Thank you for reading this even if you only just did a few sentences.
tl;dr We have 2 systems next to each other
On the one hand there is big banks and investors ruining the capitalist system into the ground by not spending the people's money wisely, spending the bail out money unwisely and continuing to do so crisis after crisis. The driving influence of this system is that a bail out is met with printing more money that is directly given to the entities who caused the bail out in the first place. This creates a loop of where people lose all their money and banks/investors (the superwealthy) get free money without doing anything but spending it on themselves. A loop that we are nearing the end of.
On the other hand is this new data economy where you are giving your advertisement for free to giga companies who own everything. They own the buildings, the roads, sea, sky, railways to transport and produce vast amounts of materials, products and so forth. These products work together to get a clear picture of what you are most likely to buy, and influence you in buying things what they show you.
The culmination of capitalism is that it has found a way to sell you. You are not just a physical slave that needs to work, you are a slave that needs to advertise yourself to the company and then you need to buy their product.
Explanation
Traditionally the beast was always money = power because money buys you things. People use money to buy food, to buy medicine, to buy what they want and need. But in essence money is just an influencer. Just like an army is an influencer to Putin and reddit is an influencer to many of us.
When you talk about money. This isn't talking about a minimum wage. Or a millionaire. This is about the hundreds of millions, the billions, the dozens of billions, the hundreds of billions of dollars/ euros/ yens etc.. The First World Countries creation of wealth and the system that makes the wealth for them.
Feudalism
So the man who has all the money (the lord) can tell people what to do (the peasant) and the lord tells the peasant to work so he can take what the peasant has produces and sell it for more money. The peasant gets just enough to stay alive. The lord owns all the land, all the money, all the buildings, all the tools. Feudalism!
But feudalism is dead. It was replaced by:
Capitalism.
Some say feudalism was never gone, but eventually you can not recognize fuedalism and capitalism as a same thing. At best feudalism is now a finely chiseled construct.
The owner of the factory and the machines has all the money. He makes people work the machines and the tools so he can sell what is produced. (eventually he owns the entire chain of production from agriculture, to machine production to logistics to stores, to delivery like Amazon.) However because of industry the amount of money to set this up is gigantic. It's so big you need to start giving out money you don't have because there isn't enough money to give. There are solutions to this. First you loan money (as a small bank/ investing company), second you come together with others so you can loan a lot more money immediately, you are bigger so you have a bigger pool to loan (big bank big investors).
This works just fine until you realized eventually the production is too big. and to make more profits you need to sell to more people. The problem is not everyone wants to buy. So the second thing you need to do is to influence people the need to buy. This is is capitalism.
So now we have the big banks and big bussines and Now the big problem with loaning lots of money is what if you don't get the profit. Loaning money is basically saying I give you this future money in the hope that you produce the money I gave you with, in the future.
What happens if nothing is produced? If not enough is produced? The bank loaned all the money, now it has no money. How did the bank get the money? The bank got the money from the people. So correction: the people have no money, so in essence the bank is the people.
Now what happens if the people (in this case the represented government) bail out the banks. You solve the problem of no money. The people were bailed out. Correction: the bank was bailed out. But the money that was loaned first isn't gone. It's still somewhere. So the amount of money in the world has risen. Conclusion the people have less, because they lost the first loan of money they gave to the banks and they lost the bail out money they gave to the banks.
What do the bankers/ investors do with the money they received? They have a party and invest back in the same things they invest before. Investments go through stock market. You buy stocks saying I invest in your company, the company makes profits through production, line goes up, you sell stocks for profit. Everyone happy. So the banks/ investors invest in themselves so their stocks go up so everyone wants to buy it because they will become more valuable but nothing is being produced
There is a new system next to Capitalism
It isn't about accumulating wealth through production. Nothing of value is being made. It's just numbers. It's fake. it's not fake it's DEBT. And when the debt is reached and the time to pay has arrived the only solution is to pay it, to cancel it or to increase the debt ceiling.
For the last 20 years we have been increasing the debt ceiling and paying off the bankers/investors meanwhile everyone still living in the old capitalist system is exploiting it to the hilt in order to survive. They are using the capitalist system that is not profitable sustainable anymore to grow in to live on the new system that IS.
the exploitation signs of the old capitalist system shows:
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exploitation of labor in any way possible. Disrupting unions, low/ stagnant wages, long work hours, little sick /vacation days, no or little protection from labor laws
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a share economy system (uber, airbnb, Lyft, rental scooters/bycicles). ANYTHING someone owns and can be temporarily shared for profits when he is not using it is sold. People don't own anything expensive anymore for themselves. It's all leased or rented temporarily. Nobody can afford to own anything anymore. To grow in the old system is to exploit anything you have that can be for money.
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the desire for distraction from the inability to grow. Bread and circuses in essence. If you are fed, if you have a roof over your head, if you are distracted enough through entertainment, people will be content. Everyone understands you need to work for your food, so that's why certain harsh conditions are acceptable to many. But in these days it's becoming more and more unacceptable.
What is the new system?
The new system is based on influencing you. You get free products to consume, but that makes no sense because nothing is free. Someone has to be paid, someone is being paid. Who pays and who gets paid? The person influencing you gets paid. The person wanting to influence you gets paid. What happens if someone could do both? Then he is paying himself to influence you to do something for him.
Why does someone want to influence you? To buy things. To click on ads which generate money, to buy products which generate money, to watch tiktok videos or youtube shorts or instagram pictures or anything so that someone gets paid
Amazon sells you Alexa. You tell Alexa what you like. Alexa shows you objects you like that you could buy from Amazon. Amazon sells you product. When did you get paid and what did Amazon get paid?
Amazon got paid when:
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You bought Alexa
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You told Alexa what you wanted (advertisement information)
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You chose an object to buy that Alexa showed you (the power to influence you increases because you were succesfully influenced by the algorithm to show what you like, this strengthens the accuracy of showing things you might buy.)
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You paid for the object you bought from Amazon.
you didn't get paid
In the capitalist there were individual middlemen that got a piece of the pie. This spread the wealth. But now the wealth is not spread anymore. One corporation is both gathering the materials, producing objects out of it, advertising the product, controlling you what you desire and thus you buying the product they produced.
It is horrifying.
And for someone to desire to grow in this world, can only do so by being able to influence others. And we get influenced by people are beautiful, talented, smart, popular. The modern influencer controls you, but he is controlled by the entity paying him
But the influencer is not producing anything functional. He's not making a chair. He's not selling you the car or baking you a pie. He's advertising to you but masked as the entertainer. Both entertainment and advertisement are weaved through together as information you pick up. The distinction between entertainment and advertisement is fading away. The entertainment that you watch that gets picked up by the algorithm that gets a picture of what you like and don't like, showing you ads based on the things you like and then you buy them. This is in essence the new system.
And most of the time the influencer is you, and you're doing it for free. You talking on your phone saying you're going to watch this on netflix, or go get mcdonalds or buy those new nikes, or googling the newest album from an artist or uploading a picture of a dog or writing on reddit giant posts about antiwork.
You get paid very little what you work for and you need to pay for what you buy.
Solutions:
reject the beasts and cut off from them (impossible, go live in the woods I guess? Back to monke in essence)
Remove the beasts entirely never for them to exist anymore (anarchy, impossible, also very huge consequences)
Kill the beasts (ah revolution, what comes from the chaos will most likely evolve into a system where a few have everything and the many nothing like that over many years. Perhaps this is the natural way of things.)
become equal to the beasts (impossible)
take over one or more of the beasts so it supports you (might be possible.. if you have a government that rejects the current economic system and reforms it, you can reduce the power of the beasts, but true power corrupts. You would need incorruptible people which is honestly not realistic…)
Make war with the beasts. (impossible. A country would start a war against another country during times of great debt. This sparks a chance to start all over. WWII was caused by the economic crash of 1929. The crash led to discontent, fascism and war.) Right now this is happening too. Fascism is rising everywhere. Trumpism is part of it. Though Trump is a moron so luckely his damage was temporary although he almost won a second term which would have probably be the catalyst of the end. Another point: wars do not happen anymore unless 1 person is in charge. Napoleon, Hitler, Putin, Hiroto, Stalin. A democratic country does not do war itself or its neighbours (this is economically damaging), it does war somewhere else (south america, africa, middle east)
Realistically from a historical perspective revolution or war has always been the consequence of the system that completely exploited the human person. This is what I expect will happen in probably the next 2 to 5 years.