And we exist to extract value from agriculture. We’ve developed to a point where it’s both possible and desirable to live in close proximity to one another. It’s possible because ag is so successful and scalable, and it’s desirable because new opportunities are possible when everything is nearby. So that’s the trade off you made. To afford the city life, you accrue value through city opportunities and you trade it in exchange for the goods from service providers. The alternative is that you run your own farm. Ask yourself how many farmers you know! And you’ll see which decision most people make.
All to say, we shouldn’t think of value extraction as a uniformly bad practice. We all do it and we need to do it because each square acre of land doesn’t provide the same goods and services.
There’s actually legal reasons why publications would pay special care to their word choice like this. The difference between seeming violation and violation comes down to hard proof. Whether we like Elon’s sideshow or not, if there is a defendable claim that his post didn’t violate (e.g. new policy that allows it was approved internally but not yet published publicly), NYT could land themselves in a lawsuit that they have a chance of losing. Then ask yourself how many stories do they publish a day? The risk starts to add up quick.
So the word seeming is doing some heavy lifting there. If you ignore the ass covering, they did still report truth on something important.