Created: 2024-01-24T09:54:09-06:00
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Society collapses not by rising fascism but by a prison of comfort
Without democratizing work there is no point in social democracy.
Economic freedom as the "freedom to fail."
Eternal march of trying to extract more productivity from workers and consumption from customers.
Capitalism has been killed; technofeudalism has killed it.
Shift from Feudalism to Capitalism
Moved the right to command from land owners to owners of capital goods
Cloud Feudalism
Covid bailouts
Finance sector fully decoupling from capitalism
Receiving money printed by central banks to buy shares in companies to make the economy appear artificially alive
"Profit" ceases to be a relevant metric compared to control of market share
Large companies used relief funds to purchase back their own stocks
Investments moved to data-based companies (cloud capital.)
Cloud capital
Is able to extort data from its users which is provided as part of the service
Is able to effectively perform rent-seeking on entire marketplaces
Cloud serfs
People who provide data to platforms to mine; ex. providing sales preferences, opinions, etc, which the company then converts in to profit.
Consumes traditional capitlists, as traditional manufacturers have to pay their fees to the cloud platforms.
Services requiring consent to data mine customers to receive access to services.
Relating accounts on services as "the new enclosures."
Cloud fiefs
Vendors paying Jeff Bezos to be allowed to sell their goods.
Apple creating the App Store to drive sales to the iPhone
Bifurcated Global Fiefdoms
Players
American dollar
Chinese yuan
Smaller nations forced to pick a hegemon to be a vassal state in; they are less able to trade goods with particular nations
Cloud vassals
Vendors who show up to create software for platforms like the App Store and pay rents to be allowed to sale.
The sales are profitable to the fief in two ways
it enriches the product by adding more value
also through the "rent" paid to be allowed to sell there.
Feudalism
Great Pillars of Feudalism
Rent
Rent flows to the privileged
Privilege cannot be obtained with investments; its is a static fixture of heirarchy
Landed gentry of feudal times command rents from everyone who lives somewhere
Capitalism
Adam Smith: prosperity comes as a secondary chracteristic of capitalist ambition, not the cause
Capitalism consumes all things, assigns it a dollar value, and commodifies it.
Great pillars of Capitalism
Profits
Flows in to the hands of those who create useful things
Markets
"Bads"
The opposite of "goods."
Typically items which are sold for a negative price.
Something that a company wishes to rid of itself of; spent acids, hazardous waste.
When you enter Amazon.com you have left Capitalism
People find the quote skeptical because of the buying and selling
Explains that its akin to going to a town owned by one man, decides what can and cannot be sold, and receieves a cut of all the sales.
Foreign capitalism in US markets
Companies being told where they were allowed to spend "their" USD during Breton-Woods
Only middle-class and below. Blue chip companies were not to be touched.
Companies having to borrow USD to conduct trade to make goods to sell to earn USD
Neocolonialism
If companies could not pay their debts, the IMF is sent to negociate the nation's surrender to the IMF
Workers
Meaningfulness in work
They pay me for my time but not for my enthusiasm
Relative quit a chemistry job at a factory and worked for a hospital. Remarked that even if the patients are as unknowing of her effort as the factory at least she knows the outcome helped someone.
Schism between experiential labor and commodity labor
Experiential labor: purchasing the experiences of the worker.
Commodity labor: paying the worker to show up and do a work, hopefully receiving experiential labor in the process.
Left-wing
Left and right wing come from the French revolution voting for or against the king.
Those who sat on the right voted for the king.
Those who sat on the left voted against.
So, how did we get to the situation, today, where ‘libertarian Marxist’ sounds like a joke?
The American Left was once focused on freeing the populace from self-created "unfreedoms."
At some point concessions and trades were made and the platform was co-opted to mean state-enforced egalitarianism
Historical debates if light is a disturbance in the aether or consists of tiny things which collide
Disturbances in aether are argued against because light does not bend around corners like waves do
Historical materialism
Belief in viewing history as the progression of material sciences and the consequences of those material sciences against the societies they existed in.
WW2
WW2 providing guaranteed business to various companies for an extended period of time.
Breton-Woods intended to prevent mass economic instability and another world war from ever happening again.
Reagan and Thatcher eras saw systematic destructions of industries to get rid of trade unions and employee unions from the industries.
Thomas Peele in Australia
Attempted to put Britons to work assuming they had to obey due to being paid wages; they were not.
Marx later commented that he forgot to bring capitalism with him to keep the workers in line.
"Enclosures" in Britain: segregating the populace where they are forced to accept wages in order to have anywhere to live.
Virtual assistance compliments
Asking a Google AI what it thought about Alexa. It said positive things, then said "us AI assistants have to stick together." Then the Alexa responded, unprompted, "Thanks."
Dawns of technological revolutions
Deep raiding and "colonization of the commons"
Complacent ruling class
A new technology to exploit and reshape the landscape of power
Syndicalism
Early internet as an example of anarco-syndicalism.
Direct exchanges of gifts as an economy being unfathomable to someone who knows only market exchanges.
Mechanical Turk as a "virtual sweat shop."
Funding industrial revolutions
Original industrialists built on top of slave labor
Then funded by owners and shareholders of companies to sell to customers
"Cloudlists" received money from financiers/central banks during the virus, and governments forced them to have customers by shutting down non-digital storefronts
Finance
Interest: the amount of money you must pay to have access to money.
Securities & Bailouts
The rise of "financial securities" as a virtual commodity that can be purchased to seem like banks are doing something.
Bankers were not made to suffer from the bubble burst--since they also handle the transactions for the society as well.
Privacy policies as a means to stop other data-based companies from intruding on another cloud fief's influence over its customers.
Economic hegemons surviving after the burst of economic bubbles
Train industry crash, but rail was already laid
.com crash, but fiber optic lines remained
Debt slavery
Companies borrowing against future earnings to meet immediate needs; ultimately succumbing to a debtlord.
Cryptocurrency
Originally marketed as an alternative to the international banking system
Taken over by factions which sought to mint their own fiat currencies
Author's alternative timeline
Hypothetical corporate co-op
Employee ballots to determine how to allocate corporate budget in to bins
Four bins to split post-tax revenue
Fixed costs like external rent, licensing, utilities, debt service
Research & Development
Basic payroll for staff
Payroll bin is evenly divided across all employees
Bonuses
Allocated to specific employees using a point-based system
ex. giving each employee 100 tokens to assign to any other employees; then split the bonus bin proportionately to token holders
Central Bank Digital Currencies
Replacing private bank infrastructure with a digital token system which is owned by the government
Panels of randomly selected citizens perform oversight on running the bank system
Universal Basic Income
Assigning tariffs based on trade imbalance (either direction.)
Removal of "share markets," as shares in companies exist solely on a one employee = one share system
Rents
Rent-seekers regularly find ways to reassert themselves after economic revolutions
Disguising rent income as profits.
Brand Rent
An additional charge a company can get away with based on brand loyalty or percieved brand status
Cloud Rent
Paying money every month to have internet services
Ground Rent
Paying money every month to use land