“The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief, 1983

Very broadly, a paradigm is about the way you perceive, interpret and live your life. In one where there are so many of us but money is scarce and you need money to survive, doesn’t money (and status) motivate and reward people to do things?

Since this signals you to be a money-chasing machine — to constantly (and blindly) battle anyone/anything that gets in your way — have the world wars really ended? Or have they evolved into Business-as-usual where common sense goes out the window as your livelihood depends on not understanding anything beyond your self-preservation?

Based on artificial Scarcity, has the incumbent paradigm experientially “groomed” you to be ‘a clock thinker’ in your respective survival silo/bubble (and to be systemically blind)?

So, although a transition is underway, do you see how we are being self-organized to shove each other from the world’s dumbest idea into the world’s most dangerous idea?

This is similar to the late 1960’s, when private sector firms in the US were starting to feel the initial pressures of global competition. Like many today, people had desperately wanted quick fixes.

That’s when Milton Friedman published a very confusing New York Times article in 1970, titled ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.’ After he retired from GE, Jack Welch even admitted the concept of shareholder value focusing on consistent quarterly results was “the dumbest idea of the world.”

However, that idea has infiltrated and shaped all our lives as we are like fish in the water.

In between physical and digital Scarcity

Until 2004, the Internet was decentralized, and a startup could go public with a business plan written on a single sheet of paper (single sided). But that year, Google IPOed and Facebook was launched.

Surveillance capitalism has since flipped us from customers being served to products being sold. Based on more of the same thinking and doing, doesn’t surveillance capitalism really mean ‘post capitalism’ and in a ‘post-monetary’ world, isn’t the future of money the data we generate?

Google and Apple have embraced open source. In 2014, TechRepublic recognized Facebook as the world’s biggest open source actor and Tesla also made available all its patents for other manufacturers to copy. Microsoft recently open sourced 60,000 patents while Amazon has opened its ‘Machine Learning University’ to all developers.

On 21 June 2018, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, spoke about how “Data is the new oil” and called for “a new world order.” Was he signaling technocrats to self-organize, to build and to champion the new ‘smart’ infrastructure and to eventually replace money with our data (and all our assets)?

Self-organizing to perpetuate the Age of Nonsense

As you join the race for recognition, convenience, speed and bargains, here’s Tom Goodwin on how we self-organized to create the initial digital Business-as-usual model:

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”

In 2018, he opined how three years had flipped the above scenario:

“The world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, is buying cars. The world’s most popular media company, Facebook, now commissions content. The world’s most valuable retailer is now Amazon, and has more than 350 stores. And the world’s largest hospitality provider, Airbnb, increasingly owns real estate.”

Because instead of Big Business paying most of us a decent salary to buy the goods and services we produce, this digital trend revolves around us creating the value and buying their services and products while all the key benefits (wealth) end up in the pockets of the Big Business and their owners.

Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have (gradually, initially) been replacing humans.

Meanwhile, the gig/freelance economy has emerged as the 21st century’s global factory on demand — marketed as your having freedom, autonomy, and self-determination but where ‘employees’ have no benefits.

According to a 2016Spera report:

• In the next five years, half of the United Kingdom’s working population may be self-employed.
• Independent workers comprise the fastest growing group in the European Union labor market: A 45% rise from 2012 to 2013.
• India’s 15 million independent workforce is the world’s second largest, filling about 40% of the world’s freelance jobs, and their ranks continue to grow.

The so-called sharing economy has many renting out their spare capacities — whether that’s themselves, their homes, cars or whatever else they have. We even volunteer our time, ideas and intellect for free on social media platforms, oblivious to how algorithms are learning about us from what we share to create value for the digital oligarchs.

Of the two trend-setting countries? Zero-hours contracts prevail in many parts of the UK economy as it grapples with Brexit while the US is regressing into a third world country. Check this out.

With better, faster, cheaper as their mantra, what profit-maximizing businesses will want to keep shelling out money to humans they no longer need to employ?

As the cost of living shots up and money scarcity addicts you to surviving only for yourself (and your loved ones), we are now being lured to DIY (with our time, efforts and money) a very different reality from what we know today. This latest transition may even standardize what it means to be a sustainable human.

Because as we continue to think and live ‘I win, you lose,’ wouldn’t our individual data all be aggregated and turned into Big Data — the future of money — for absolute control?

Why? Because the Business-as-usual function of extracting our value based on ‘I win, you lose’ to maximize profits has not changed one iota. Based on artificial Scarcity, wouldn’t the new digital tools simply accelerate the extraction of the rest of our value from cradle to grave?

Do these social movements have the answer?

To explore, get your copy of Social movements powering the future of money, the first of two or three books to try to explain why we need a paradigm shift from artificial Scarcity to True Abundance.

Our future depends on you!!

About twenty or so years ago, Prince perhaps said it best: “Don’t be fooled by the Internet.”

The post New century, new tools but what future are you creating? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Check out this video to ponder whether this is the paradigm we are in.

This extract from Social movements powering the future of money attempts to explain how the Age of ‘I win, you lose’ Nonsense (paradigm) has us blindly perpetuating the root cause of all our (biggest) challenges …

INTRODUCTION

“ … our society is filled with hatred and violence. Everything is like a bomb ready to explode, and we are all a part of that bomb; we are all co-responsible. We are all the policemen and the victim.”Thich Nhat Hanh

What is the biggest challenge the world faces?

Is it humans, money, technologies, capitalism, climate change, wars, terror, diseases, mass starvation, wealth inequality or social unrest? Or is each of that a ‘silo’ tool or outcome of the system we depend on, with symptoms running the gamut of fear, distrust, anger, hatred, envy, biases, etc.?

All these are systemic challenges: They have their root in how the system we depend on impacts our behavior, individually and collectively, to perpetuate a destructive ‘bullying’ way of thinking and extracting, especially by the most power-hungry:

To survive, you must compete and fake it till you make it because wanting to win at all costs is what’s prized.

This core root cause hides in plain sight and you even call it Business-as-usual.

However, with its logic deeply embedded into our culture, you may not see how in a world where we all need money to survive, Business-as-usual very narrowly focuses you on how money is for your self-preservation — at your individual level — preoccupying you with surviving/competing in a silo. As money buys you stuff, pays your bills or you may receive some as a reward for being a super money-chasing machine, are you even cognizant of the system of how money influences your behavior?

Essentially, the systemic role of money and its creation. Can that be how our means of survival has increasingly been vested with corporations (aka ‘artificial persons’) that exist solely to maximize shareholder value/profit? Is that how the corporatocracy has been able to take over our lives?

John Kenneth Galbraith, the late Harvard economics professor, provides this systemic insight:

Twenty-three years after the Bretton Woods Conference (officially known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference), he published The New Industrial State to share how capitalism had shifted from a market society to a hierarchical“industrial system” owned by a cartel of corporations he called the “technostructure.”

More than half a century ago, Galbraith had observed that instead of being markets-driven ground-up, the economy was organizations-driven, top-down. Dominated by large industrial firms controlling around two-thirds of output in key sectors of the economy then, he saw how a global elite was usurping markets, fixing prices and controlling demand for long-term production planning.

Galbraith had further disdained the scientific pretensions and formal apparatus of modern economics, believing all that math and numbers-crunching missed the point. He was also known to have quipped:

“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”

In 1973, the year after taking up Mao Zedong government’s invitation to visit China in his capacity as the president of the American Economic Association, Galbraith published A China Passage to share:

“There can be no serious doubt that China is devising a highly effective economic system,” “Greater Shanghai … has a better medical service than New York …”

and considered it not implausible that Chinese industrial and agricultural output was expanding annually at a rate of 10 to 11 percent … “rivaling that of Japan.”

Rather than being Johnny-come-lately, China could have been creating the framework for a new global system based on Business-as-usual for a very long time: The Belt and Road Initiative and the Social Credit system being two of its latest endeavors. The world’s factory also harbors intentions to become the world’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powerhouse.

Meanwhile, using money to laser focus you on self-preservation, the “technostructure” has gradually institutionalized money into our lives, drumming up artificial Scarcity to reinforce distrust and exploitative ‘I win, you lose’ behaviors — with value creation orbiting around money.

Have you observed or even experienced such Hegelian dialectic theatrics?

A problem is created using fear, panic and hysteria. Two polar opposites (good cop vs bad cop) surface, one opposing the other to create division (divide and conquer) so you (the masses) will clamor for a predetermined solution.

Over time, is that how the global elites have been able to turn money into a public utility for a global payment system — governed exclusively by Big Business — powered by us surviving for ourselves?

In this dangerous world, only they are our saviors because they NEVER see Business-as-usual as the key fundamental root cause — it is always us, the people.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde

Money serves these key functions

• Transfer of value (buy and sell goods and services and pay debts/taxes),
• Store of value (accumulate to transact goods and services later) and
• The most critical, psychologically as a numeric unit of account (common measure for goods and services to be exchanged) so whoever has the most money and power can very easily control and manipulate you — e.g. rewarding (giving money) or punishing (taking away).

Meantime, whatever has the most meaning (e.g. love, trust, care, friendship, authenticity, innate gifts) cannot be measured. So, although we are all vastly different, money has enabled our value (e.g. time, ideas, skills, energy, passion, resources, rights, etc.) to be captured, standardized and monetized. Even weaponized, as we compete for attention, grades, jobs, promotions, market share, funding, etc.

Most of all, by transforming human value into exchange value, money allows business entities (middlemen) to systemically facilitate transactions and to take a cut. Legally obliged to pursue the bottom line, these rapacious ‘artificial persons’ have no higher god than growth. Once they take over our means of survival, we are held hostage — money lets them increase prices at their whims and fancy, including outsourcing their risks to jack up their bottom lines, and to do whatever else they want with us.

If so, doesn’t the systemic role of money make us their sources of profit and transactions, our toxic way of life? Hasn’t money turned us into (human) resources to power the system we depend on?

Byextracting our value and funneling that to the “technostructure,” our collective value and worth is rendered invisible but individuals with the winner-takes-all mentality are encouraged and rewarded.

The operating system of artificial Scarcity does not value humans

“If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive, you’re compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.” Noam Chomsky

Money is mandatory for urban survival. As escalating cost of living fixates you on self-preservation, too many will perceive that value only comes with a big price tag. Expectations honed by societal norms also reinforce that belief. Then as you use money to self-organize and to self-allocate yourself and your priorities, money scarcity will hammer this simple numbers logic into your psyche.

Once that becomes an unconscious lifelong habit of ‘I win, you lose’ (divide and conquer), you will be territorial over whatever it is you perceive you own. Psychologically ingrained, (the lack of) money focuses you on seeing things as you are rather than as they are. In the here and now. Systemically conditioned to take things personally, your sense of self-worth (ego) then becomes an unwitting custodian of Business-as-usual as your empathy, the long term and the system fade out of sight.

So, much like the frog in a pot of slowly boiling water, you may not even realize the human layer is disappearing — money lets you complete transactions quickly without needing to understand anyone. Already, no human is required to transact on online platforms. With billions increasingly engrossed with self-preservation, unintended and negative consequences can and will arise. As trust collapses, fear will then push you to blindly accept utter nonsense as norm.

To have you continue doing whatever it is you believe you must do to survive, unaware this is how the system influences you to systemically create booms-and-busts.

For example: As we scramble to survive for ourselves, we invariably create a mountain of debt for all. Globally, a staggering 97 percent of all the money is debt. As we chase after shelter, food, healthcare, education, energy, security, etc., so many of us powering the system willy-nilly also drive up the cost of living to mega insane heights, unaware:

“The financial system does not, in fact, consist of ‘national monetary flows.’ Nor is it made up of a mass of tiny, anonymous, microscopic firms — the ideal of ‘perfect competition’ and the economic analogue to the individual citizen. The overwhelming majority of private credit creation is done by a tightly-knit corporate oligarchy. … At a global level twenty to thirty banks matter.”Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

Our post-war world economy was originally structured to prevent speculators from trying to attack fixed currencies. To keep money within the countries they were acquired, only long-term investments could move overseas. Oliver Bullough shares in the Guardian that this was to “keep governments from using trade as a weapon with which to bully neighbours, and create a stable system that would help secure peace and prosperity.”

However, Moneyland is also “a place where, if you are rich enough, whoever you are, wherever your money comes from, the laws do not apply to you.” Bullough calls that “the dirty secret at the heart of the City’s rebirth, the beginning of the process that eventually led to today’s stratospheric inequality.”

But back in September 1970, as US businesses grappled with the initial impact of globalization, Milton Friedman’s article clumsily rallied their key drivers to make profit their social responsibility.

Then on 15 August 1971, US President Richard Nixon ripped apart the Bretton Woods agreement, officially ending liberal economic order. As currencies became legal tender (fiat), Business-as-usual ushered in a new phase of globalization tethered to neoliberal policies. The movement of capital unleashed, the rich and powerful (including institutional investors) speculated — using money to make money — the world, their global casino.

‘Hot money’ (e.g. ‘eurodollar’ and ‘eurobond’) legally moving across borders has torpedoed us back to square one, exposing us to escalating episodes of debilitating instability:

“With the creation of the Euromarket, bankers in both countries [United States and Britain] ambled on a solution to the problem of how to reconstruct the London-New York financial axis that had been prominent in the 1920s.”Eric Helleiner, Treasure islands

Was our biggest shove into artificial Scarcity(and inequality) when our world economy legally became a global casino — covertly helmed by the failed Bretton Woods institutions?

* * * * * * * * *

The Social movements powering the future of moneyebook is now available on Amazon. Depending on demand, a paperback can be in the works.

If you are ready for a paradigm shift out of ‘I win, you lose’ Nonsense, please please watch out for and sign our petition when it’s out. Once it reaches 10,000 signatories, I hope to have observed/figured out the initial guidelines to try to catalyse the shift to True Abundance where strangers anywhere can potentially empower and build trust with one another for everyone’s benefit.

To try to buck the Business-as-usual trend where Big Business retains all the key benefits, net proceeds from that very emergent initiative will be shared with the best crowd actualizers, very broadly as follows:

· 1/3 for core team

· 1/3 for best crowd actualizers and

· 1/3 for next True Abundance project.

But we have a huge chasm to cross first — to unlearn ‘I win, you lose’ so we can relearn ‘You win, we win’ by doing.

The post Self-organized to perpetuate Nonsense? appeared first on P2P Foundation.