Liberating Capital, You and Me.
No pa dodam še tretje pismo, ki se bolj dotika interneta in splošne globalizacije in liberacije denarnega pretoka…
Kakorkoli obrnem in vsakič ko se poglobi, vidim smisel v njenem pisanju konec koncev je Amerika doživela že veliko več v tem sistemu kot mi sami…
In a way I am a capitalist in the most extreme sense. I believe capital should be as free as possible to do what it wants to do. Before you brandish me, please understand I am not a corporatist, Randian, or some kind of right-wing Extropian. I don’t believe in the current system of corporate control. True capitalism would be free of such crazy and corrupt constraints. I’ll be blunt; Ayn Rand had it all wrong. Most extropians and libertarians as well. They hijacked the idea and took it hostage. But it’s hostage status is about to end.
HERE IS MY VISION OF WHERE THINGS ARE ACTUALLY GOING
The Internet is already pervasive. Already people are paying exorbitant amounts of money to buy virtual things and places in virtual games. Many of these games are using virtual currency within the game. It has become so valuable to some people that they are now buying OTHER things besides game stuff. For example, people have exchanged thousands of earned game money into “real” dollars and vice versa. How long until out of control decentralized p2p currencies proliferate? Not long I suspect. Meanwhile, the Internet itself is becoming more liberated and decentralized, more p2p applications are flourishing, open source in every stripe and every possible application is being developed. Wikipedia is offering all of its knowledge for free. Google, Yahoo and at some point many, many others will be offering the entire worlds knowledge found in books (tens of millions of them) online. And this is just the beginning. Within 10 years, the Internet will have allowed almost everything we know and are to become digitized. This includes money, which as I pointed out above, HAS ALREADY STARTED.
Please keep in mind, that while all this is happening, alternative energy continues to get cheaper and more pervasive, nanomaterials and soon nanofabs will start cropping up everywhere, totally disrupting the corporate supply chain, making people ever more autonomous, which further feeds on itself the mobility of people, things, ideas, money, everything. Further driving prices down.
Capitalism, regardless of what the top corporations want, is ultimately about creating more capital - more, more and still more without end. Economic growth in every way. It’s about creating a world without limits. A world with limits, limits capital. Capital like life, like information, like you, desperately wants to be free. And it will do whatever it has to become that way. The reason is that the degree to which any player in the system operates with that philosophy, and competes in the marketplace that way, will win. Again, wikipedia vs. Britannica, Linux vs. windows., etc. Decentralized marketplaces out compete centralized ones. We should have learned that when the west beat the Soviet Union, just because such a centrally controlled economy is not sustainable. It’s stupid and vunerable to corruption and control. The same thing has happed here now. They are trying to create a corporate controlled state economy, in which very specific corporations have all the control over everyone and everything else on the planet - total world domination. The problem with this plan is that it has all the same weaknesses as the old soviet system. It’s basically replacing the soviet party with the corporate party. Our CEO’s become more like their leaders - fat cats. The parallels are striking. That is the ultimate irony of what is unfolding on the world stage today. It can’t last and is not sutainable. Capitalism and communism are both being transcended by capital itself. Capital liberated from capitalism. I know I’m contradicting myself here, but basically what I’m saying is we have no words or models for whats coming next. IT IS THAT REVOLUTIONARY!! It’s an entirely new p2p, decentralized system - one so powerful, decentralized and free beyond anything that has existed before, that nothing will stand a chance of stopping it. It is so revolutionary, that our poor conditioned brains may have a really hard time getting our minds around it. But it is completely logical once you think about it. In fact, corporations have been trying very hard to make sure you don’t understand it. But now’s your chance to wake up from your sleep, and see that economic liberation is at hand.
As everything gets cheaper and cheaper with advancing technology, it will become highly profitable for a company to start paying people to do anything they want. Now its important to understand what I mean by company. Companies of today are a dying breed, their current crazy system is about to collapse. Instead, companies will continue to exist, except they will become totally amorphous, totally transparent to the economy itself. So streamlined, that they will become indistinguisable from everything else. Please read my Leisure society article to understand how this actually will work. Anyway, in exchange for people paid to do whatever they want, people have only two things they have to do in return. Share any ideas they have about how to make the world a better place, including an agreed upon amount of money they might make off of it back to the company. A symbiotic relationship. Those companies elsewhere on the globe, who insist on not paying people, will have to resort to selling their products to only those already rich enough to afford it, as most everyone else will be unemployed as a result of rapidly increasing automation. Meanwhile, the other companies are taking all the untapped genius of the marketplace, by making customers loyal to their products in exchange for any help they can give. The amount of creativity, ingenuity that will come from this will be extraordinary. Parties will crop up, new entertainment venues, pleasure centers, vacation resorts, gaming ideas. Trust me when people have all that free time, they will begin a new renaissance of creativity like we have never seen before. There will only be so much sex, pot and TV that the average person will engage in. Most people will start doing other things, when they realize that it will get really boring, especially knowing there is WAY more happening in the world and will want to be a part of the fun, than sit around and be a slug all day. Besides, the ability of neuro-enhancement is already reaching a point, where pleasure, or at least the elimination of depression is easy. I truly believe that Burning Man is trailblazing this type of global leisure society.
Sure, the generous company might be taking risks with any one person, but it’s the numbers their counting on. Besides, having a poor customer who can’t afford to buy any of their stuff in this extremely connected world will in the end hurt and drag down their bottom line. Helping everyone will be in everyone’s best interest. It is now, but people haven’t quite figured that out yet. The prevailing paradigm being promoted by them is “you must work HARD to get money”. “If you aren’t working hard, you’re a cheat, a lazy bum, a parasite” or whatever other lame name they have to come up with to keep you enslaved. Quite simply, their thinking is archaic, backward, Puritanical, illogical. And capitilism has no patience for backward thinking - it rewards the most forward thinking. The decentralized technologies that are coming rapidly, as well as the totally novel and radically liberating economic landscape that is approaching, breaks all the rules. Those who are generous will make the most money, period. Greedy types will wither away into nothing. Generosity will be magnified by the network, and will be repaid in greater levels of generosity. This is the true Gift Economy that you keep hearing about. Its not some pipe dream, its in fact what is actually happening as we speak. All the basic foundations are being laid now. And guess what, almost everyone, including corporations are becoming part of this new game, whether they like it or not. Everyone adds and is adding to the network, especially and including the third world, sharing ideas, and the network itself and all of its millions of open-source engineers continues to extend and empower it beyond anything we can imagine.
The Internet is not some static thing, it is the enabler, which keeps getting more enabled to enable more, in a bootstrapping feedback loop. Just think, the web itself was an experimental application running on one guys machine just 13 years ago. Now it is everywhere. It has become so pervasive we hardly even question it anymore. Well the web is only the beginning; there are now thousands of new applications being created right now that are extending it in ways we have barely begun to understand. Music was liberated by Napster, then gnutella, then bittorrent, now Exeem. Movies are next, followed by just about every type of patent and copyright. “Aye, the sky is falling, rampant piracy is robbing us!” But who is really robbing whom here? Corporations robbed it from the public domain. So the marketplace of people, capital and technological progress itself is taking it back into balance. Will the legal system have any power to stop this onslaught? Nope. If it did, then why are all the p2p applications still running at record bandwidths? Beginning to see the picture now? They can’t stop it. The genie is out of the bottle. Since everything is becoming digitized, and everything digitized is becoming FREE, then everything becomes free. Capital (i.e. money) then becomes almost meaningless. Simple and logical right? Anything that can’t be digitized will become of marginal cost, easily paid for by your continued positive presence in the world. If you still don’t get it, it’s all right, it’s your brain’s way of dealing with the shock of believing it was impossible, utopian, etc. So be kind to yourself, pick your jaw up off the floor from the shockingly good news, take a breather, relax, come back in a few days, read this again, and you’ll probably get it the second time around. Personally, I’ve gone over this all a hundred times and I’m still gettting my mind around it. It’s perfectly ok, we’ve all been thru hell and back under a lifetime of wage slavery and corporate-tv brainwashing. So believing something this fucking great and optimistic is just way to hard to believe right now. I understand! But it’s true. You’ll feel whole lots better when you finally realize it. I know I did. 
