The slogan from the World Economic Forum, “You’ll own nothing and be happy,” set off a round of backlash when it filtered down to hoi polloi.
Similar to “Green,” it’s using a glittering generality to obscure – to mystify – another agenda.
Take the Fourth Industrial Revolution:
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR or Industry 4.0) is the ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices, using modern smart technology. Large-scale machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the internet of things (IoT) are integrated for increased automation, improved communication and self-monitoring, and production of smart machines that can analyze and diagnose issues without the need for human intervention.
Frankly, few would oppose such developments in and of themselves. “Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism” is a meme essentially describing the world of Star Trek and few in the West, or in Asia, would oppose it on principle. Certain cranks, on the right and the left, would, on idiosyncratic ideological grounds – think Bronze Age Pervert types channeling Fight Club – but few really oppose the vision.
After all, robots are simply very complex tools, and even “artificial intelligence” is not different in kind to actuarial tables – indeed, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” are fancy ways to say “statistics” and “algorithms.” Statistics and algorithms are as old as civilization, they have merely been automated and leveraged to an extreme degree with the invention of semiconductors. There really is nothing “magical” about it, merely another incremental step in technology.
Only Ted Kaczynski wants to see humans reduced back to digging trenches with a shovel; laying underground cable is a lot easier with a trencher.
There is also a legitimate environmental concern with modern consumer capitalism. Climate hysteria aside, humanity has already polluted their environments to a significant degree and mineral acquisition is getting more and more difficult as the surface levels have been mined out; similarly, fisheries are in dire straits globally.
But there is a right way to go about these things, and a wrong way.
Much of the media around such topics is not in-depth think pieces, but instead a form of consumerism for yuppies. Consider Alec Leach’s In the Future We Won’t Own Clothes, We’ll Rent Them, which while is as bad as it sounds, nevertheless helps clarify the real issues from the dross.
Currently, most products are designed with a linear lifespan. We make things, and when they’re no longer needed, they’re thrown away, likely ending up in a landfill or incinerated. If all, or part, of a product gets recycled, then most of the time it goes further down the value chain — T-shirts end up as rags or insulation, for example. It’s massively wasteful, and it means manufacturers are losing ownership of valuable resources when they could be keeping hold of them.
In a circular system, products are designed from the very beginning to be recycled, without moving down the value chain. Take a running shoe, for example. Due to the huge amount of stress the body puts on it while it’s in use, it’s a product with a limited lifespan. When the shoe reaches the end of its lifespan, instead of being thrown away, it could theoretically have its upper reprocessed and sole melted down, so those components could then be used in making another running shoe.
The idea is that we’d reach a point where consumption and production doesn’t result in any waste at all, as every used or unwanted product is recovered, then fully recycled.
…
[C]ompanies will commit to collecting and re-selling a higher volume of used garments, while using more recycled fibers in their products. Most importantly, it urges companies to design products to be recycled — which is the beginning of a truly circular system.
Any serious environmental reform will have to come at the industrial level. Consumers making a personal choice to buy “green” products is nothing more than aspirational branding to upsell and often “green” products are worse for the environment than the cheapest products.
However it is difficult to get industrial reform because modern capitalism is based on externalizing environmental costs. If the environment is a commons, the modern corporation simply externalizes environmental costs to the commons, as it dumps its pollution into the river or the landfill. Pollution taxes simply lessen the profit margin of a company’s externalizing, but doesn’t fundamentally change the nature.
Being able to fully recycle clothing without moving down the value chain is a laudable goal. In theory, the recycling would require only the energy input.
But political economics has social consequences. Consider:
Well, a truly circular economy would create a culture where we use products, rather than own them. Currently, manufacturers make things, then sell them and forget about them — that’s what’s creating so much waste. If manufacturers were instead recovering, recycling and reprocessing their products, then it makes much more sense for them to rent them rather than sell them.
That way, they still own all of the materials, and can ensure they’re recovered and recycled correctly. With resources becoming scarcer and increasingly valuable, this business model makes much more sense in the long run.
Notice the subtle shift. The goal is to recycle clothing, but in order to do that, the manufacturer must maintain ownership and “rent” to the consumer instead of “sell” to the consumer.
But any free marketeer would simple respond: why is there no economic incentive for the consumer to recycle? If they were paid for their old clothing by the producers intent on recycling them, it would have more or less the same effect as the producers “renting” to the consumer instead of “renting” to the consumer. And if the market isn’t there, that is simply because the producers have been allowed to externalize the environmental costs.
Consider also the social and class perspective these ideas originate in:
It’s not hard to imagine a future where clothing is rented rather then owned, as part of some kind of subscription service — like Spotify or Netflix for your wardrobe. It’d be especially useful for garments with short lifespans or limited uses — kids’ clothing, running shoes, wedding suits, that kind of thing.
This is dressing up something quite old into something quite new. “Wedding suits?” Tuxedo rentals have been a staple of the Western middle class forever. This writer didn’t own a tuxedo until he was thirty, but had rented a number of them since high school – it is likely the majority of American men have never owned a tuxedo but have rented them as the occasion warranted.
As for kid’s clothing, likely most Americans have worn “hand-me-downs” from older siblings and neighbors, and kid’s clothes have always been reused – not recycled – at yard sales, thrift stores, and Goodwill.
If the goal is to recycle clothing without going lower on the value chain, there is hardly any need for producers to maintain “ownership” of consumer’s personal clothing – which would surely involve some sort of mobile phone app – perhaps the real agenda here – instead, a simple and straightforward removal of the producer’s ability to externalize environmental costs.
There would be no need to institute some bizarre social-economic arrangement where a clothing companies maintainers ownership literally of the clothes on your back. Instead, consumers would simply be paid by the producers for worn out clothing, which would then be recycled at the same level of the value chain.
The entire concept is yet another way to externalize costs – if they can no longer externalize environmental costs, they can externalize the costs of recycling onto the consumer.
The last decade’s hottest Silicon Valley start-up is … Uber. A taxi company. The entire business model of Uber – which has yet to turn a profit – is to avoid local limousine regulations, and to externalize the costs of taxi maintenance to the drivers. The only value that Uber has added is making the process of calling a taxi dispatcher easier and more efficient. Everything else they do is labor and regulatory arbitrage and externalizing costs – and even then they have never turned a profit.
It would be more economically efficient – and better socially – to simply reform limousine regulations in various localities. Perhaps Uber could charge a penny or so to use their app, or perhaps the very nature of the app, basically simply the value of network effect, should be a cooperative along the lines of a credit union, or indeed even some taxi dispatch services.
AirBnB is no different: a better app than Craigslist’s Vacation Rentals, and the same regulation arbitrage to extract more value and externalize more costs than a simple change in hotel and insurance regulation.
Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos infamously said, “your margin is my opportunity.” In theory, this is free market capitalism working as intended: squeezing every last inefficiently out of the market – the only problem is the Capitalist Class still appropriates value. The problem for ideological capitalists is that Bezos can leverage scale to appropriate all the value for himself, thus out-competing everyone else.
The more rational choice: simply stop competing with Bezos and buy Amazon stock, that way you are a capitalist too, without having to do any work?
After all, that is the entire point of capitalism: to not work for your money, but to have your money work for you. In other words, to extract economic rent.
Eventually the economics of scale leads to extreme efficiency – good for consumers – and centralization of economic functions into a handful of firms.
In the United States, we call these firms “Amazon” and “GM” – in the Soviet Union, they were called “the Ministry of Agriculture” and “the Ministry of Transportation.” In Capitalism, a private class of owners extracts the excess value, in Communism, a public class of party officials extracts the excess value.
Either way, it is Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
The real agenda here, the real meaning of “you’ll own nothing” is nothing more than the recreation of feudalism, where all real estate – even your own personal home – is owned by the Financial class to whom you will pay rent. That is one way to do it, another way would he Henry George’s Single Tax, or Geolibertarianism.
Sadly, the link is lost: there is a Communist version of Mencius Moldbug. Also Jewish, also a scion of the aristocracy, in his case, “the red aristocracy,” that goes through the entire thing: a centralized executive, a stable bandit as opposed to a transitory bandit, the Communist party as the loyal aristocracy, the upper class keeping the peasants happy while allowing the bourgeois prosperity without allowing them to upend the power system.
The systems are virtually identical.
Nice work. I still disagree that real estate is the ultimate goal as the resources and your ability to be independent is riskier to them. Mortgage and tax levers already exist to make property ownership illusory.
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@doktormindbender
Well, ultimately the goal is control; power is its own reward. But specifically, what is happening now is to end the system of private real estate ownership. That also goes with mineral rights – you haven’t been able to buy real estate with mineral rights in West Virginia for a century.
The “everything as a service” is mostly silly though, as “socks as a service” is clearly absurd – it would be absurdly expensive as the transaction costs alone make it inefficient. So, “socks as a service” is just absurdist yuppie rhetoric. There is a start up in New York City where a fashionista will send you a box of clothes once a month. Who would this appeal to? A tiny minority of people who are very into fashion but not shopping?
Few of these are serious proposals. They would like to have “means of production as a service” but that is no different that piecework. They are just repackaging old ideas into Silicon Valley speak and hoping to use computers as a intermediary.
Like “Carbon Credits” are just another way to tax energy (thus all production and even consumption) “You’ll Own Nothing” is really about this:
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/wall-streets-takeover-of-nature-advances-with-launch-of-new-asset-class/
> Last month, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it had developed a new asset class and accompanying listing vehicle meant “to preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end of goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.
So, “privatized water” – not a new idea at all – but financialized so there is no one Bad Guy that you can point too. Mystification.
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Yeah, but……
All of those subscription services are to set up infrastructure. They don’t have to succeed. Just evolve.
All of those blind boxes are just “entrepreneurs” seeing the writing on the wall and trying to create their own rent seeking enterprises. The money will flow to the ones that can build out the infrastructure.
The rental aspect could be obscured.
If your Levis are $200, the lease becomes the juice you paid on your credit card interest and selling fees after listing them on some used clothing app.
Baby clothes is one to watch. It’s a marketplace where the product is only useful for a short time. I’m certain someone has figured out some sort of rental/lease/subscription model.
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> Baby clothes is one to watch.
Cloth-diapers-as-a-service has been around for a while, I knew some families who used it. Crunchy Conservative Christian types that didn’t like the idea of plastic disposable diapers – but they had enough money they didn’t want the hassle of washing them themselves.
So, they had a service: they would get x number of cloth diapers, put the dirty ones in a plastic bin, the service would come buy once a week, deliver clean cloth diapers, and run the diapers through some sort of industrial wash.
Also, again, tuxedo rentals have been around forever. And thrift stores make “renting” clothing mostly the same.
The thing is, adding a “app” to this sort of thing won’t get anything – not even the data is all that valuable, because you already get the data at point of sale.
What I’m suggesting is that “socks-as-a-service” is not a serious proposal – it is a marketing gimmick. As I just read, partially it is to normalize the lower living standards of the overproduced elites – they don’t live in “trailer parks” – no, they live in “tiny-eco-home communities.” I.e., a trailer park, but with upper class status because of the “eco-” prefix.
There really is a difference between durable goods and consumer goods like blue jeans.
I learned recently that in Germany apartments don’t come with kitchens – just the hook ups. This is due to the extreme regulations on property there. You rent an apartment, you have to install your own kitchen. If you move, you either bring your kitchen with you, or sell it.
Something like that could be a lease – but also it is not new, and there has been Furniture Rental forever – mostly, it’s just financing someone’s living room couch, targeted at the very poor.
It is more marketing and social conditioning than economic, is what I mean.
I knew families who were poorer than mine that financed their fridge and rented their furniture. All this “consumer-good-as-a-service” is just that – as are the tiny homes – just repackaged to ease the status hit of the newly proletarianized.
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You’re not poor, you’re sustainable!
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I think you’re right on target with the idea of passing the cost of doing business on to the one working. eBay and Amazon do that. Essentially pay to play. Also good examples of so called social credit networks.
I wonder if the textile and manufacturing class got an early memo that industrial base level power is pretty much done for and that they better get with some new hustle?
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@doktormindbender
> If your Levis are $200, the lease becomes the juice you paid on your credit card interest and selling fees after listing them on some used clothing app.
My mother sewed some of my clothes as a child. Mostly she did it for my older siblings, for me just more as a hobby. But she stopped pretty quickly because the fabrics became more expensive than the clothing – and this was due to the dropping of tarrifs and outsoucing seamstressing to the third world. Fabric went from a primary home product to a niche hobby product – as have sewing machines.
I’ve seen robots making t-shirts. I’ve seen robots spooling thread. Agricultural robots are here, they just aren’t deployed too widely yet, still some engineering to do. But the big Iowa corn farmers? They sit in their tractors, auto-driven by GPS, and talk on the cell phone networking for their run for local office.
If “global supply lines” are really disrupted and will be for a while, you could see robots going from planting the cotton seed to delivering the finished blue jeans with little to no human intervention at all. TSMC is building a huge chip fab in Arizona, which I guess means there won’t be any war with China over Taiwan.
This is why your typical “right-wing conservative capitalist” really needs to update his firmware. No small businesses can compete with robots. The “family farm” and “independent producers” of their romantic notions are simply not economically competitive – and they haven’t been since the age of global free trade.
Most of the “right-wing conservative capitalists” I know are actually just bureaucrats working in a larger corporation on a defense contract. There is nothing “capitalist” nor “independent producer” about any of these people at all. But they cannot easily give up their self-conception.
Collectivization is here – call it capitalism, corporatism, socialism, communism – doesn’t matter, it is all the same. And if they think they are going to be day traders of something? LOL – good luck competing with Goldman’s Sachs High Frequency Trading algorithm.
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The system “works” by having everyone build the pyramid. I don’t know what the pyramid is. The money is a fiction to get the pyramid built.
If the president was actually a real position and the White House were not a film set, he could make a phone call down to the federal reserve and say “Print some money, we’re going to pay everyone’s mortgage and if you don’t like it, I already have a few tanks in front of the place and a few of my agents in your Swiss chateaus with guns to your family’s skulls.” but that’s not how this system works. Taxation, inflation, and interest are all useful at managing populations.
What we have is a class that wants their pyramid (whatever it is, who knows?) built and has made several systems and classes to build it. Some are incentivized to suck blood wherever they can find it. Others are set up to manage the herd. Right now, we have one of those moments in history where the managerial and vampire class’ interests align.
I would imagine John Harvey Kellog invented the corn flake not as a health food but as some pyramid manager’s project to pack the most caloric energy into the cheapest mass produced junk possible. And once the masses started eating cornflakes, I’m sure Kellog felt pretty Galt-like thinking that it was all his.
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Well, yeah, a robot can make stuff but what about the raw materials? They have to introduce artificial scarcity somewhere. I think that’s the big part of the game.
Stuff that literally grows on trees replaced by industrially produced and recycled stuff.
And the ruling class seeing themselves as John Galt taking all the toys off the table.
I remember going to fabric stores with my mom as a kid.
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@doktormindbender
Ultimately, they want to tax energy, which is scare, but not artificially. But I suspect the “Carbon Credits” to “stop global warming” is exactly that artificial scarcity. It is somewhat a proxy for energy, but it’s even easier to manipulate.
The old fashion way of introducing artificial scarcity is privatize the financial system and only create money via debt to bankers.
Imagine if the US Treasury just printed money itself – no need to sell Treasuries, debt, to the financial system, that they create money to buy, which then the taxpayers have to pay back.
I know, this is an ultra-radical idea – but why should private banks do this? Private banks can’t exist without the federal government, after all. It is basically a subsidy to them.
We could eliminate a huge amount of taxes that way.
One would ask, well, what about inflation? Well – what about it? The private financial industry inflates every time they create money.
>And the ruling class seeing themselves as John Galt taking all the toys off the table.
This is the fatuous rhetoric you get from the Wall Street Journal when they raise interest rates, “taking the punchbowl away just as the party is getting started.”
Again, this is a super pet peeve of mine, the moralism from conservatives who have no idea how the system actually works. Total suckers.
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> Who would [socks-as-a-service] appeal to?
It would appeal to people who can’t buy socks.
This is the same basic principle as real estate, the only difference is in degree: scale and social normalization. People rent what they can’t buy; renting is an “economic substitute” for buying. If a house went for $6k everyone would buy not rent, but because the house is going for $600k they rent not buy. Good houses could be made for $6k, but then there would be no mortgages and no workers and maybe no taxpayers. So you can see the problem.
If every material item can be tagged on the blockchain and tracked for no effective cost, it makes it feasible to outlaw the production, sale, and possession of “unregistered” items. After all, if it’s unregistered we can’t be sure you didn’t steal it. Don’t listen to me, blockchain people are the biggest advocates for “zero trust” around.
And then you have the infrastructure to rent socks fully in place. Whether it happens is an open question, but if you think it can’t happen…
Lol.
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Reblogged this on muunyayo .
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>The systems are virtually identical.
Except todays system is far less forgiving, I’m from a former socialist country, and the one thing they had, and we don’t today, is wiggle room, there was always wiggle room back then, you could always make a deal deal, there was nothing a few bottles of Jim Beam or Deutschmarks couldn’t smooth over, after all we were all comrades, we ain’t comrades no more. It’s ironic that the weight of the state is much heavier today than back then, and people were less afraid of the state, hence there’s still lots of Yugonostalgia for the good old days of Tito:
“President Tito lighting a Cuban cigar, which were personally delivered to him by Fidel Castro, in the White House on an official state visit. Smoking is strictly forbiden in the White House. Sounds like a big middle finger in Nixon’s face if you ask me. (1971.)”
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@guest
> back then, you could always make a deal deal, there was nothing a few bottles of Jim Beam or Deutschmarks couldn’t smooth over, after all we were all comrades
Well, this is the big test. There exists plenty of black and grey markets in America. In the Red State rural areas, grey markets and just informal and second-hand markets have always been huge.
At the lower end you have the religious institutions – the LDS Bishop’s Storehouse is the most well-developed.
It’s going to be the deracinated and urbanized that suffer the most.
Their real control is at the production level, not so much retail. After all, retail has already been destroyed by Walmart on the low end and Amazon on the high end.
We see what direction it is going. But they need buy-in, and we can definitely see that there media narrative control has slipped quite a bit, and quite quickly.
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In his The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto takes it as an axiom that trhe democratic republic is the metamorphic precursor – as tadpole to frog – of the plutocratic oligarchy. We are seeing that in action here.
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@robertpinkerton
Didn’t Plato describe a tyranny->oligarchy->anarchy->tyranny cycle? Or, in modern terms, executive->bureaucracy->democracy->executive?
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On the topic of recycling i always recommend:
P3nn & T3ll3r Bull$hit Recycling (bitchute).
I actually cannot think of anything more wasteful than recycling, just think about the productive man hours lost on recycling, at lets say 10$ an hour it must be billions at this point lost. And it only sort of worked because China was buying up everything whole sale, now with that gone, they don’t know what do do with that waste.
Since China’s Ban, Recycling in the US Has Gone Up in Flames
“All that neatly sorted plastic, paper, and glass used to go to China. Now a lot of it is just getting burned instead.”
Same for UK, they are shipping it to Turkey, Australia to Malaysia… where’s it’s all just burned. I mean would you recycle, if you knew it’s all just burned anyway?
Reminds of the paper recycling drive a local school had before covid, kids spending their whole afternoons collecting old paper, a whole week long, the whole neighborhood collecting and helping, putting out old newspapers etc… and when all was said and gone, they didn’t even get 100 bucks for the two tons of paper collected.
I see the the push for recycling just a cover for planned obsolescence, to get perfectly fine products out of circulation. It’s also just another form of externalizing costs since most recycling is paid for by local communities, yet whatever comes out of it is sold for pennis on the dollar for profit.
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If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment.
John Maynard Keynes
Seems like it applies?
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> After all, that is the entire point of capitalism: to not work for your money, but to have your money work for you.
So true.
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“Notice the subtle shift. The goal is to recycle clothing, but in order to do that, the manufacturer must maintain ownership and “rent” to the consumer instead of “sell” to the consumer.”
Amazon already does this with its proprietary “kindle” ebooks. Stupidly expensive academic books can be “rented” as ebooks (still pricey) but the ordinary kindle is simply “bought”. But in reality, you only buy essentially a license to access the file from the cloud. It’s cheaper than paper books, delivered instantly, and you can download it to up to seven registered devices any time your want, which is convenient; but the bottom line is that you don’t “own” anything, and Amazon can, if necessary, simple “remove” it from your “library.” (Hence it can only be read on one of the “registered” devices, so Amazon can always access it). (To be clear, I don’t think they reach into your device, but they cancel the license and the next time the system updates your “book” disappears. They can remove “pirated” books, such as they once did with a US edition of 1984, which is doubly ironic, since it’s now out of copyright anyway).
Like everything Amazon makes money on, it only works digitally; t-shirts and shoes need to be stored, picked up and delivered back, wear out, etc. Perhaps the 3d printer is the answer: you buy a license to print the shoes, which have a backdoor so that the company can disintegrate them if you miss a payment. Of course, they also track where you walk, but only for your safety.
BTW, as a student in Canada in the 70s, when a schooner of beer was 35 cents (= about 25 US), I rented my TV from a company called Granada, which I think was related to the UK TV network. Eventually they closed down the operation, so I got to just keep the thing. Sweet! A bit later I visited a classmate who was working at UNebraska (Lincoln) and we had a movie night by going to a supermarket and not only renting the videocassette but also the player, for the night. Seems a bit bulky now but we thought we were living in the future. The movie? Blood Simple.
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Blockbuster used to rent VHS players, and I think the original Nintendos, along side of VHS cassettes and Nintendo cartridges.
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>After all, robots are simply very complex tools, and even “artificial intelligence” is not different in kind to actuarial tables – indeed, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” are fancy ways to say “statistics” and “algorithms.” Statistics and algorithms are as old as civilization, they have merely been automated and leveraged to an extreme degree with the invention of semiconductors. There really is nothing “magical” about it, merely another incremental step in technology.
But of course, as forms of capital become increasingly self-sufficient, it will increasingly chafe against the dross of useless meatrobots holding back it’s growth towards yet greater power.
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@Pseudo-Chrysostom
> it will increasingly chafe against the dross of useless meatrobots holding back it’s growth towards yet greater power.
That is the nature of capitalism, which is itself based on algorithms and statistics. Most critics of capitalism, to include traditional Catholics, Marx, non-Marxist socialists, anarchists – and even Ted Kaczynski, said just that.
Capitalism had the paperclip problem long before the era of computers. For Spain and Portugal, gold was paperclips and all other economic considerations had to be subservient to getting gold.
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Without funny-money the enormous credit bubble behind public and private spending simply would not exist. Fix the money and consumerism is made sustainable. Take a bow, Ron Paul.
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@bob saffron
All money is “funny money.” Gold coins are “funny money” too, precisely because it’s pure money with no industrial value.
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All money is “funny money.”
Sure. Money is a shared delusion. A quasi-abstraction.
Medium of exchange; store of value; unit of account [+/- standard of deferred payment] — all of these characteristics of money are dependent on the “full faith and credit” of the people who use it for those purposes. In other words, the population that utilizes a particular form of “money” — or at least a significant supermajority of that population — has to believe that a particular form of currency is “real money*.”
Obviously, the issuer can’t abuse this belief in too egregious a fashion — Gresham’s Law, increasing the money supply far in excess of the real rate of economic growth*, etc. But those sorts of constraints aside, the “value” of money is largely “faith-based.”
If money had “real” value, it wouldn’t be money; it would be something more concrete — a good or service.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the same group that relies on narrative manipulation/ narrative hegemony for much of their power is also well-known for their focus on financial manipulation…
*Gold is merely a particularly common emergent form of money because of its scarcity and relatively universal esthetic/ status “value.”
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>Frankly, few would oppose such developments in and of themselves. “Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism” is a meme essentially describing the world of Star Trek and few in the West, or in Asia, would oppose it on principle. Certain cranks, on the right and the left, would, on idiosyncratic ideological grounds – think Bronze Age Pervert types channeling Fight Club – but few really oppose the vision.
As a counterpart of the previous comment, those primalists amongst us intuitively sense that there is something rotten with the bugman’s dream of being interred in a lotus eater machine, but the point is often confused and unable to be stated explicitly, which is simply this: the bugman’s instincts are not in alignment with potency, with what leads to greater potency, with what leads to large scale entities greater in potency than other such entities.
He sees the bugman’s love of techne to satisfy it’s resignatory desires, and equivocates this impoverished weltanschauung with techne itself; but in reality the bugman doesn’t have a future – or rather the future having bugmen – at all, precisely because of it’s self-abnegating tendencies. Powerful forces will be all too happy to push them into assisted suicide.
Since we happen to be currently living through the collapse of the atlantic empire, as daemon-possessed harridans range ever farther afield, seeking out any last traces of adaptive social technology to corrupt or destroy, it’s an open question as to whether techne in general will actually be advancing any time soon – since it more or less hasn’t been since the 70s, everything since then in turn being more or less elaborations on a theme, and even then only in select industries (consumer electronics being perhaps the most notable). Mayhaps Star Prophet Musk will succeed within his lifetime of establishing forms of capital that can proliferate on their own in space without need for recourse from the blue marble; thus finally opening up a frontier for based and redpilled men to secede from humanities earthly internment with their dust-bound communist jailers, inaugurating the glorious imperium of man.
In any case, if or when outbreaks of civilization do start reappearing and advancing techne, such intensification promises to make things even more wild and interesting, not less.
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@Pseudo-Chrysostom
I mentioned Bronze Age Pervert fans cos-playing Fight Club. I could have added NRx Jimianist cos-playing Richard Spencer’s Roman Empire … but in Space!
>dust-bound communist jailers
I really have a problem with the constant use of false dilemmas. Communism is long gone. What we have is Capitalism – global Capitalism. Everything is driven structurally by pure capitalism – capitalist powers have completely co-opted governments via regulatory capture.
Similarly, there is no pretense of “egalitarianism” or “demotism” or indeed anything but a highly technical redefinition of the word “democracy” (meaning “our regime”) in the current system.
Yet some people still believe that “true capitalism has never been tried.” Or that somehow the science fiction ideal of space colonization will somehow overcome the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
I also find it quite fascinating that for all the hatred of “bugmen” it’s the right-wingers that long for Eusociality – the society of ants, bees, and naked mole rats. The ultimate in “non-egalitarianism.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality
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“I also find it quite fascinating that for all the hatred of “bugmen” it’s the right-wingers that long for Eusociality – the society of ants, bees, and naked mole rats. The ultimate in “non-egalitarianism.”
Just last night I left a sneering comment on a YT video where some German was “reacting” to seeing American Psycho. Every time Bateman came out with one of his phony remark,s like “Cool it with the anti-Semitic remarks” or “We have to solve the problem of world hunger” he would say something like, “Hmm, how confusing, he seems like a nice guy”. I pointed out these were obviously part of his phony exterior, and obviously worked on Fritz. Moreover, I always thought Bateman’s act was EuroMan anyway; the yuppie elite apes the “sophisticated” Europeans, not flyover Trump voters. In fact, for “EuroMan” read: globalist. Wouldn’t Patrick Bateman have ideally taken up a seat on the World Economic Federation, or been invited to speak at Davos? That’s why he tells his fiancé that he keeps his dull job because “I want to FIT IN!” Eurosociality, not “American cowboy individualism”. It’s easy to see him as the American Macron, giving out mask mandates… wait, no, that’s Gavin Newsom.
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I really have a problem with the constant use of false dilemmas. Communism is long gone. What we have is Capitalism – global Capitalism. Everything is driven structurally by pure capitalism.
Was Armand Hammer a “communist/” Or a “capitalist?” How about Sidney Rittenberg? Explain your answer.
Or perhaps the “sola scriptura” view of “communism” and “capitalism” as isolated. purely abstract constructs meant to be analyzed solely in terms of their own exoteric claims is perhaps not as useful as viewing them from a more instrumentalist standpoint? “Cui bono?” might be a more useful question here than “What were the claimed motivations for their actions?”
Just sayin’.
Similarly, those who claim that “Cultural Marxism” has limited validity when comparing its direct, stated “beliefs” to those of bolshevism are ignoring both the clear cladistic relationship between judeobolshevism and cultural semitism and the common instrumental purpose of the two narratives. [See also neo-Trotskyism]
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@Dissident Rightist
> Or perhaps the “sola scriptura” view of “communism” and “capitalism” as isolated. purely abstract constructs meant to be analyzed solely in terms of their own exoteric claims is perhaps not as useful as viewing them from a more instrumentalist standpoint?
That is essentially my point. The Cold War Conservatives knew they were against the Commies so therefore they were Capitalists, so therefore they were against even non-profit co-ops, or any welfare state programs, or labor unions.
But did the USSR really have anything to do with those? They busted up the unions the first day. The issue with the USSR was that it was a totalitarian state – and that does include economic totalitarianism.
But it doesn’t follow that if you are anti-USSR you should then do the exact opposite of whatever they do.
USA got the worst of both world: we got the police state, the economic totalitarianism, but no decent welfare state programs or non-profit private co-opts. And de-industrialization as the Capitalists sent all the factories to Communist China.
I blame the Reagan voters.
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My wife hasn’t shopped for clothes for quite a few years now. She’s not a “shopper” at all. She uses Stitch Fix as do another 3.5 million people. They send you a box of stuff at whatever interval you desire, the clothes are tailored to your likes, you pick out what you like and put the unwanted in the large envelope provided and send the rejects back. She spends about an average of $100 monthly. Every now and again she’ll tell them not to send anything for a few months. It’s probably cheaper this way as there are no “impulse” buys.
I think recycling probably worked for a while but now it doesn’t. I imagine some garbage barge operator out of Spokane got halfway to China and was met at sea by the Chinese guy that gets paid to accept the garbage. The Chinaman says to him, “dump it here and save yourself half the diesel and time costs”. Bargeman says to Chinese guy, “whoa dude, then you the get paid for nothing”. Chinaman hands him some cash and says, “we got a deal?”.
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@Bill
> Stitch Fix … founded in 2011
This is almost certainly the company I read about back then.
> The business was originally called Rack Habit, and was initially run out of Lake’s apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Yes, it is.
> Stitch Fix generated more than $1 billion in sales during 2018 and reported 3.4 million customers in June 2020.
I guess I’ll have to eat my words. I didn’t think it would be popular, but then again, it’s basically the Sears catalog I guess. Still, it’s not “renting.”
Although I would guess AI/Machine Learning does work quite well at picking out novel variations based on prior purchases. Like the Netflix algorithm, that sort of thing has proven quite effective. Which makes me question “free will” all the more – if a machine can that easily predict your behavior …
Although still, how are they not going to eventually be eaten by Amazon? Isn’t one of Amazon’s selling points is its generous return policy?
> I think recycling probably worked for a while but now it doesn’t. I imagine some garbage barge operator out of Spokane got halfway to China and was met at sea by the Chinese guy that gets paid to accept the garbage. The Chinaman says to him, “dump it here and save yourself half the diesel and time costs”. Bargeman says to Chinese guy, “whoa dude, then you the get paid for nothing”. Chinaman hands him some cash and says, “we got a deal?”.
Yes, that is probably how it works.
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One need only look at the trends to see where this is headed. Athleisure and Crocs (Athleisure Crowley would be a great username BTW) are basically the disposable clothes in Idiocracy. In fact, I think they actually wore Crocs in the movie.
You can add as many robots as you but want when the cotton is too expensive or even illegal to grow or process, it won’t matter. And that’s where it’s going. Somehow, the plant based trash bag material that goes through a million industrial processes and gets shipped all over the world to make your Idiocracy uniform will be “sustainable” and cheaper but the real stuff will be expensive or unobtanium.
Look at the deliberate dismantling of aesthetics going on. Do you think fashion for the masses has any use in that future? There seems to be a very real march towards a society of assimilated gray goo. Uniformity. Conformity.
When clothing becomes 100% utilitarian, why wouldn’t you just buy it as a service? Get your trash bag suit and Crocs delivered and your old ones sent back to the soylent green reprocessing center.
Economic explanations for all of this bear it out. We’re on a march towards efficiency. All will be accounted for and there will be no margins.
My own celebrity clothing line will be called Lumpen and be sold via MLM by van life people in closed down Sears parking lots.
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Trashbag suits are very convenient.
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Honestly man, they can’t stop me from buying yarn…
I’ll 2D print my sewing machine *and* my gun.
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@aiaslives
Have you seen some of the newest robot sewing/spinning machines? Crazy.
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I have not yet, but I will.
Here’s something that astonished me recently:
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