If something is a "Titanic idea" it generally means one that is often oversold or invincible to critique while having underlying fatal flaws. So much like the ship that was sold to the rich as "unsinkable" capitalism is in the same boat if you will. That is not to say that the well-known alternative (Communism) is going to replace it, more something in between and its inevitable.
Automation is no longer a Hackney term on the internet's tech words. Automation is already here and more is coming faster than ever before. The decreasing number of human-operated service when checking out of a supermarket is just a teaser of whats around the corner.
The bridge between the past of manual labour and an automated future is precarious, to say the least with the rise of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy. Those hard-working Uber drivers have been disruptive to the black cabs in London, and the old guard of the black caps have fought to ban them from what they say as their turf... for now.
What many of are not aware of is that these Uber drivers are working their way into a more comfortable future where they don't have to do the driving and their wages will instead come in the form of Universal Basic Income. Unlike how the idea of automation no longer stays stuck in science fiction stories, but strangely the inevitable consequence being UBI still seems fiction to many.
The resistance to it is that we have evolved to learn that nothing comes for free, "everything has a cost!"... sounds like the foundations of capitalism. Those Uber cars don't just provide a quick and efficient taxi service with huge incentives for the drivers to provide good customer care and to pick up first-time app users. Their very cars are also collecting data by mapping the major roads of every major city for AI to eventually take over.
When the job is done, the drivers will still need paying and the best way to pay them is to just give them money without anyone doing much working for it beyond setting up an initial algorithm to cover this database of newly unemployed people.
Some still think this is like quantitive easing on steroids. The truth is, its simply removing the vail from currency which is that we humans made up and just didn't stop counting. Currency in many places is no longer tied to gold reserves and that cat out of the bag as made it so that cryptocurrencies are now just as valuable. This is a good thing because unlike centralized money, cryptocurrencies are not controlled by anyone other than those trading, holding and mining it.
In essence, cryptocurrencies are the true democratized free market as it puts the people in charge of their money instead of an unelected minority in traditional finance where accountability is so low that they can cause huge world recessions and instead of face jail for the inevitable resulting deaths of their precariats, can walk away with an even bigger pay cheque.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are not used for selling people things they can't afford or miss-selling them products they didn't ask for. It's there for them to buy and sell when the time is right for them. It should not be lost on anyone that the traditionalists have this loss of control on their radar and their pushback so far has come from people like Warren Buffet simply saying "I don't understand bitcoin but take my word, don't invest in it, it's going nowhere".
A short time after he said this, bitcoin platforms like Coinbase saw its biggest rise in new users and transactions sending the value of bitcoin higher than its ever been. Maybe reverse psychology isn't Warren's strong point but it proved a point. Cryptocurrencies are unbiased as to who gets involved with them, in fact, the only major barrier is lack of an internet connection which will soon be a thing of the past with reusable rockets rapidly reducing the cost of the satellite industry.
So with a financial system that effectively doesn't care who applies, the crypto market will simply boom in areas of society where capitalism has neglected. A well-educated commentator in London called James O'brian recently called it having one of his caller induced revelations that "capitalism only works for those that have capital". Another analogy is that you can't play the game of monopoly unless you have an asset to start with.
This brings us back to UBI and why its introduction will most likely be in the form of cryptocurrency. The idea is that everyone is given assets to start with and the rest is simply up to the individual's ambition and luck. Unlike traditional finance, you can make your own luck too with the fact that UBI also delivers free time. Time to explore one's ambitions and unique skills which can open new doors of opportunity as we saw from those in the past that were lucky enough to enjoy free education.
So yes, Capitalism is seen as an unsinkable ship to those in first class, but in reality, rich or poor, the smartest know it’s doomed to sink and give rise to a future where the goals of abundance are met from our time's most innovative geniuses. These geniuses won't be people like Warren Buffet talking about things they don't understand and telling people to keep the old ways going. It will instead be people like Elon Musk, Peter Diamantes, Liz Parrish, Ray Kurzweil, Tim Berners-Lee, Aubrey De Grey and an army of like-minded people they are associated with in crafting a future where everyone has a shot at living a healthy and comfortable long life.
If you look at the evolution of civilization, as a percentage, there is less conflict, more organization and certainly more transparency than ever before thanks to the internet. Where pockets of corruption exist, it has never been more blatant because, before the internet, people were only found out if a whistleblower was in the right place at the right time, today it just takes a few gifted hackers and organizations like the US Democratic National Committee are exposed as anything but democratic as with saw with the Podesta emails in 2016.
Had Hillary Clinton of been running for president before the Internet, she may have got away with her parties corporate corruption against her rival candidate Bernie Sanders, who also has the internet to thank for much of his viral popularity over both the final candidates in the 2016 US election. It was only during the primaries that C-Span archive footage provided voters with evidence that Bernie had never changed his progressive principles as they could simply roam youtube for speeches from his entire political career. So this eased access to archive footage was always going to play against Hillary Clinton because people could see that she had flip-flopped her entire career on policies on issues of gay rights and race.
The point here is that it's getting harder for those in the public eye to get away with telling the public lies. The same is true for those that have a vested interest in keeping the capitalist system going such as the largest corporations that actively lobby governments to keep taxes low and employment cheap. These kinds of capitalists seem to forget that although 24-hour news can be bought, indi media is also 24 hours now and they investigate constantly.
If we look what is happening in the UK, as of 2018, the Conservative government has imposed up to 8 years of austerity which was started in 2010 under the premise that it was the previous government fault for overspending on public services and widening the gap between the rich and poor. In 2018 we have seen spending rise further still and the gap between the rich and poor widen to something more reminiscent of the gilded age.
The argument was that the state should never again overspend on the public sector. Instead, we have seen them overspend public money on the high end of the private sector that has resulted in 3 major bailouts on PFI contracts. Public money has been sent in the form of grants to private rail companies who have failed and lost that public money. Young first-time buyers have been cheated into buying houses on land they don't own, leaving the taxpayers money suck on 1 initial house. So the situation in the UK is almost as bad as the capitalist system in the USA where an increasingly small minority are benefitting from this system.
Instead of measures to correct this inequality we only see further rewarding of those that are still onboard with it. Again thanks to transparency, it's easy to find out how much people are earning in public life, so we can see outside of lobbying in politics, a huge area of wealth is within mainstream media. This means with a few exceptions there is a conflict of interest between the media and the public because its the medias job to inform the public of the facts in the economy.
The US media may have this system on lockdown with "red fear" which is basically the practice of smearing any change in course to capitalism, being Stalin's murderous form of early communism. When this fails they switch to blaming immigration which has been a very popular technique for defensive capitalists to sway their precariats to do their bidding by convincing them that immigrants are the reason they are not benefitting from "trickle-down economics".
In the UK this tactic has been used successfully by the capitalist establishment to dodge future tax rises from the European Union.
So with less conflict and more transparency than ever before, what is in the best interest of civilization going forward? Technology has proven it is not to get to simply get to mass capitalism and then sustain it until an inevitable mass extinction event. Before this habitual experiment really took hold, we were sending people to explore the moon with mostly public money.
From our origins in Africa, we now have almost the entire planet inhabited and we are getting to a stage where Earths finite resources are causing the majority of conflict and inequality as corporations bang the drums for war where they need access to more resources. So the colonial wars that forged the borders around the world have run out of space to be justified.Of course, The Iraq war was not about borders or opposing ideologies, it was what all conflicts are about now which is corporations competing for the depleting resources left on Earth.
The only solution is to go back to space exploration, make Earth the perfect home and protect it rather than ransacking it. There is an abundance of resources in our own solar system and we have explored well beyond where they are most dense in the asteroid belt.
With reusable rockets no longer science fiction, we have no excuses for not exploring beyond Earth and making other planets habitable. It would not only ease our strains of overpopulation on Earth but give us a humane reason to expand our civilization further because the work out there in space to make more places habitable is going to require more people working together than ever before rather than jingoistic habits of everything being about national borders on Earth which is unsustainable.
If we simply listen to negative voices about our future, we will just get bogged down in a self-fulfilling defeatist prophecy. It would be kinder to not act like everyone who is alive now, should be the last people alive, but instead, allow future generations to enjoy the best thing we know in the universe which is living. If we are the only advanced civilization we know of, it is our duty to get out there and thrive, not pretend that the current capitalist system where only a minority get to enjoy life is how its meant to be for the rest of civilization.
