What Late Stage Capitalism Can’t Sell You

I’ve heard the argument that free trade via a money supply allows the market to quickly signal through price of products what goods and services are needed. And this is true to an extent— for goods and services that are saleable and *can* be priced.

But this leaves out a vast portion of our lives which cannot so easily have bar code price stickers affixed or encased in hard clear plastic— friendship, love, civic duty, honesty, community spirit, genuine dialog and so much more.

Individuals offer those things freely to the society because people intuitively understand that they’ll receive likewise in return from their trusted friends and family. However, such an economy of these necessities in life is like a black market that is entirely outside of the “normal” economy. People who have found “their people”, whomever those people might be, are saved from the emptiness that is the life promised to them in “The American Dream”— which is an entirely materialistic one.

But in a society that values only those services and products which can command a price tag and a profit by producing a surplus, these other essential holistic elements for a satisfying human life are conspicuously absent from the marketplace, with only cheap substitutes sold in their stead.

And so, the symptoms that we see are casualties of despair due to the failure of capitalism to provide the most basic nutrients to sustain a healthy and happy human life. It is implicit in this “free market utopia” that each individual seek and satisfy the remainder of their human non-material needs through their own means. That is part of the contract of a “free society”. But people don’t always realize that and also don’t always know where to fulfill the remainder of their needs.

The problem is that the society that uses the free market as the foundation of its entire construct provides no guidance as to how and what further is necessary to obtain for a satisfying life. The recommendations that ARE given are intended for the producers to extract a profit from the people seeking something more in life. That is the nature of the foundation of this market-centric society.

In the absence of this guidance of what more to seek out in life, people have sought more meaning in their lives through the products and services that have been advertised to them. It is unsurprising that such products and services that don’t fill the holes in their souls. And when those things sold as promises fall short, people turn to other false promises from a variety of other charlatans in religion, politics, or other temporary snake-oil salves.

There is no doubt in my mind that all that is happening is a crisis of late-stage capitalism. The flaw isn’t that capitalism is terrible. It has served its part quite well— to relieve society of scarcity of material goods and services. However, it has not and cannot relieve society of the scarcity of immaterial things such as love, friendship, civic duty, respect, honesty, and so many other things that we inherently value as a social species.

We must find those things ourselves. But it’s difficult for people who are accustomed to using money to find solutions to all of their problems. When that currency is not accepted by the providers of these other immaterial needs, the people who are accustomed to being “valued customers” grow angry that their money is no good here.

That disconnect is what I see most often between people who have bought into the “material goods” worldview and the “immaterial goods” worldview. The two economies use different currencies, and there is rightfully a rejection of money being used to buy goods and services from the “immaterial goods” economy. When someone with money tries to buy from the “immaterial goods economy” without earning the currency first, there is indignation and offense, and often times rejection of their attempted purchase. And there is indignation and offense in return that their money, that they’ve worked hard for, has no value in this economy that is foreign to them.

You have to find your people, whomever they may be. That’s the missing ingredient. And for each person, that ingredient is different. So, it’s hard for capitalism to produce a surplus to satisfy this particular demand, though they certainly have no qualms about trying and profiting from it anyway.


How I dropped Out of Society Into a Fourth Social Class

There are three social classes in America. I have chosen to be in none of them. This is not a choice normally available to people. Let me explain a little bit why I dropped out and how I’m basically classless now.

First, let me define the three classes.

There is a worker class who produces material goods. Then, secondly, there is a capitalist class who creates an organization to collect the surplus value of the workers after paying the workers. The market decides what the workers get paid. In America, we rely on the market to balance many things, and worker wages is one of these things. However, when only a single class (the capitalist class) competes in the market for workers, it is difficult for the workers to receive full value for the product of their work whose labor surplus is inevitably skimmed for profit by the capitalist class. What capitalists are competing for in “the market” is this labor surplus. However, competition for this surplus never causes the surplus to go to zero, otherwise, the capitalist has no incentive to start the company at all. Thus, by the very nature of the system of capitalism, it is guaranteed that the worker class can never receive the full total of their labors, for by nature, the capitalist must be incentivized by equity in order to risk his capital to receive the surplus.
The worker’s only choice is which capitalist they choose to skim their profits. Occasionally, workers may band together in a start-up company in hopes that their skills and labor allow them to become elevated to the capitalist class themselves. Ironically, such a gamble requires selling a significant share of their labor to the capitalist class in the form of equity to angel investors, venture capitalists, or Wall Street investors.

Aside from the worker class and the capitalist class, there is one other class that I am not a part of. That class is the incarcerated class. That is the class you fall into by design if you choose not to be a worker for the capitalist class. As a person who has chosen not to be in any of those three classes, I am constantly in danger of falling into the incarcerated class due the laws which rig it that way.

An example of a law which would put me into the incarcerated class is the law which bans sleeping in vehicles. Although you can eat in your vehicle or do just about anything else in your vehicle, many cities have outlawed sleeping in your vehicle because they don’t want homeless people living in their cars.

Our society purposely doesn’t want homeless people because they fall into a non-category of peoples who have rejected the rat-race of being a worker who has her surplus value skimmed by profiteering capitalists. Once you have decided you don’t need a home, then you certainly don’t need a job and thus you don’t need to enter the job market for various capitalists to choose how to exploit you. This is very bad for a society of capitalists. So, it is discouraged. And one way it is discouraged is to arrest you and fine you so that you remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and incarceration so that you will want to join the worker class to escape your spiraling predicament.

I have to be very careful while skirting the fringes of society not to accidentally fall into the incarcerated class. Once one tendril of poverty has grabbed you, it won’t let go until you are trapped in the incarcerated class. So far, I have managed to avoid it with previous wealth accumulated when I was a worker and by continually disguising myself as a “decent” worker class citizen.

Worker class people are afforded certain privileges in society that we take for granted, and I know how to act and present myself as a worker having been one myself for decades. Fortunately, many well-to-do technologists look poverty-stricken and disheveled; so a crazy homeless van dweller, a wealthy start-up app creator, and a math professor at Berkeley are indistinguishable to a police officer.
It is this guise of normalcy which affords my safety in society. It is not the laws which protect me. It is the disheveled appearance of my fellow Silicon Valley workers which affords me the most security.

Let me make this clear. It is not the laws which make me safe from imprisonment and harassment from police. It is my old CodeWarrior and OpenGL t-shirts from 10 years ago that allow me a disguise to slip past laws intended for homeless people. These old clothes are mostly still stored in my storage area. Ten years ago, I could not have known that they would serve me as a uniform of the worker class that I dropped out of and be as valuable as a literal license to participate in society.

There have been many times I have been told to move or threatened with a ticket or various anti-homeless measures that I have been able to thwart by convincing the police that I was “programming” or “visiting someone” in my obviously expensive van and then hastily moving away. I have had the privilege of select enforcement of the law because of the privilege or illusion of wealth, I am not ashamed to admit. I am truly sorry for the treatment that less wealthy citizens would receive due to these laws, but that is not something I am prepared to go to jail for and fight a civil liberties battle over at this point. Such a move would certainly put me into the incarceration class for good. And these laws will remain precisely because no one who is ever put into that legal position could afford to fight those laws.

One of the “solutions” to the homeless problem is to put people to work. I see this as problematic for various reasons. For one, some people may have chosen to drop out of the rigged game of workers and capitalists. I know that we in the worker class believe in the stigma of being homeless as being mentally ill or having substance abuse problems. I don’t know enough about the topic to determine whether this stigma is one of causation or correlation or whether the stigma serves more as a warning to the worker class to not become homeless and to keep maintaining a steady pace on the treadmill for their capitalist of choice.

For me, I tried to get out of the worker class by starting my own company and joining many various start ups. I didn’t quite succeed. I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a capitalist anyway. So, now, I’m adrift neither here nor there.

What I want to do is just create stories and experiences for people to enjoy using the skills that I’ve learned over a couple of decades. I think I can do that without spiraling into the incarcerated class.
But I’ve also chosen to do that without attempting to join the capitalist class or to beg them for help. This is not really a rational thing to do because what I would like to do requires resources beyond what I can muster myself.

And so, things are going slow. That’s okay. I don’t care about deadlines, and I don’t care about milestones, and I don’t care about making money. I’ll let things sort out on its own. Maybe I’ll make money, but I’m certainly not counting on it. And if I don’t count on it, I think I can properly enjoy the process of creating. I think the journey of creation is what matters to me now. Once I strip away all of the stress of starting a company that has to balance income with expenses and has to hit a market window and has to choose the right people, choose the right platform, and choose the right moment, I can truly enjoy what I always wanted to do when I first played Space Invaders in 1977 as a 7 year-old kid— to make his own game.

I only need to get back a fraction of the value of work that I put into my own game to make it worth my while. After all, I’m only getting paid a fraction of my value by any capitalist that’s making a profit anyway. So, for now, I’m not going to worry about what that fraction is going to be. I must accept that that fraction is exactly zero and go on doing what I want to do anyway. It’s not worth worrying about at this point. I’m too far from completion on any of the projects to even think that far ahead anyway.

And so I’m hoping there is a fourth social class in America that joins me. Perhaps there will be enough wealth from an automated and nearly workerless society that a fourth social class can emerge and can simply create art, literature, and entertainment while sustaining themselves with occasional gifts or purchases from the worker and capitalist classes.

This class, like me, will leverage the skills gained from years in the worker class to create novel things that could never be commercially successful enough for the capitalist class to want to exploit.

There are many small things too specific and niche and weird to ever be mass market and thus never be commercially viable to a capitalist class. Such things can be created by a mature post-worker artisan class simply because artisans love to create things and such crafts were not allowed to even be attempted when under the yoke of a capitalist.

And so that’s what I’m going to be doing— sometimes. I hope I can succeed, not so much to make money, but as to serve as an example to others that it is possible to be done. If freedom affords you this luxury, I hope you can take it as I have. I don’t think you have to be brave or anything to do this.

You have to realize that being in the worker class is merely a more comfy kind of incarcerated class. I think Fight Club touched on this a little bit. But you don’t have to be violent or disruptive to break free of the seeming stranglehold of the worker class. The prison is an illusion.

You can live just fine and be happy with less. You can be happy with your relationships without your things. It’s a matter of elevating your most important values to the top of the priority list and then shedding the rest. Once you’re accustomed to not dealing with the rest anyway, it becomes easy to focus on only the necessities.

It’s simpler and less complicated and more fun to focus only on what matters to you, even if it’s trivial or not understood by others. In fact, not being understood by others is what makes it special and enjoyable to you and only you. People might ask, “won’t you get tired of it?” I don’t think you can ever get tired of being a kid every day. Besides, if you miss any aspects of worker society, you can always put on a uniform and blend in and experience a taste every now and again.

Now, granted, I have built myself a bit of a cushion in finances in order to do this, and not everyone will have the same flexibility. But I think the fundamental concept is sound. We are really much more wealthy and capable than we think we are. We’re under an illusion that running out of money will result in homelessness or mental illness or substance abuse as if all of the latter were one thing.

I’m amazed at people who grow up poor but wind up having a huge number of kids anyway. Well, if they can do , then anybody who works in tech in Silicon Valley can also. People working tech jobs in Silicon Valley have a tremendous amount of wealth compared to people in other parts of the United States and other parts of the world. Yet, they’re always comparing themselves with each other and their neighbors which makes them feel poor.

So rather than bemoaning that you can’t buy a house in Silicon Valley, be grateful that you can do things that many people in the world cannot even begin to comprehend, like spending $5 for a cup of coffee and then not even finishing it.

Because wealth is relative like this, I have chosen to focus on how wealthy I am compared to the rest of America even though I’m not working, and to change my perspective on life to appreciate the luxuries that that wealth affords me. And what it really affords me is time. I can have time to do the things that I want to do without worrying about spiraling down into the incarcerated class. I see the danger in that for those who are closer to poverty. Perhaps I am skirting a bit close to the edge of poverty, but I have chosen to not be afraid of it and to be confident in my ability to stay out of the trap of poverty.

So, maybe for this part, you do have to be a little brave. If you or your family has fought hard to come out of poverty, I can see how this part would be scary. However, if you’ve made it into the worker class and saved up some money, have confidence in yourself that you can re-enter the worker class at some level if you so choose. It may be at a lower level than you were accustomed to, but just accept that that was part of the cost for chasing your dreams and experiencing real freedom in your life.

I understand. You don’t want to lose your place on the ladder. You’ve worked very hard to get to that rung and you don’t want to lose it, so you grip tightly. I get that. But don’t cling to the ladder just for the sake of the ladder’s position itself. Remember that you got to that rung for some reason. What was that reason? Do you still remember? You had something else you wanted to do and climbing that ladder was the way to achieve it. It’s not too late to try to achieve it. Even though you haven’t reached the top of the ladder, maybe you’ve reached a high enough rung that you can simply let go and try and achieve the original goal you had in mind. Climbing the ladder certainly wasn’t your only goal until you got onto the first rung, right? The ladder was meant to lead somewhere. Maybe you don’t need to climb the rest of the ladder to get there right now. That’s what is worth considering.


How to Survive the Impending Oligarchy Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Capitalism

Did I say impending oligarchy? I must be mistaken. I mean existing oligarchy. Well, whether you believe the United States is becoming or has become or will become an oligarchy is not the point of this article. The point of this article is to say, “Well, fuck it, we’re fucked. So how do we fucking unfuck ourselves?”

I’ve thought of a couple of ways, both of which I’ve tried with mild degrees of success. Way Number One is to follow with tiny footsteps in the giant footsteps of the giant capitalists ahead of you. What does this mean? This means that you find ways in which capitalists have exploited the law for their own gain and try to emulate their success to some small degree. After all, if someone is going to cheat by changing the rules to favor themselves, is it really wrong to crib from their answers?

Let me serve you an example! Did you know that some 9000 tax payers in the United States have accumulated over $5 million each in their IRA accounts? If they follow the rules of the IRA which limits contributions each year to $5500, then it would seem to reason that there are at least 9000 vampires in the United States who are over 900 years old! And one of them is Mitt Romney. I demand to see his birth certificate! He’s definitely a vampire!

Or perhaps there is a better explanation: We live in an oligarchy where the rules are bent for the extremely wealthy. Or maybe they simply have lawyers read the rules differently. If you want some ideas on how this is done, you can check out this Bloomberg article here. But you’d better act fast, because the anti-oligarchy minded Obama is onto this and has been working to close this particular loophole. In any case, some of those ideas might be doable for somewhat regular folks like you and me. We might own our own businesses or we might be a founder of a startup. The methods in the article are like doubling down 10 times in your own success.

Another way is a thing I stumbled into called HARP. Basically, due to the financial crisis caused unironically by our financial institutions, the US found itself in a recession. In order to stimulate the economy, the government decided that it would throw some liquidity into the gummed up economy in order to get the wheels of capitalism turning again. Greasing the wheels of the money machine, you might say. In layman’s terms, increasing liquidity means that they need to effectively print some cold hard cash and give it to people. If you want to understand why this needs to happen, I urge you to read Paul Krugman’s retelling of the baby-sitter co-op. It’s a lovely story which illustrates a liquidity crunch very effectively.

Usually, in a situation like this, the government would simply give the newly created money to the banks. This, mysteriously enough, is not called “giving money to banks” but is instead called increasing the supply of money. Now, if you’re anything like me, you too would like to increase your supply of money, but you have the inconvenient fact that you’re a person and not a bank and certainly not a person who owns a bank. This greatly hinders your efforts at increasing your supply of money by virtue of the Fed. (The Fed is a fancy capitalist insider’s way of saying The Federal Reserve Bank. If you’re going to follow in the giant footsteps of capitalists ahead of you, you should at least sound like them.)

In this unique situation in which the government needs to give out tons of money, but the institutions it normally gives it to were the cause of the problem in the first place (i.e. the banks), it then needs to give it out to people who won’t fuck shit up even more. And also, maybe punish the banks a little bit, too. But not too much. We’re a capitalistic oligarchy, not a socialist country, you Bernie Sanders loving fuck. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Why are you reading this if not to get your hands on that lovely free supply of money from the government? Socialists! Always trying to get the government to give you free money and you don’t realize that they’re already giving you money! (Well, not anybody… just people rich enough to afford a home. Sorry, renters! Maybe you guys should vote or something. Oh, also, I forgot. If you happen to own a struggling automobile manufacturer, you could also get some free money. But don’t worry about that. That money wasn’t really free. Haha! Government play joke on capitalists!)

Uhhh… where were we? Free money! That brings us back to HARP. What is HARP? Well, it’s a relief program for homeowners (hopefully you, though I know you kind of have to be a bazillionaire in Silicon Valley where I live to own a home). Basically, the whole housing market was artificially inflated by the bankers making money off of inventive new “financial instruments” which was basically writing so many I.O.U’s and insurance claims against bad I.O.U’s that they lost track of who was going to lose money. Some banks knew that they would lose money, but as long as they weren’t losing money at that moment, they were still making tons of money, so it was okay. Well, because the banks basically leeched tons of money out of the housing market, the government responded with HARP which is meant to even things out a bit with the homeowners and the bankers who robbed them.

Have you ever seen those click-bait ads that are like “Click here for this one trick which bankers don’t want you to know about!”? Well, that is literally HARP. You can literally only do HARP one time according to its rules. The bankers must offer you these loans if your house value is lower than what you owe on the house. Because basically, you might have thought you bought your house at a reasonable value. But due to banker shenanigans, it was actually way higher than it should have been. As a result of those shenanigans, the price plummeted thus leaving you in danger of forfeiting your house to… you guessed it: the bankers responsible for the shenanigans. So, the government decided to give those homeowners another chance to rewrite their mortgages at a better contract than originally signed. The banks would rather you forfeit your house, but the government is now looking over their shoulders, so they’re going to play by the rules rather than try any shenanigans, otherwise called irrational exuberance, by those in the know. Remember to walk the walk and talk the talk, little capitalist footstep-follower!

That’s an awesome deal! Here’s the rub. Not enough people actually qualified under those terms. So, they changed the terms. Rather than being underwater (i.e. you own more on the house than it’s worth), you needed some low equity value, less than 20%. Well, if you’re like me, you probably put 20% down and if the house value went down, you have less than 20% equity. Voila! You might qualify for HARP! Now sign up and force the banks to pay some institutional penance that is way too little for the shit-storm they caused, but still not bad considering we live in a capitalistic oligarchy!

So, in summary, we’ve examined a couple of ways of getting by in the post-oligarchy world.

1: Find an absurd thing a wealthy capitalist did and copy it.

2: Find a mistake that a capitalist institution made and be the beneficiary of its punishment.

Remember, little footstep followers, to be creative with the above two concepts. Capitalism is rich in absurd things you can do and also mistakes that need to get punished by the government! You are in a target rich environment! Now that we have the internet, it’s much easier to find out about these things and either copy their techniques or else take advantage of the rules meant to punish their irrational exuberance! Feel free to post some crazy things that you’ve seen capitalists do in the comments section. Happy hunting!

Stay tuned to next time for Way Number 2 Of How To Exploit Capitalism for My Own Gain: Or How I Enjoyed the Fruits of Capitalism Without Being Ground Up By Its Gears!