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Employers in the US were once expected to take good care of their employees. When my parents generation entered the workforce, a single salary could support a family of four. This is obviously no longer the case. Workers today are little more than interchangeable resource units from which value can be extracted.
Companies extract this value from their workers and extract more from their customers, then concentrate all of the value into vast pools of unaccountable wealth. The government extracts still more from us to fund its operations. These public and private segments of the control regime then work together to use the wealth extracted from us to exercise power over us. Our participation in this arrangement isn't really voluntary. It's coerced, with our lives and livelihoods dependent on our furtherance of regime objectives.
The only way out is to create and adopt alternative systems. This should be no problem. The technologies required to organize massive enterprises are widely accessible. The financial infrastructure for an alternative economy is readily available on public blockchains. So we already have the tools we need to transform our economy into something better, yet the vast majority of people aren't at all interested in doing this.
These muggles are fortunately irrelevant to the creation of an alternative system. And in many ways, such a system is arising organically as a consequence of the growing need for commerce on more favorable terms. Why pay 7% for remittances and 3% for payment processing when you could pay 0%? Why let your bank earn interest on your funds when you could earn that interest yourself?
On a large scale, there are many existing companies that could be replaced by AI administrators cooperatively owned by the contractors in their contractor networks. Think Lyft, but every driver is an owner, and the company itself is just a transparent computer program. This isn't some distant fantasy. It may be just around the corner.
Meanwhile, a new web is taking shape behind the scenes. Decentralized finance is a part of this, but you can also see it in everything from supply chain management to social media. About 17% of American adults have used crypto at this point, but among men ages 18-29, that figure jumps to 42%. These adoption levels are more than sufficient to build on.
Globally, token markets have grown explosively and will probably continue to do so. The more integrated with the legacy economy these token markets become, the more unstoppable they become. A world war might cause a downturn in the price of bitcoin, but regional conflicts are good for crypto, and there are plenty of those going on.
From my perspective, automated companies built on these unstoppable markets appear inevitable. The only thing in question is ownership. Will these companies be owned by the same handful of people that already own everything in the legacy economy? Or will they be owned by the people that do the work?
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.