The alternative is a continued and ever more absurd growth in the service sector. In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then trickling down. It does sound absurd, doesn't it? But we're already getting there. Does your kitchen really need a marble counter top? No, but you want to feel important/worthy enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, and a luxurious lifestyle includes a marble counter top, so you get one. Replace "kitchen" and "marble counter top" with whatever you want to.
The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great example of this. High-end prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all for providing emotional support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate modern workers, in my opinion, and most of us will be following in their footsteps soon enough.
Re that pg tweet - "Will ownership turn out to be largely a hack people resorted to before they had the infrastructure to manage sharing properly?"
We have the technology to share the profits of AirBNB right now. The "sharing economy" can work on many levels now that we have the technology. Or we could all share YC, or Google, or even TechCrunch.
Who will step up to the plate first, then?
That's where this line of thinking goes, universal ownership not just of commodity resources, but of everything.
Who will lead us?
Note- While I sound satirical, I'm really not. This is the logical and likely necessary progression. And it really does require some leadership.
"This is the logical and likely necessary progression. And it really does require some leadership."
You can't just tout your opinion as "logical". We live in the real world, where people have their own opinions and wants/desires. Just because it's "logical" according to you for society to move in a specific direction using a specific political system, doesn't mean that everyone will agree with it, nor that it is logical for them to do so.
It's odd how all these political schemes always work in "absolutes", and never allowing anyone to take themselves out of it voluntarily. Hint: If someone doesn't like the political system, then you're acting immorally and violently by forcing them to abide by it.
I'm genuinely curious but how to do prevent abuse with shared stuff? There's lots of people in the world who will abuse, destroy, hog, etc. There was that story about the airbnb sex party just over a month ago as just one example.
I'm sure there are good ideas. Maybe that's yet another tech solution?
A quick google about abuse of Zipcars brought up this article
It's a society that shares everything. Logical mode of thinking suggests that leadership should also be shared.
A recent example of this is; San Francisco (I think) municipality opening up it databases to the citizens so that people can figure out a way to get involved in how their living space is governed.
Those in "leadership" roles will eventually enrich themselves and their cronies and you're back to having income inequality, but worse than before, since any chance at upward mobility has been removed.
I'd be careful about assuming that it is necessary just because it seems plausible. Workers rebelling against capitalists and seizing the means of production once also seemed like a logical, necessary progression from the economic system of the time.
edit: The material dialectic, if it exists in any meaningful way, is far stranger than we once supposed.
The crux: "It seems to me that technology will soon destroy jobs faster than it creates them, if it hasn’t started to already. Which is a good thing! Most of the jobs it destroys are bad, and most of the ones it creates are good. Net human happiness should be vastly increased, not decreased, by this process — but, unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work that way."
Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
Basically, that quote was the foundation of Marx' argument for why he saw capitalism as doomed to eventual failure.
People tend to think that Marx argued for the overthrow of capitalism because it is/was in his eyes morally "bad" or "evil", but that's not really the case.
Marx argued that capitalism was better than any previous system, and - despite failings - vitally necessary to bring the world to a point where production would for the first time in history make it possible to meet the basic needs of everyone
(without which, he insisted, a socialist revolution would be doomed to failure: in such a situation, redistribution would just make want common, and cause the old class struggle to re-assert itself - like it did in the Soviet Union etc. with the party installing itself as a new upper class).
But he expected capitalism to continue to push production efficiency to the point where it would overproduce and under-employ, and that this would eventually trigger socialist revolutions.
> Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we not?
OR embrace the structural changes and move towards a world in which fulfillment of basic needs (food/shelter/medical care) aren't tied to whether or not one has a job. All this extra value floating around should take care of that...
Who is "we"? There is no "we". Capitalism exists because different people have conflicting desires and unequal abilities. Capitalism is just another word for natural selection. Any attempts to get rid of capitalism as the "default" state of interhuman relations, will have to be accompanied by massive amounts of force, because you cant fight human nature without force. And even then, the only people willing to invest force and suffering to end the natural state of things are people who would personally profit from ending it, otherwise they would have no motivation to lift a finger, let alone lose one fighting to end capitalism, which then makes the attempt to violently end capitalism just another, more brutish form of natural selection.
You can not somehow "out-smart" natural selection and evolution and make people live happily together ever after without anybody exploiting anybody else. Inequality is a fact of life. By forcibly ending capitalism, the most humane form of natural selection to date, you can merely make the endeavour more bloody again.
The article contends that we'll replace capitalism with a "reputation economy":
> I strongly suspect that any post-capitalist society
> will be built around a technologically sophisticated
> reputation economy, very very loosely a la Cory
> Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
> Obviously we already live in a world full of subtle
> reputation economies — you see one in action any time a
> celebrity gets special treatment. Nowadays, though,
> technology could enable something much more codified and
> quantitative. (Crude hacks like Klout may at least light
> the way, for all their flaws.)
Perhaps I'm being thick, but isn't reputation just a form of capital? Why would it replace capital?
I think the idea is that you can't hoard reputation and you can't trade it.
With money the more you get the easier it becomes to manipulate the system so you can acquire even more, with reputation you go from no reputation to maximum reputation in one particular subject.
You're not being thick. The author conflates currency with capital and corporatism with capitalism. The only question is whether or not the author is making this mistake out of ignorance or malice.
Or after Capitalism destroys technology (such as TWC/Comcast or RIAA/MPAA). Or even after Technology destroys technology (NSA). People are still greedy and power wants more power. If you push powerful people too far they will fight back. If you push governments with power you usually wind up dead. If you try to take people's wealth away they usually have the resources to beat you back. A few exceptions is not a rule.
History is full of people who tried to fix society's ills and virtually always have things wind up even worse. The French revolution started out as idealism and wound up using "technology" to chop off people's heads.
I'm not at all against technology trying to make things better but unless we eliminate people it's not going to change basic human behavior.
It has some ideas on how to get from where we are to there. I think the philosophies of Race Against the Machine and Capital in the 21st century are pretty insightful and the truth may be somewhere in between the two.
I think it's a mistake to call the ubiquitous emphasis on corporate growth in the US for the last 40 years "capitalism". The argument really breaks down if you try to call this all laissez-faire capitalism. There has been nothing "hands off" about our government's handling of the economic infrastructure. They have walked campaign-contribution-hand in regulation-and-subsidy-hand down the aisle of oligopoly and oligarchy. It's much closer to the mercantilism of Europe out of which the US was created than it is to laissez-faire.
I don't believe in completely unregulated markets, either. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking government will ride in to save the day. They were complicity in creating a system whose soul purpose is to drain 99.9% of people in the country of their money and leave nothing for anyone else. That's not trade, that's not capitalism. That's scorched earth warfare. You won't get reform out of Congress, they have too much skin in the game of the current system.
In a world where corporations can't buy off congresscritters, and congresscritters can't pass laws to give unfair advantage to their cohorts, I don't believe you can have an oligopoly of giganto-corporations. There is such an inefficiency to them that a truly capitalist system would have swarmed, killed, ate them up, and spat them out already.
We need to continue to push the internet to be independent, to grow an economy disconnected from governments, one that can, through mutual benefit of trade (i.e. capitalism) support the individuals within it with understanding and fairness, with no favor provided to any individual just because they won the Ivy League roommate lottery.
Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. Capitalism is one method of allocating scarce resources. If some resources become so plentiful that they are no longer scarce, they are treated as having no value. I don't see how everything could possibly become non-scarce. Maybe energy, maybe even food, but we still need to build homes, transportation of some sort, to provide medical care, and go into court when someone screws you over. And because of that, there will need to be a way of allocating resources.
Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources. While it's nice to predict some moneyless utopia in the future, it presents real and insurmountable problems.
>Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources
a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources
I'd put it slightly differently. We need a method for the allocation of scarce resources and money is the one we have developed that has the least transactional overhead, and any methods that seek to replace it not only needs to look at achieving a better allocation, but also needs to be able to do it with less overhead or else you lose any benefits gained.
What irked me about this article was the author's immediate need to declare his love of Marxism and "Marxist-powered technology". It's a reminder of how entrenched the current ideology is and how people feel they must align themselves to it, for fear of ridicule (or worse). But I agree with the overall tone of the article. Maybe there will be a day when Marxism is considered to be a thing of the past and we can move on to some other socio-economic paradigm.
But the idea that capitalism will eventually produce the conditions of its own demise is /the/ Marxist argument. It's like Marx 101. Capitalism is a stage (and a necessary one) on the way towards full communism. (Unfortunately we've seen that attempts to move past that dictatorship of the proletariat time period haven't worked out so well)
"...a basic income, supplemented by occasional temporary gigs..."
The problem I see with gigs, as can be seen on the various freelancing sites, is you're competing with people on the other side of the world who need way less than you to get by. As far as online gigs go, I'd like to see some borders go up in all but special cases.
The other side of the world is quickly catching up to developed nations. Granted there's still a while to go, but there's good reason to think that at some point countries everywhere will be more or less on an even keel.
And people wonder why inequality is supposedly increasing. Did we not ever stop to think that we're putting up barriers that prevent the poor from equalizing with the rich?
And this new reputation economy will only be as good as the cultural biases of the engineers of the technology. Which could net us a worse situation than there is currently.
[+] [-] tormeh|12 years ago|reply
The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great example of this. High-end prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all for providing emotional support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate modern workers, in my opinion, and most of us will be following in their footsteps soon enough.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
We have the technology to share the profits of AirBNB right now. The "sharing economy" can work on many levels now that we have the technology. Or we could all share YC, or Google, or even TechCrunch.
Who will step up to the plate first, then?
That's where this line of thinking goes, universal ownership not just of commodity resources, but of everything.
Who will lead us?
Note- While I sound satirical, I'm really not. This is the logical and likely necessary progression. And it really does require some leadership.
[+] [-] zo1|12 years ago|reply
It's odd how all these political schemes always work in "absolutes", and never allowing anyone to take themselves out of it voluntarily. Hint: If someone doesn't like the political system, then you're acting immorally and violently by forcing them to abide by it.
[+] [-] greggman|12 years ago|reply
I'm sure there are good ideas. Maybe that's yet another tech solution?
A quick google about abuse of Zipcars brought up this article
http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/07/zipcar-users-dont-good-c...
[+] [-] n0rm|12 years ago|reply
A recent example of this is; San Francisco (I think) municipality opening up it databases to the citizens so that people can figure out a way to get involved in how their living space is governed.
[+] [-] itbeho|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seacious|12 years ago|reply
edit: The material dialectic, if it exists in any meaningful way, is far stranger than we once supposed.
[+] [-] aluhut|12 years ago|reply
Googles AI of course.
[+] [-] klunger|12 years ago|reply
Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
People tend to think that Marx argued for the overthrow of capitalism because it is/was in his eyes morally "bad" or "evil", but that's not really the case.
Marx argued that capitalism was better than any previous system, and - despite failings - vitally necessary to bring the world to a point where production would for the first time in history make it possible to meet the basic needs of everyone
(without which, he insisted, a socialist revolution would be doomed to failure: in such a situation, redistribution would just make want common, and cause the old class struggle to re-assert itself - like it did in the Soviet Union etc. with the party installing itself as a new upper class).
But he expected capitalism to continue to push production efficiency to the point where it would overproduce and under-employ, and that this would eventually trigger socialist revolutions.
> Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we not?
[+] [-] llamataboot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muuh-gnu|12 years ago|reply
Who is "we"? There is no "we". Capitalism exists because different people have conflicting desires and unequal abilities. Capitalism is just another word for natural selection. Any attempts to get rid of capitalism as the "default" state of interhuman relations, will have to be accompanied by massive amounts of force, because you cant fight human nature without force. And even then, the only people willing to invest force and suffering to end the natural state of things are people who would personally profit from ending it, otherwise they would have no motivation to lift a finger, let alone lose one fighting to end capitalism, which then makes the attempt to violently end capitalism just another, more brutish form of natural selection.
You can not somehow "out-smart" natural selection and evolution and make people live happily together ever after without anybody exploiting anybody else. Inequality is a fact of life. By forcibly ending capitalism, the most humane form of natural selection to date, you can merely make the endeavour more bloody again.
[+] [-] carsongross|12 years ago|reply
Or we could try to lower costs for people by creating software that replaces big companies (and government.)
Just a thought.
[+] [-] jt2190|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djkz|12 years ago|reply
With money the more you get the easier it becomes to manipulate the system so you can acquire even more, with reputation you go from no reputation to maximum reputation in one particular subject.
[+] [-] moron4hire|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|12 years ago|reply
History is full of people who tried to fix society's ills and virtually always have things wind up even worse. The French revolution started out as idealism and wound up using "technology" to chop off people's heads.
I'm not at all against technology trying to make things better but unless we eliminate people it's not going to change basic human behavior.
[+] [-] ryanong|12 years ago|reply
Race Against the Machine,
by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-...
It has some ideas on how to get from where we are to there. I think the philosophies of Race Against the Machine and Capital in the 21st century are pretty insightful and the truth may be somewhere in between the two.
[+] [-] moron4hire|12 years ago|reply
I don't believe in completely unregulated markets, either. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking government will ride in to save the day. They were complicity in creating a system whose soul purpose is to drain 99.9% of people in the country of their money and leave nothing for anyone else. That's not trade, that's not capitalism. That's scorched earth warfare. You won't get reform out of Congress, they have too much skin in the game of the current system.
In a world where corporations can't buy off congresscritters, and congresscritters can't pass laws to give unfair advantage to their cohorts, I don't believe you can have an oligopoly of giganto-corporations. There is such an inefficiency to them that a truly capitalist system would have swarmed, killed, ate them up, and spat them out already.
We need to continue to push the internet to be independent, to grow an economy disconnected from governments, one that can, through mutual benefit of trade (i.e. capitalism) support the individuals within it with understanding and fairness, with no favor provided to any individual just because they won the Ivy League roommate lottery.
[+] [-] jstalin|12 years ago|reply
Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources. While it's nice to predict some moneyless utopia in the future, it presents real and insurmountable problems.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|12 years ago|reply
So I guess he never heard of the Incans.
[+] [-] lotsofmangos|12 years ago|reply
I'd put it slightly differently. We need a method for the allocation of scarce resources and money is the one we have developed that has the least transactional overhead, and any methods that seek to replace it not only needs to look at achieving a better allocation, but also needs to be able to do it with less overhead or else you lose any benefits gained.
[+] [-] motters|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llamataboot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmrm|12 years ago|reply
McCarthy is not ancient history, and Marxism is still viewed mostly met suspiciousness and ridicule in the us.
No one in the US and in their right mind would claim to be Marxist in order to fit in our due to social pressure. If anything, the exact opposite.
[+] [-] kybernetyk|12 years ago|reply
He makes this sound like it was something bad.
[+] [-] bwanab|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] personlurking|12 years ago|reply
The problem I see with gigs, as can be seen on the various freelancing sites, is you're competing with people on the other side of the world who need way less than you to get by. As far as online gigs go, I'd like to see some borders go up in all but special cases.
[+] [-] lotsofmangos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0th87|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zo1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llamataboot|12 years ago|reply
But luckily there's plenty of things that /can't/ be done from the other side of the world.
[+] [-] ronaldx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quomopete|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daRomansky|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n0rm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mantrax5|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nirnira|12 years ago|reply
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