Late-era capitalism
I’ve lately been entranced by the notion, new to me, that our society no longer operates under the aegis of capitalism—or, at least, we no longer operate under vanilla-invisible-hand-Adam-Smith style capitalism. Because we don’t have a free market the likes of which Smith wrote about and, indeed, such a free market being impossible given the realities of modern economics, we have some sort of hybridized capitalism. In talking with people smarter than me I’ve found that I should be looking at “late-era capitalism”. That term describes our current large-scale economic model. Okay then.
This Wired article has some neat things to say about what motivates capitalism—a choice between the consumer or the producer. In traditional models it is a feedback loop like in supply and demand… but, lately, given that the goal of making as much money in as short a time as possible has become the overriding law under which almost all large-scale business is run.
Which is too bad because I think that’s pretty short-sighted. If a company makes $1 billion in one year by screwing everything around it and then tanks immediately afterwards because of said screwing when it could have made $5 billion in three years by not screwing everything around it… I mean, WTF, right?
So I’m on the lookout for something that’s post-capitalist. I think a realistic, applicable post-capitalist model of economics would have to take into consideration local striations in markets. For instance, economics based on scarcity of resources don’t quite apply in the digital media: if I can reproduce one episode of one TV show a billion times with no degradation and zero manufacturing cost per episode then we should adjust our models.
I’ve heard the argument that time has become the primary scarce resource and we can adjust capitalism to reflect that and still use our old models… but I think that’s false. It’s not time that’s scarce but attention. Human attention is what is at stake.
What about peer-to-peer solutions to attention scarcity (like grassroots movements seeking volunteer synergy in petitionts and letter-writing campaigns)? Ever hear the one about how porn bots could defeat CAPTCHA by forcing free website viewers to defeat said CAPTCHA as part of the entry into a free website? That’s a combination of using supposedly scarce attention resources which are, actually, available for free. Have you seen Peekaboom? It’s a computer vision training program that uses human players who are playing a game to provide training data. Training data for computer vision programs is tedious to create… unless one dupes the audience into believing they are playing some game (no one is duped at Peekaboom... the website is very upfront). So attention is kind of scarce but relatively easy to harvest.
Where does that leave us?