The majority of the world population would get a better quality of life out of returning to the stone age, compared to the way capitalism has been proven to operate over and over again. Even if you believe the absolute worst about that way of life, it can't be worse than suffering the exploitations of modernity without enjoying any of its benefits, which is the reality for far too many people.
Personally, I think our economy and politics need to evolve into a memetic form. I'm not talking about stupid jokes. I'm talking about direct communication that spreads in a natural fashion and unites people into action that they have a direct interest and belief in. I think that this is the natural way for civilization to progress at this stage of mass communication. It's already happening in many ways. The right tools have just not been made to facilitate it with the proper procedures and scale that we need.
Well, you described capitalism ("people into action that they have a direct interest and belief in").
1. What I said implied far more than that.
2. I think there's much more to the definition of capitalism than that. Otherwise, a group of people deciding to create a communist government and acting on that belief and interest would be a capitalist course of action.
I see capitalism as an abstract, decentralized method of indirectly electing rulers, who then rule in a centralized fashion. The invisible hand is a good concept. People who have good ideas or skills are rewarded for them when people partake of the benefits they offer. That reward is more resources to, theoretically, have greater ability to do more good things. This is where it falls apart pretty damn quickly. There is incentive to do beneficial things to get ahead. Once ahead, there is no incentive to do anything good. In fact, those who continue to act on that incentive lose out in competition.
Plus, people doing what they are directly interested or believe in has nothing to do with it most of the time. The vast majority are forced into daily activity that works against their best interests; working for the wealthy to make them more wealthy.
What I was saying is that we don't need the abstraction anymore. It was the best we could do before the era of mass communications, when there was no practical way for intelligent allocation of resources to occur without centralized leadership. There were too many limitations in the ways information could flow. A single person at the top of a hierarchy could mobilize large numbers of people into concerted effort much quicker than a community's ability to work out mutual agreements.
This is no longer the case at all. People are now more than capable of reacting in an egalitarian and organized fashion to information and ideas from around the world many times more quickly than an order can pass down through a chain of command. There is no reason we should be organizing our lives around the commands of people who have no relation to us. We should be communicating directly with one another on a scale relative to the issue in question and coming to mutual agreements through modern consensus decision making processes. We should be acting because it is what we mutually agree to do, not because we have to pay the rent.
And I'm currently convinced that all the world is waiting for is the proper tools to be made to facilitate this.
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Topic: Occupying Wallstreet (Read 289041 times)