Page 4 of 5 · Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism
The tool has users. Decisions have subjects.
Every output Hebbia produces lands somewhere. The marketing tells you who holds the tool. Wang asks you to look at who is held by the decision it produces.
See who pays ↓The split
Marketing names the user. It hides the subject.
Click each user type. The right side reveals who lives downstream of the decision. The interaction is the point: you have to choose to look.
Who uses Hebbia
visibleWho is affected
hidden until clickedWorkers at the target company whose jobs depend on what the memo recommends.
Employees, suppliers, and communities tied to the deal being evaluated.
Borrowers whose loan terms were shaped by what the summary surfaced and what it didn’t.
Retail investors and pension holders downstream of the position.
Populations in the communities being modeled as inputs.
You have now looked at five people or groups the marketing never asked you to see.
Wang’s concept of parasitic governance describes financial systems that extract value from populations while presenting that extraction as service. The loan isn’t predatory — it’s access to credit. The diligence isn’t cold — it’s rigorous analysis. The AI isn’t biased — it’s objective. Each framing is doing the work of making extraction look like infrastructure. Wang calls this the financialization of everyday life: the slow colonization of daily existence by financial logic, risk modeling, and debt instruments — all of which now have an AI interface.
The analyst who uses Hebbia is a knowledge worker making $200K. The borrower whose file Hebbia summarized is applying for a $15K personal loan. The tool sits between them. The marketing speaks only to the analyst.
Noble argued the tool launders bias through a clean interface. Wang shows who the laundering serves. The output lands as objective data on the analyst’s screen. It lands as a denial, an approval, or a term sheet in someone else’s life. The interface is the same. The stakes are not.
This is not a neutral tool used in a neutral context. It is a tool used by capital to process people — borrowers, workers, communities — whose lives become inputs in a workflow they will never see and cannot contest. Wang calls that parasitic. The marketing calls it agentic.
How to read these companies.
A five-question framework you can use on any AI-native finance company you encounter next. Hebbia and AlphaSense, side by side.