Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: capitalism

  • Theme:

    debt-ocrocy

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Accessing capital finance (going into debt, being bought out) is considered normal for companies and individuals. Yet, when states, towns, or social support services access capital, the debt is paid back through public taxes, a version of plundering the citizens due to incompetent or unlucky government.

    Instead of allowing collapse, like small or medium-sized businesses (the large ones are bailed out), the capitalist devil’s bargain allows rich citizens to capture the state’s taxing power. Once embedded, the rate is hiked, forcing the nation to cover the inflated costs. OR the shareholders remake and steer the social services to their enrichment.

    It sounds more like a medieval oligarchy, legalized through lobbyists: we are all indebted serfs for sins we did not commit.
    –
    –
    –

  • Theme:

    running out the clock

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    One way to win is to stop “playing.”

    You can still be in the game, and technically, the regulations allow you to stall, filibuster, or use the rules to maintain possession (of the ball) with immunity.

    However, winning on a technicality is uninspiring. In the sense of fairness, it is always an asterisk of legality rather than achievement. A loophole of bureaucratic cleverness seldom inspires, which reduces victory until we bleed away what it means to have a hero.

  • Theme:

    Beyond capital: algorithms

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Algorithms are lauded as new processes in capitalism’s arsenal. While traditional capitalism dealt in heavy metals such as gold, machines, production, and labor to move assets, the new model is a light extractive filter sitting atop a tangled web of connected network traffic, siphoning off the nectar.

    While increasing efficiency and value creation, an algorithm sits atop an already exploitative digital economy (harvesting of personal data and clicks), much as traditional capital set atop early civilizations (militarized states protect merchants and allow factories and supply chains). This additional layering offers benefits yet increasingly attenuates production from the physical into the abstract and speculative.

    Arguably, the reliance on coordinated, cooperative networks provides stability beyond material reality until chaos ensues, at which point the revenge of the real reduces artificial systemic complexity very rapidly: algorithms are not capital but pleasant parasites easily swatted.

  • Theme:

    the attention economy

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    To be awake today is to be sold something.

  • Theme:

    Capitalism requires hope

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    In capitalism, economic salvation is a promise occasionally made good: some small percent miraculously gets rich. For most, it is an illusory pretense, a propagandistic dogma, that hard work will pay off, lifting the poverty-stricken to grace.

    There is a slim chance that it is better than the strict feudal/caste system, except psychologically, where capitalism internalizes the master’s whip: our striving and failures are our faults, our shame. In feudal systems and caste systems, it is systemic fate, not personal failure, that lands you in poverty or wealth.

    The promise of possible wealth (economic salvation) moderates the volatility of a system that also ruins people. Hope fuels the winners, and when it fails, it creates the losers. Either way, hope is an essential fuel for the populace to accept the system and believe its goods outweigh its ills.

    –
    –
    –

  • Theme:

    The story of capitalism

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Capitalism, as a narrative ideology, can be seen as an evolved version of the master-slave dynamic, where economic power replaces direct subjugation.

    It offers a more complex, dramatic story—one of individualism, opportunity, and self-made heroes. The chaos of markets and competition heightens the stakes, turning economic struggles into personal dramas.

    However, this narrative also generates great tragedies. The heroes—entrepreneurs, and capitalists—are often accompanied by victims: the exploited or marginalized. Thus, capitalism’s appeal lies in its dramatic potential, but its tragedy arises from the inherent inequalities and systemic pressures embedded in this grand narrative.

  • Theme:

    Paradox: fighting for natural rights

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    We cannot fight for natural rights with war and coercion, because it is antithetical to the spirit natural rights, forcing a hypocritical solution.

    Neither can natural rights be reinstated by appealing to settled peaceful times, because such a time is managed by industrial complexes and conglomerates that work fracture liberty and the individual into serfdom.

    From Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, #Accelerate

  • Theme:

    natural rights: a byproduct of peaceful industry

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Natural rights stem from peaceful industry and cannot be restored through war or coercive government, as these oppose the spirit of natural rights. (War or Government will not restore your rights.)

    They also cannot be reinstated through settled peace and freedom, which would advance industrial and corporate dominance, further eroding natural liberty. (Peaceful will not restore your rights.)

    from Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, #Accelerate

    –
    –
    –

  • Theme:

    Incentives frame your outcome: surveillance data

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    The questions we pose are driven by specific incentives: complex queries empower problem-solvers, commerce-driven inquiries explore market potential, but to foster awareness, we ponder the absence of problems.

    Surveillance capitalism, with its unsettling lexicon—harvesting, exhaust, extraction, akin to industrial strip mining—suggests that behaviors extracted are merely responses to the intrusive questions posed. Thus, the behaviors, and consequently the data, are manufactured at the moment of inquiry, not passively mined. This process is not a zero-sum game.

    The core issue with surveillance capitalism lies in its data collection focus, which is narrowly aimed at consumer profiling and sales rather than gathering data that could contribute to more meaningful or transformative outcomes: global ecology or meaningful biopolitics.

    –
    –
    –

  • Theme:

    the communal self disrupted by capitalism

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    The competitive nature of the capitalist economic struggle, while it produces progress in products and raises the overall quality of life, also converts humans into individuated consumers, themselves produced and desires manipulated.

    To know yourself as an individual (sovereign, autonomous) is to not know yourself as part of a community with reliant ties. You cease to know yourself as we once did, as a piece of a whole in which your identity is integral and there is no desire to differentiate or stive out of it.