I don't see that in the article. I see it as a repudiation of the uniquely Silicon Valley culture that allows essentially bad ideas to get huge amounts of funding. It's not really a screed against the buyers - they are just the sad suckers being played, in the end - but more as a wake-up call against the navel-gazing protective bubble of the SV startup scene. "...it stands on the premise that someone offering a choice to you is the same as you being forced to participate..."
The VC people are the buyers at the early stage though. They're buying a piece of the profits if the product sells. But in the end, if no consumers actually buy it, they're fucked. Quip won't work. They're trying to take the Dollar Shave Club business model and extend it a few inches across the bathroom counter to the toothbrush. The problem is that no one was gouging on electric toothbrush heads for years like GIllette and Schick were doing with razors. They can't shave 95 percent off the price and still make money. And that's not a VC/Silicon Valley brand trying to get you into their propietary system, that's Proctor & Gamble. The proprietary business model won't work for much longer beacuse it's extremely easy for a factory in another country to produce a product that fits exactly the same way, but they didn't have to sell you the expensive part first. I get my sonicare toothbrush heads from ToothCo on Amazon, for example. There is no direct quote of the forced to participate, but it's the last half of the article. This is a good example: "Why is everything so expensive? Because Silicon Valley and Wall Street are taking huge percentages out of transactions they once didn’t. That’s why. The Juiceros make inexpensive and functional products far more expensive and often less functional..." Everything he talks about being expensive, you don't have to buy. The choice is not forcing things to be more expensive for anyone who doesn't want to buy it. In the link he provides, it talks about how rent has gone up, and how college costs have gone up, and even how food prices have gone down, but there are lots of reasons (increased median income and population density in cities without increase in space, easy access to guaranteed governemnt back loans for college and a society pushing everyone to go, increased global yield) that have very little if anything to do with VC and Silicon Valley. He's just using it to make it look ilke he did some research while it doesn't lend any creedence to his case. Silicon valley did not invent rich people getting ripped off by slick sales people.