SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the create-the-world-you-would-want-to-survive-in dept.
Douglas Rushkoff has a thought-provoking article on Medium, Survival of the Richest -- The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind; here are some excerpts:
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”
[...] I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.
They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.
Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
[...] The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
[...] The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.
[...] When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.
They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:04AM (13 children)
You either get rich by creating wealth, or you get rich by taking wealth.
When a large number of people band together to organize the taking of wealth, we call that organization "government"; a good government promises to use that stolen booty to create more wealth, usually for the benefit of a special-interest group such as poor voters.
So, a rich person either created his wealth, or he took someone else's wealth; if he took someone's wealth, then either he constitutes a government (e.g., that rich person is a warlord), or he outsourced the plundering to some well-established, industrial-scale, long-lived violently imposed monopoly.
You can't steal under capitalism (if you do steal, you aren't practicing capitalism); you have to create wealth. If there's been a transfer of wealth on a societal scale, it's necessarily the fault of a government.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:40AM (1 child)
You on one side and the rest of the world on the other have different meaning for the word.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:12AM
Otherwise, the definitions are the same.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:13AM (1 child)
FTFY to make it fit the real world.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @11:33AM
What I do have to do is pay for Walmart employees' food stamps (or be stuffed into a cage for refusing).
As always, the problem is a government program, because a government program is predicated on theft.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:50PM (6 children)
No True Scotsman. You can't achieve perfect Capitalism in practice any more than you can achieve perfect Socialism. Under a flawed implementation of Capitalism, people are conned out of their wealth in dishonest ways very frequently.
If a transaction isn't a fair trade of value then it is unfair by definition and in a sense it is a theft of value.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:01PM (5 children)
No one knows what is "fair", mainly because the future (e.g., supply chains, disasters, etc.) is uncertain.
The whole point of a market place is to find what is fair; that which is fair is that which emerges from a multitude of daily interactions, and this implies that a free society searching for fairness must accept "caveat emptor" as a fundamental principle.
That is the major failure of communist/socialist thinking—that there is some kind of fair, absolute, calculable value. There's not.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:32PM (4 children)
This "free" society you describe sounds like an idealized version of Capitalism where fairness improves over time and anyone, with the help of trickle down, has the opportunity to compete with the big guy so no monopolies last for long.
Not one single calculable value, no; I agree. But I'm sure you'd accept that any given product will have a realistic range of prices that a given market will tolerate at a given time. Once you accept that, you should also accept that occasionally there will be outliers -- scams where a small number of people are conned into paying sums of money vastly outside such a range, often due to misrepresentation of facts about the product. These outliers can go to extremes where you have some people awarding themselves bonuses of tens of millions whilst offering little to no new value to their customers in return.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:28PM (3 children)
There's no solution to that other than intrusive command-and-control by Angels.
And, as men are not Angles, such command-and-control inevitably transforms into Tyranny.
You can't save a person from his own stupidity.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:50PM (2 children)
The solution, although it's only a sticking plaster for a flawed system, is a safety net of social benefits.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)
You have to crawl back to the ladder and start climbing again.
The reason your "safety net" doesn't is that it's a government program rather than a "private" charity; because it is a government program, it is based on theft, and will therefore end up destroying wealth rather than maintaining or creating wealth.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:01PM
Let's assume for a moment that what you say were correct. Who gives a shit about what effect a small safety net has on the total wealth* when it's saving people from suffering and dying?
*Let me give you a clue. If done properly, it's a very small effect.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:46PM (1 child)
Please: "You can't steal under capitalism" is clearly false. That your modifier "f you do steal, you aren't practicing capitalism" is true doesn't change that. There are many in capitalist systems that steal by one means or another. (Fraud is the most legally protected, but hardly the only way.) Some are successful, some aren't. Many camouflage what they're doing as something other than theft.
Secondly, wealth is not a thing. You're thinking about it incorrectly. Wealth is contextual. Wealth is access to things that are useful, helpful, or at least pleasurable. Gold is not wealth in-and-of-itself, but only in the context where you can trade it for something useful, helpful, or pleasurable. That is commonly occurs should not obscure the difference. In times of famine, food is wealth much more than gold. In times of danger, military competence is wealth (well, depending on the nature of the danger). Etc.
If you want guaranteed wealth, become a skilled doctor, who is also skilled in bush medicine. (Not first aid...that's just to tide you over until you can get medical help.) But be aware that doctors often suffer when the powerful demand to be cured of something incurable with the given resources.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:58PM
Capitalism is the philosophy that, ideally, every resource should have a well-defined owner; a resource with a well-defined owner becomes "capital". Theft is appropriation of a resource in contravention of well established ownership. Obviously, there can be disputes over ownership, and thus Capitalism necessarily entails an iterative process of dispute resolution, contract negotiation, and enforcement (the latter of which is voluntary by definition, as the means of enforcement is necessarily specified in each contract).
I'm not thinking about wealth incorrectly; indeed, you and I pretty much agree.
I don't agree that being a skill doctor guarantees wealth; after all, it would be stupid if everyone in a community were just a skilled doctor.