For the past two years now, of course, it’s been the global pandemic and all the seemingly endless emotional and economic turmoil it has churned up that has dominated the headlines and the airwaves, as well as our thoughts and worries. Never far behind that is our dawning awareness of just how much trouble we’re really in as a result of the planetary heating we’ve wreaked upon ourselves – in fact, if anything has managed to break through the grim daily litany of half-contextualized COVID factoids in these years, and truly imprint itself upon on collective consciousness, it’s the harrowing coverage of firestorms and floods, heatwaves and hurricanes, ever more constant, seemingly everywhere and nearly all of unprecedented intensity.

For most of us, that’s entirely enough mental noise to contend with. If you have any attention left to spare, however, and you haven’t yet tuned out everything not immediately germane to the pressing needs of everyday survival, you may have perceived the thing that’s been bubbling along beneath the surface of events this whole time – something maybe harder to discern than the parade of figures about case rates or wind speeds, novel variants and calving ice shelves, but no less consequential for that. It is the steady accretion of news items suggesting that we stand on the verge of yet another epochal technosocial transformation. The long-awaited and now perceptibly becoming actual advent of novel technologies like machine learning, so-called “artifical intelligence,” virtual reality and cryptocurrency certainly seems like it has the potential to remake everyday life just about everywhere, especially in combination with one another.

Do technologies make the world, though? Among those of us who spend our days thinking about this sort of thing, this is a vexed, long- and intensely debated question. Attempts to understand the social and political consequences of technological development have tended to cluster around two major schools of thought, positions that are called “technological determinism” on the one hand, and “social constructivism” on the other.

For many, technodeterminism might seem to be the more natural and obvious position: someone invents a given technology, it appears in the world, and the world straightforwardly changes in response. (Indeed, some technologies actually do work this way, and are so potent as catalysts of societal change that the language we use to describe them reflects this. We simply call them “the Pill,” “the Bomb” and so on.) And there are plenty of other examples of this happening, or seeming to, ready to hand – our collective history with the internal combustion engine, for one, which would surely appear to underwrite belief in a certain technodeterminism. The introduction of cars powered by internal combustion manifestly drove the structuration of urban form in every densely settled place on Earth, with only relatively minor differences in layout and organization of cities developed after its widespread adoption, wherever they should happen to be found. If you wanted to argue that given enough time, novel technologies do more or less directly change the world, you’d be hard pressed to find a better case study than that.

The converse position, social constructionism, is a little more nuanced. It argues that societies invest in and select for the development of technologies that reflect their existing values, and particularly their power dynamics. For example, consider humanoid robotics. There has tended to be far more interest in the development of humanoid systems and interfaces in Japan than there has been elsewhere on Earth. There could be any number of reasons why this is so, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that it might have something to do with the greater emphasis placed in Japanese society on the potential for shame, embarrassment or humiliation inhering in all interactions between human beings (and therefore the desirability of replacing as many of the humans we interact with on a daily basis as possible with unfeeling, unjudging synthetics). This would seem to bolster the contention that a technology can prosper and develop only where it finds culturally fertile ground.

In actuality, of course, things drop out somewhere between the two extremes. Where does this leave us, if we want to understand what the advent of cryptocurrency or machine learning or virtual reality might portend for us, and for the world we share? Instead of the crude binary of technodeterminism and social constructionism, what I’d like to propose is a soft constructionism, in which the hegemonic global culture we think of as “late capitalism” selects not so much which technologies we get in any absolute sense, but which versions of them thrive in our world.

Seen in this light, those technological choices will fare best which resonate most with the scarcity-based economics and deep-seated fear of the Other that already characterize our lives. Far from being “disruptive,” what they’re really offering is a continuation or extension of circumstances that are already familiar to us.

“Artificial intelligence” could mean just about anything. But what are the applications that actually receive investment? Of all the possibilities we might have been offered, the ones that are advancing most quickly appear to be those dedicated to police, surveillance and security functions — identifying exceptions from the statistical norm, tracking them through space and time, and placing bounds around their freedom of action. If you want a sense of the aesthetics driving this investment, to say nothing of the values, look no further than the lengthening list of ventures billionaire PayPal and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has named for figures from his Lord of the Rings fixation — the vendor of sinister “total information awareness” systems Palantir, the manufacturer of weaponized autonomous drones Anduril and so on.

Or consider virtual reality, that realm of putatively limitless imagination Mark Zuckerberg would be pleased if we described with the word “metaverse.” With a staggering impoverishment of sensibility, the verson on offer from Zuckerberg’s Meta not merely imposes an entirely artificial scarcity into a realm that might otherwise extend to the very horizons of the imagination, but turns that same expanse into a platform where cloyingly infantilized avatars doze through the self-same boring meetings they might have had on Zoom with dignity still more or less intact. It’s as if the entire universe and all of its wonders had been crafted by and for people with LinkedIn accounts.

And then there’s crypto. Crypto is a little different. It was always an ideological project – avowedly anarchocapitalist by design, offering no vision of society beyond a threadbare neo-Randian fantasy of contract relations undertaken between sovereign individuals — so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be awful. (If anything, given the long history of inventions that confound or undermine their original design intention, the surprise is that crypto appears to be enacting its awfulness so straightforwardly.) It nevertheless hurts a little to see the truly radical concept of a distributed autonomous organization, or “DAO,” originally intended to provide a trellis for endeavors assembling human and nonhuman partners, remade as mortifyingly tacky nightclub/bottle-service party for Supreme-stanning manchildren.

But surely these examples don’t represent the full potential of the technologies in question? As it happens, I come from an intellectual tradition insisting that any appearance of the word “potential” needs to be greeted with the greatest skepticism. There is no such thing as potential, in this view: there are merely states of a system that have historically been enacted, and those that have not yet been enacted. The only way to assess whether a system is capable of assuming a given state is to do the work of enacting it. This is why I tend to look askance at the more fervent enthusiasts for these technologies, making  breathless claims for their unlimited liberatory potential. In practice, the only realities that seem to be cropping out so far are markedly tawdry. And while it is certainly early days, and one should always be charitable, I think it’s fair to say that a pattern can already be discerned.

Virtually everywhere, technologies are touted to us on the promise that they will permanently displace human subjectivity and bias, annihilate the painful limits imposed upon us by our embodiment and our mooring in the real world, liberate us to be the sparkling Nietzschean (or really Olympian) creatures of pure will we ought to have been all along. And yet in every instance we find that these ambitions are flouted, as the technologies that were supposed to enact them are captured and recuperated by existing concentrations of power. They will not spontaneously bring scarcity to an end, or capitalism, or oppression. Laminated into standing ways of doing, making and selling, the only thing they seem to be capable of spontaneously reproducing is more of the same. The bottom line is this: those of us who dream of different, more hopeful, freer futures, and who still believe that technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality or the blockchain have a place in building them, will have to do the hard, painstaking work of proving this to be the case. We have our work cut out for us.

L'articolo The technological revolution in the “late capitalism” era proviene da InsideOver.

The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic will be unprecedented. Even if the American and global economy manages to achieve some stabilization post-COVID-19 through central bank stimulus packages and countermeasures, many small and medium-sized businesses will not survive. In addition to the millions of lost jobs in the United States alone, thousands of family-owned and medium-sized corporations and businesses are going under.

What Comes Next?

What comes next is exactly what everyone thinks: consolidation and big companies getting bigger. Larger businesses like Amazon, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, airlines, government contractors, massive grocery chains and all manner of other giant corporations will continue to scoop up any smaller fish in the pond as they grow to grotesque proportions. The end result post-COVID-19 will be a world in which large, tax-loophole-exploiting corporate behemoths who thrive under corporate socialism and government bailouts will be the only place to get a job.

Starting a business will be an impossibility for those struggling out from mountains of COVID-19 economic damage, not to mention even getting the financial liquidity to go up against market-dominating players who have actually been boosted as a result of the pandemic.

Profits Over People

The harsh and obvious truth is that governments care much more about their donors and economic partners than they do about their citizens. The US government got warmed up in 2008 and 2009 with its bank bailouts, and this time it’s the same approach on a larger scale and not focused on financial institutions — although large banks have made tens of billions in processing fees paying out emergency government loans to small businesses who are trying to stay afloat. Even when the government offers some help the middlemen manage to turn it to their advantage. It’s a win-win for the giant banks and corporations and a lose-lose for working people.

As Nassim Taleb put it of the last big bailout: “That was a blatant case of corporate socialism and a reward to an industry whose managers are stopped out by the taxpayer. The asymmetry (moral hazard) and what we call optionality for the bankers can be expressed as follows: heads and the bankers win, tails and the taxpayer loses. Furthermore, this does not count the policy of quantitative easing that went to inflate asset values and increased inequality by benefiting the super rich. Remember that bailouts come with printed money, which effectively deflate the wages of the middle class in relation to asset values such as ultra-luxury apartments in New York City.”

COVID-19 Has Been Great for Billionaires

While ordinary people including the upper-middle class and many who might be termed conventionally “rich” are suffering immensely during the pandemic, the ultra-rich and managerial “superclass” (as David Rothkopf coined them) are doing swimmingly. These are the folks who call the shots at a fairly senior level and work to shift entire economies and industries and they number around 6,000 worldwide. The pandemic hasn’t hurt billionaires like this for the most part. In fact, billionaire wealth has boomed significantly during this crisis. The panic and isolation of those in lockdown is only an opportunity for individuals like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who has made over $25 billion just since March, to increase their profits.

Unsurprisingly, the head of Zoom Eric Yuan also saw a big jump in his earnings and is now worth around $3 billion and Bill Gates spent a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria chuckling as they talked about how unprepared the United States had been for COVID-19 and smirking and admitting Microsoft could do pretty well in the coming digital work gold rush while Zakaria talked about the economic suffering people will experience. Supposed free market global capitalism has slowly morphed into a worrying fusion of big government and big business that is starting to look vaguely similar to authoritarian movements of the past century and modern-day China which fused the military, government and corporate power into fascistic and communistic juggernauts of centralized surveillance and control.

Corporate Socialism

The reality of many “free market” economies is that they function as a sort of feeding trough for large, connected corporations to monopolize, risk capital within and then collect lifesaving funds if they fail. This essentially means bailouts, tax breaks and special rules for the largest corporations and industry leaders and an up-by-the-bootstraps rhetoric of tough luck and homeless shelters for working families employed by many of those large corporations and small or medium companies who go under during tough times or find the bottom-of-the-barrel wages they are offered insufficient. It is not as if workers haven’t noticed that their mega corporations are profiting off their backs while offering them peanuts, with a mass strike of Amazon, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods and Instacart workers planned for May 1.

While the occasional $1,200 stimulus check may indeed help out struggling individuals during these hard times, it is nothing compared to the yearly subsidies and tax breaks of giant corporations or for the scope of their market dominance. Regular businesses work to innovate products, services and reputation as they expand and branch out: mega-corporations seek to become the actual market itself and force merchants to do business on their terms and under their supply chains. Are you a small business that sells household items online? Well you can pump money into advertising and get a trickle of customers or you can join Big Daddy Bezos’ Fun Farm and give him the commissions he demands in return for a steady stream of purchases and product exposure.

Survival of the Biggest

Many wars, revolutions, crises and social shifts in history have been accompanied by, and even partly caused by, enormous economic change and changing economic needs of industry leaders and the ruling class. The Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, World War One and Two, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the list goes on. Think of a social, military or political upheaval and you will find a significant economic aspect. However, it would be naive to imagine that money or profit is the primary factor driving economic concerns at the upper level, even if it drives them on the lower level. For the very wealthiest and most connected, particularly those linked to the actual creation of money by central banks, money is merely a means to an end. That end is, generally speaking, stability, control and a specific social and political vision. If one thinks back to even several decades ago, there seemed to be numerous different brands of soft drinks, for example, headquartered in different areas if you read the fine print and with different prices and styles. Now almost every can or bottle you pick up despite its surface brand is owned by Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Consolidation and control is the name of the game: in governance and sociopolitical engineering just as in the food industry.

Join or Die

The post-COVID-19 world will be different and it will have even less illusion of choice than the Google-run techtropolis that preceded it. There is no time for “future shock” because the future is already here. Whether it is the government or its affiliated mega-corporations the reality will be simple, especially for those who have fallen on particularly hard times as a result of the pandemic with their health, insurance costs and lost work. The message of the emerging technocracy will be simple: work at our companies, eat our food, take our vaccines, believe our news, live in our plural cities where the jobs are all located, or else face the consequences of being banned. Make sure you don’t fall prey to the siren song of that ultimate evil of populism: you wouldn’t want to lose your government check or be forced to stay out in no man’s land where the new, worse viruses and looters are, right? Like a twisted shadow version of Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War cartoon, the writing of the consolidated corona-nomics economic future will be on the wall for all to see. Join or die. 

L'articolo Corona-nomics proviene da InsideOver.

The rise and fall of capitalism. Could we have predicted this earlier? The coronavirus pandemic sweeping across the globe may cause complications that are beyond imagination at this point. Cities once hustling and bustling with locals and tourists have now turned into ghost towns following massive lockdowns. Shops are shut, businesses suspended and millions forced out from their jobs. The consequences of the coronavirus could be sharp and deadly and, in the long-term, capitalism may end up taking the biggest hit.

How Does Capitalism Work?

To understand what capitalism is, let’s look at it this way: capitalism is an economic system where private exchange and ownership are the basis of the economic system instead of state-owned or socialized ownership. In reality, capitalism has shown itself to be a system where a few people end up owning the vast number of resources and wealth while the working class which is used by these capitalists to produce goods for local or global societies. The working class, in order to survive, must work for the ruling “owner” class and earn wages to carve out a basic living. However, if these corporations shut down, the average person won’t be able to survive due to the lack of income.

The capitalist society is one which is driven by profits. If an initiative is not worth the desired return, that plan could be canceled. Light is being shed on this system as healthcare systems collapse and world leaders scratch their heads before making the next move. Lockdowns in major economies like the United States, India, Brazil and almost all of Europe have led to the reduction in demand. The price of oil has fallen to a record low and corporations are betting on their next moves.

This has also put world governments in serious crisis. Citizens are questioning their leaders why effective measures weren’t enforced beforehand to stem the transfer of infections. With the inability to stop the spread and lockdowns being proposed as the ideal means to fight Covid-19, consumer spending is also taking a hit. Recession is here but so are issues for major industries, who have no consumers left to take care of. Share prices have also slumped as investor confidence continues to fall rapidly.

Helping Big Business or Citizens?

The main problem lies in governments trying to save big businesses over and above innocent people. Let’s take the example of Pakistan, a country closest to China where the virus initially broke out. Prime Minister Imran Khan said earlier that, “I would have gone for complete lockdown of the country had there been a similar situation in Pakistan like it had emerged in China and Italy.” He said that his government would not be able to provide food to the people and that, “the chaos and panic is more dangerous than coronavirus (Covid-19).” Despite being disguised as concern for ordinary people, this goes on to show that the survival and sustenance of capitalistic structures are preferred over the well-being of citizens.

Similarly, we can see in the United States that a ‘for-profit,’ capitalistic structure is dragging millions to the brink of death. Where private healthcare systems are made to gain advantage rather than helping people recover. In the $1 trillion stimulus package unveiled by President Donald Trump, over $360 billion are allocated for small businesses so that they don’t lay off their workers, while under the same program, Americans will be entitled to receive checks of $1,000. In a society where a routine check-up would cost anywhere from $200-$700, what importance will a thousand dollars have?

The Destruction of Small Business

To keep the economy running, it is essential that small businesses continue to progress. However, the problem is that these businesses will survive at the expense of their workers who in some cases don’t have access to apt precautions to fight the virus, risking their lives so that they can earn money to sustain their livelihoods. The capitalist structure is effective but harsh since it disregards basic human rights. Another harrowing detail of the stimulus plan is that hospitals and health centers are allocated $100 billion while big distressed companies get over $400 billion in funding. Not to forget the tourism and aviation industries which will have around $75 billion at their disposal.

In the United Kingdom, £350 billion were borrowed by the state to pour that amount into the bank accounts of both large and small businesses, while also suspending taxes. When we compare this situation with that of China, a country siding more towards an authoritarian and communist structure, we see that the health of citizens was heavily prioritized. Despite hiding the initial outbreak from the outside world, China built hospitals, installed surveillance cameras and entered into a lockdown which was capable of stemming the flow of the virus. China’s effective measures safeguarded the lives of its citizens.

Looking into the Future

When this coronavirus crisis ends, people will be more inclined to think about the choices they need to make in order to survive. An entirely different mindset will be visible across the globe as people come to terms with the problems that the real world faces. Many will continue doing the same: going back to their normal routines and enjoying life to the fullest, but for some it will be a completely different story altogether.

Yes, at this point in time many corporations are trying to safeguard the rights of their employees, but to what extent that will continue, only time will tell. However, others will be likely to make renewed choices about their health and mental well-being, the things they buy and how much they’re willing to put back into the economy for their own benefit. Will this signal an end of corporate and capitalistic greed and injustice? If we start thinking about what we need and what we want, the answer can be “yes.”

L'articolo Will Coronavirus Kill Capitalism? proviene da InsideOver.