group encompasses influencers, OnlyFans creators, and content producers who convert attention, intimacy, and spectacle into income, but it also includes hustle coaches, wealth influencers, and online gurus who sell neoliberal individualism itself as a product.

At the top of this ecosystem sit tech elites and platform owners who have deliberately engineered digital environments to maximise engagement through outrage, grievance, and polarisation. Figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg do not simply host discourse; they profit from its degradation. Hence, agorithm grifters can generate income by deliberately provoking outrage, spreading misinformation, or amplifying grievance because anger is what the platforms reward.

This same extractive logic applies, in a different form, to parts of the online adult-content economy. OnlyFans creators are often framed as symbols of empowerment or entrepreneurial freedom, but the platform itself rewards escalation. Bonnie Blue, for instance, has openly acknowledged with PoliticsJOE that she is constantly searching for content that is “more extreme” in order to satisfy algorithmic demand. This is not an individual moral failing, but a structural one: the platform encourages creators to push boundaries because extremity drives traffic. In doing so, personal vulnerability and sexual depravity are commodified, not only for profit, but as a means of staying visible in an overcrowded digital marketplace.

In the post-COVID online economy, visibility is capital, and the quickest route to it is polarisation. Whether through click-bait politics, culture-war content, or outright falsehoods, these actors understand that the algorithm does not care about truth, social cohesion, or harm, only engagement. Misery, resentment, and fear become raw materials, mined for clicks and ad revenue in a digital attention economy that actively incentivises social breakdown.

Financial Extractors

The third pillar of the Extractive Class operates through financial volatility rather than social or physical scarcity. Hedge fund managers, day traders, and crypto-speculators generate wealth through arbitrage, speculation, and asymmetrical risk. The pandemic era saw an explosion of retail trading and cryptocurrency participation, often framed as democratised finance, but in practice dominated by those with capital, insider knowledge, or algorithmic advantage.

In this world, practices like rug pulls or speculative bubbles are justified as simply “how the game works.” Moral responsibility is displaced by market logic. Losses are individual failures; gains are proof of merit. As with property and platform extraction, this group often overlaps materially and ideologically with the others, profits are recycled into housing, online branding, or political influence.

Why This Matters for the UK

The rise of the Extractive Class marks a deeper cultural shift in Britain toward an increasingly Americanised model of social life: hyper-individualist, market-driven, and hostile to collective responsibility. In this worldview, social systems exist only to be exploited and there are no "moral victories", only financial ones.

It is therefore no coincidence that many within this class gravitate toward political movements that reject redistribution, undermine welfare, and frame social solidarity as indulgence. The appeal of parties like Reform UK lies not just in their policies, but in their affirmation of extraction as legitimacy: the idea that those who “win” the system are entitled to rule it, regardless of social cost.

When extraction replaces production as the dominant route to wealth, and grievance replaces solidarity as the dominant social currency, democracy, trust, and community all begin to fracture. Understanding the Extractive Class is therefore not an academic exercise, it is essential to understanding where the UK is heading, and what is being lost along the way...