Catherine Bracy, a civic technologist and the founder of TechEquity Collaborative, draws on a decade of reporting and advocacy to argue that venture capital, as practiced in twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, has become a destructive force in the broader economy. Her central claim is that VC was designed for a narrow purpose—funding a small number of speculative, high-risk technology companies that could plausibly grow ten or a hundred times—and that the model has metastasized to industries where it makes no sense: housing, primary care, child care, agriculture, journalism, education. In those domains, Bracy argues, the pressure to deliver outsized returns within a fund's seven-to-ten-year horizon forces companies into extractive practices: gutting service quality, cutting labor costs, monopolizing markets, and selling on to an even larger acquirer before the underlying damage is felt. The book moves through case studies—the iBuyer model in real estate, primary care roll-ups, gig labor platforms, the WeWork collapse—and traces VC's history from its postwar government-supported origins to its current scale of hundreds of billions per year. Bracy proposes alternative structures, including longer-horizon patient capital, public investment, and cooperatives. The result is both a journalist's exposé and a policy argument aimed at lawmakers and ordinary readers who want to understand why so much of the economy now feels like it is operating against them.