My theory/rant on capitalism and associated concepts works

[Hashi]

So much shit is made these days for morons and idiots to consume. Of course this is all based on my understanding of the economy, the human psyche, capitalism, evolution, growth and all the rest that ties into it.

So for reasons that will become clear later on, (or you can see where this is going) actually having the opinion I do makes no sense, but I hold to my sometimes irrational and contradictory views.

So this is how I understand economics. Before the industrial revolution it worked out (Im not sure how this part works out) so that there was a fixed amount of money in circulation. So when the population grew, people were poorer as the same amount of money had to support more people. This is why infanticide was a big thing back then. I know that throughout the majority of history, in almost every society on Earth, something from 80-98% of all people in that society were employed in agriculture. The vast majority of people lived a subsistence level and had very little money to spend outside of food and shelter. So when we think of the "rich" Roman empire, we are primarily talking about the people living in the cities, a small portion of the population. Even in 1900, only about 10% of people on Earth lived in cities.

So then came the industrial revolution. Along with this came new notions of personal security, and three other pillars that I can't remember the name of, that were needed for our modern growth. Now comes growth based on intellectual property and not on the land. It was in the 1970s (or so) that money no longer needed to be backed by gold. But now what happened was that we could essentially create industries out of thin air, create not new products, but new categories of products. As people had more disposable income as they didn't have to spend as much (proportionally) of their income just to survive. Now what should this new middle class buy?

You don't simply invent new products for people to buy, but new categories. It all well and good for a seller to have a number of vases for sale. But what if someone only wants to buy one? So lets put a vase down as a indoor decoration. Then you can sell say cups, and these are not for decoration. These have a different use. Now someone can come to your shop and get a decoration and a item to help him drink liquids. Marketing also comes into this. Think about deodorant. Before its invention, people used their natural body odours to attract mates. Only the highest up people in a society might use products to mask their odours. This was out of bounds for the vast majority of people on Earth. But then its marketed in such a way so that the naturally occurring odours were a liability, smelt bad, and had to be masked. All hail deodorant!

Think about entertainment. What constituted as entertainment before the industrial revolution is miniscule compared with today. We have TV, the PC, consoles, magazines, things like yoyo's, tamagochi's, etc. But now you have the tourism industry, the airline industry, companies that own all the natural resources on Earth, theme parks, cinema, etc. But you don't need just new categories of objects. Create new markets. Think about a teenager. What is a teenager? Just someone that fits a definition and holds possibly self-prophesying behaviors. Throughout most of history, people were children and then around 13 or so, turned into adults. But when you invent the concept of a teenager you can now create products catering for that market. They have their own likes etc, that are different from adults and children. That way you buy certain products when you're a child, teenager and then adults. Now think about how they are using the term "tween", as something between child and teenager. Fuck how far can they go?

So then we come to modern capitalism. You constantly need new content for people to consume. People are now sensitized to it, have come to take progress for granted and have such high expectations. But this belies a hell of a lot of effort that goes into keeping this world turning. This view doesn't take into account the amount of effort that goes into producing new content and even upgrades of products (think of a newer model of a TV) and then have impossible standards. When cinema first came out, people went to watch movies just for the sake of seeing this new form. But think about people at airports now. They take it for granted to the extent that when there are delays, people are vocal about complaining. But they don't stop to think just how amazing it is that we can fly, that airports are organised so damn well that millions of people can land on different countries every day around the Earth.

But I think we are slowly running out of ideas. Marketing is the largest growing sector in my opinion. It's no longer about the item being sold, but how it is being sold. I look at the TV shows currently on. There are now shows about fucking kitchens. They create drama around cooking fucking food in kitchens. There were like 3 shows around at one point and the main one still standing is "My kitchen rules" but it fucking sucks and everything is so goddamn fake and shit, that I imagine that only morons would be entertained by that. I've seen other garbage advertised, but since I don't watch TV anymore, I can't remember the names, but most new shows look fucking crap and simply desperate attempts at holding audiences and holding on to money for that section of entertainment, keeping people employed.

Then the fucking "ipods" and the related "i" shit products. They're all fucking shit, and people wet themselves every time an update comes out to one of the products. But got to hand it to the marketing department for hawking the products as well as they did. Movies are running out of ideas too, and now 3D is out (again), an attempt to make cinema a spectacle again. I see people getting excited about new phones, but I can't help think how fucking useless this is, as most of the people are only going to use it as a phone and to sms, and not the 900000000000 million accessories on them. I can't help but see how fake it all is, you can't just have a phone and manufacture that. You need constant updates for people to buy them and keep your business afloat. But I still can't help thinking that people who get all excited about new phones with just some new features on are idiots. As if this update on this new phone is going to make them somehow happier then they are now with their current phone.

It's all so necessary to keeping our economy going but...

Fuck Apple products. Fuck all the phone update products. Fuck all the shitty toys that are produced these days. Fuck those goddamn ads hawking off those shitty fucking ads, like the "ab king pro" type ads. Fuck those life insurance ads, pedaling another useless way to spend your money.

My advice? Reality is subjective. Don't look to external sources for validation for who you are or for happiness. Feel happy within yourself and because of yourself. Don't look to products to do this for you. That happiness is fleeting at best, and will last until the next update comes out. Don't define yourself by the products you buy, and don't do things to impress others. Don't create your image around products. Has anyone bought pieces of art and just put it in a place where only they can see? Save that money for trips, these will make you happier and be longer lasting then any product you can buy.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

Hold on, I think you contradicted yourself when you stated that people have too high standards and should appreciate that they even have the technology, then you meantioned marketing.. Marketing of course is a means of lowering those said standards or faking that your product meets those standards when they do not.

Capitalism is not all evil, Globalization is evil, American Mega-Corporation/Multi-nationalism is extremely evil.

In the end your rant neglects the human need for culture, one could argue a major problem with Capitialism is that its created a consumer culture built around social conformity and around brand association, this in turn can be directly linked to ones social class in the marxist system, problem is that people construct identities around this which are in many cases pure fantasy and unobtainable within their means, but they choose to continue doing so anyway.. and then the GFC happens.. Big fucking wakeup call world!.

High Standards are good trust me, if we didn't have high standards we'd loose the desire to one up each other- which is a major factor in progression. The need to constantly do better than the predecessor- this is something inherit within human nature itself, we've seen countless civilizations thrive on this.

I'd argue most of the problems you've argued are 100% American problems, they've only been introduced post 1945, when America proclaimed itself to be the dominant power in the world, and once we reached the 1980s it was pretty much assured. America took those good times it had of prosperity (whilst the rest of the world went to shit as a result of the Soviets and post-war economic destruction). America inacted a lot of policies, created a lot of cultural trends and essentially went on a rampage trying to assimiliate the world into the image it defined as being proper. In the end I'm sick of it. I appreciate the concept of classical Victorian capitalism, which was by nature very Socialist. America took that and totally bastardized the shit out of it- it started with Ford and continued to evolve into Neo-Fordism.. the root of all evil- and the reason why we've become such a throw away society that exports everything to China.

(if you don't understand the term Neo-Fordism, this explains it a bit better: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=7aU ... sm&f=false, its pretty much the flexibility of labor over a global scale.)

The biggest problem though with today is the total cultural stagnation, that we're simply not producing anything meaningful that is going to have that nostalgic quality that we all remember from our own pasts.. nowdays everything is shit and gives us no solace in our own lives that we can better ourselves or that our lives aren't all that bad really.. but truth is, without culture we just wake up to the fact that our world really fucking sucks. Its that instinct that I feel drives the artist to create something, and I'd argue its the high standards that ensures that the artist produces something timeless and eventually nostalgic.

You're right in many cases, but I don't think consumers are to blame for being picky. I'd argue its the capitalists that are at fault for having such low standards anyway. Sure we can fly now, but back in the day there was a certain art to it that nowdays is lost, now we're all shoved into economy class.. hell if you've ever flown Australian JetStar... yeah you can really really see that the art has certainly been lost... if people are pissed about delays, they have every right to be frankly. and seriously, Qantas.. what the fuck.. you guys used to be awesome. What the fuck happened.

[DDL]

I...I have no idea where to begin with this. Jesus. A static economy == infanticide? Seriously?

Basically this reads just like someone getting older and realising they don't have their finger on the pulse anymore. And it ignores all the ways in which things have become demonstrably better, such as healthcare, education, access to a varied diet, and generally not putting 13 year olds straight into the mine.

[Jonas]

and generally not putting 13 year olds straight into the mine.

Oh I dunno. I can think of a few ~13-year-olds I'd like to put into a mine.

[Hashi]

I...I have no idea where to begin with this. Jesus. A static economy == infanticide? Seriously?

Basically this reads just like someone getting older and realising they don't have their finger on the pulse anymore. And it ignores all the ways in which things have become demonstrably better, such as healthcare, education, access to a varied diet, and generally not putting 13 year olds straight into the mine.

Have you done any reading on the matter or is this your personal view? I don't claim to like the idea, but it was a big thing that happened back then. They had no contraceptives and having a larger family was not feasible for many people, they simply could not afford it. Yes things are better, but it is at a cost. I don't doubt this at all, and my original post did not either. I don't like some aspects of capitalism. It does not mean I hate it, or that I want to do away with it. Just that I don't like some aspects of it.

[DDL]

They had a ton of contraceptives. Fuck me, even monkeys have contraceptives. Hell, sheer "timing" is a contraceptive, albeit a poor one.

This is irrelevant, however: my objection was to the idea that people were murdering their children because "there was a fixed amount of money in the economy, and larger populations would mean they wouldn't get enough of it as a consequence". It trivialised infanticide, posits a truly spurious interpretation of 'economy', and in fact misses the point of money entirely, which is simply an abstract representation of resources.

I have one cow, I want to trade my cow for some wood.

I could take my cow to the market, and meet someone who has dragged his wood all the way from his forest. Assuming he wants a whole cow, we trade, and I carry all my new wood back home, and he drags his cow all the way home. I may end up with fucktons more wood than I want, he may end up with fucktons more cow than he wants.

This is inefficient, messy and retarded, like most barter systems.

I take my cow to someone who needs/can use one whole cow (say, a butcher, or a dairy farmer), he gives me a token universally accepted to be worth one cow (or indeed, a large amount of wood). I take my token to a lumberjack, and exchange it for some wood, and a smaller less valuable token. He, incidentally, obtained his wood by giving a token universally accepted to be worth a large amount of wood (or one cow) to a woodsman. This woodsman then took his token to the butcher from earlier, and exchanged it for some meat, and a smaller less valuable token.

Woo. Also, the tokens are portable, and non-perishable. Yay!

Ultimately, they are still representations of stuff. If you are having to murder your children because you don't have enough money, that is nothing to do with the money, it's because either there isn't enough STUFF, or you're not able to earn enough stuff. It's not a consequence of a 'fixed economy, meaning the same money is distributed more thinly', because that's not how value works. It's a consequence of lack of resources, or inability to garner sufficient quantities of resources. It's not because there's shitloads of resources but not enough physical cash, which is what you were implying. The money wasn't supporting people, resources were. It was simply representing the value of resources that were supporting people.

Incidentally, this is entirely true today: if you have a huuuuuge family, you will be unable to support them all. This is nothing to do with there being a 'fixed amount of money', and all to do with resources and your access to them. If resources are plentiful, then the value of resources decreases, so you can support a larger familiy (note, with the SAME amount of money, since it is representative of that value). If times are hard, resources become more valuable, so their cash-based representation increases in number: the same amount of money now gets you less, so time to get murderin' those young 'uns. The 'amount of money' hasn't changed.


It might also be worth noting that people bought almost as much cheap generic trash back in the olden times as they do now, but it was simply more perishable: lovely copper serving vases will survive to live on in museums, whereas the middle ages equivalent of an ikea Turmvaat lampstand would break eventually, then get recycled into other shit. Cottage industries selling cheap shit and pandering to morons are not a new thing.

[bobby 55]

"My kitchen rules" but it fucking sucks and everything is so goddamn fake and shit, that I imagine that only morons would be entertained by that.

It's only the highest rating show in the country. I'll pass on your "only morons could be entertained by that" message to my mum.

....or maybe not.

[gamer0004]

Yeah the "limited amount of money thing" is incorrect, as for the rest... I dunno. Consumerism has its benefits and its drawbacks.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

It's only the highest rating show in the country. I'll pass on your "only morons could be entertained by that" message to my mum.

....or maybe not.

once again, Success does NOT equal Cultural Progression. I'd argue that most economically successful things do not advance the culture at all, and that things that do advance culture end up not being as economically successful.. And that's whats bloody wrong with the world. (I tried to explain that in my post).

I dislike the show mainly because it panders people's desire to have something to bitch about. However I am a hypocrite since I follow game politics which effectively is nothing but me bitching about what I'm reading.

Yes, Not only did I argue my case, but then I argued against it as well. Damn you Creative Thinking Game Design Classes!

[Hashi]

Hold on, I think you contradicted yourself when you stated that people have too high standards and should appreciate that they even have the technology, then you meantioned marketing.. Marketing of course is a means of lowering those said standards or faking that your product meets those standards when they do not.

Capitalism is not all evil, Globalization is evil, American Mega-Corporation/Multi-nationalism is extremely evil.

In the end your rant neglects the human need for culture, one could argue a major problem with Capitialism is that its created a consumer culture built around social conformity and around brand association, this in turn can be directly linked to ones social class in the marxist system, problem is that people construct identities around this which are in many cases pure fantasy and unobtainable within their means, but they choose to continue doing so anyway.. and then the GFC happens.. Big fucking wakeup call world!.

High Standards are good trust me, if we didn't have high standards we'd loose the desire to one up each other- which is a major factor in progression. The need to constantly do better than the predecessor- this is something inherit within human nature itself, we've seen countless civilizations thrive on this.

I'd argue most of the problems you've argued are 100% American problems, they've only been introduced post 1945, when America proclaimed itself to be the dominant power in the world, and once we reached the 1980s it was pretty much assured. America took those good times it had of prosperity (whilst the rest of the world went to shit as a result of the Soviets and post-war economic destruction). America inacted a lot of policies, created a lot of cultural trends and essentially went on a rampage trying to assimiliate the world into the image it defined as being proper. In the end I'm sick of it. I appreciate the concept of classical Victorian capitalism, which was by nature very Socialist. America took that and totally bastardized the shit out of it- it started with Ford and continued to evolve into Neo-Fordism.. the root of all evil- and the reason why we've become such a throw away society that exports everything to China.

(if you don't understand the term Neo-Fordism, this explains it a bit better: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=7aU ... sm&f=false, its pretty much the flexibility of labor over a global scale.)

The biggest problem though with today is the total cultural stagnation, that we're simply not producing anything meaningful that is going to have that nostalgic quality that we all remember from our own pasts.. nowdays everything is shit and gives us no solace in our own lives that we can better ourselves or that our lives aren't all that bad really.. but truth is, without culture we just wake up to the fact that our world really fucking sucks. Its that instinct that I feel drives the artist to create something, and I'd argue its the high standards that ensures that the artist produces something timeless and eventually nostalgic.

You're right in many cases, but I don't think consumers are to blame for being picky. I'd argue its the capitalists that are at fault for having such low standards anyway. Sure we can fly now, but back in the day there was a certain art to it that nowdays is lost, now we're all shoved into economy class.. hell if you've ever flown Australian JetStar... yeah you can really really see that the art has certainly been lost... if people are pissed about delays, they have every right to be frankly. and seriously, Qantas.. what the fuck.. you guys used to be awesome. What the fuck happened.

I understand the need for the system as it stands, as I have a very good life because of it. The people who idiolise the past (middle ages etc) tend to be nubs or uninformed (I used to be one of them lulz) because if you did go back in time and live there, there was an outragiously high chance you would be one of the people simply living a subsistence existence. The question is can we continue in this manner? If we are living in cultural stagnation, then how much loinger can it continue in its current form?

I understand some aspects of human nature, and understand that for prosperity we have today, we need a system like this. It doesn't mean I agree with all aspects of the system.

"one could argue a major problem with Capitialism is that its created a consumer culture built around social conformity and around brand association, this in turn can be directly linked to ones social class in the marxist system, problem is that people construct identities around this which are in many cases pure fantasy and unobtainable within their means, but they choose to continue doing so anyway.. and then the GFC happens.. Big fucking wakeup call world!."

I agree with that for sure.

They had a ton of contraceptives. Fuck me, even monkeys have contraceptives. Hell, sheer "timing" is a contraceptive, albeit a poor one.

This is irrelevant, however: my objection was to the idea that people were murdering their children because "there was a fixed amount of money in the economy, and larger populations would mean they wouldn't get enough of it as a consequence". It trivialised infanticide, posits a truly spurious interpretation of 'economy', and in fact misses the point of money entirely, which is simply an abstract representation of resources.

I have one cow, I want to trade my cow for some wood.

I could take my cow to the market, and meet someone who has dragged his wood all the way from his forest. Assuming he wants a whole cow, we trade, and I carry all my new wood back home, and he drags his cow all the way home. I may end up with fucktons more wood than I want, he may end up with fucktons more cow than he wants.

This is inefficient, messy and retarded, like most barter systems.

I take my cow to someone who needs/can use one whole cow (say, a butcher, or a dairy farmer), he gives me a token universally accepted to be worth one cow (or indeed, a large amount of wood). I take my token to a lumberjack, and exchange it for some wood, and a smaller less valuable token. He, incidentally, obtained his wood by giving a token universally accepted to be worth a large amount of wood (or one cow) to a woodsman. This woodsman then took his token to the butcher from earlier, and exchanged it for some meat, and a smaller less valuable token.

Woo. Also, the tokens are portable, and non-perishable. Yay!

Ultimately, they are still representations of stuff. If you are having to murder your children because you don't have enough money, that is nothing to do with the money, it's because either there isn't enough STUFF, or you're not able to earn enough stuff. It's not a consequence of a 'fixed economy, meaning the same money is distributed more thinly', because that's not how value works. It's a consequence of lack of resources, or inability to garner sufficient quantities of resources. It's not because there's shitloads of resources but not enough physical cash, which is what you were implying. The money wasn't supporting people, resources were. It was simply representing the value of resources that were supporting people.

Incidentally, this is entirely true today: if you have a huuuuuge family, you will be unable to support them all. This is nothing to do with there being a 'fixed amount of money', and all to do with resources and your access to them. If resources are plentiful, then the value of resources decreases, so you can support a larger familiy (note, with the SAME amount of money, since it is representative of that value). If times are hard, resources become more valuable, so their cash-based representation increases in number: the same amount of money now gets you less, so time to get murderin' those young 'uns. The 'amount of money' hasn't changed.


It might also be worth noting that people bought almost as much cheap generic trash back in the olden times as they do now, but it was simply more perishable: lovely copper serving vases will survive to live on in museums, whereas the middle ages equivalent of an ikea Turmvaat lampstand would break eventually, then get recycled into other shit. Cottage industries selling cheap shit and pandering to morons are not a new thing.

Yeah I don't really understand how the economy worked before the Industrial Revolution. I don't really understand why it was essentially a stagnant economy that saw almost no growth. I don't know why it took until the Industrial Revolution to finally produce some real, lasting growth in the world. Not temporal growth that some nations saw before the revolution. I've done a fair amount of reading on the subject and it interests me, yet the understanding still eludes me. Maybe it has something to do with power and how it was held by people, and as the revolution rolled on, how power worked changed either perceptibly or subtetly, and people were still able to stay in power with the new economy and the creation of the middle class.

Well yes these industries have always existed, but its also the scale of them that we have nowadays, and the percentages of them are far far higher then before. But it's still a minority of people on Earth that benefit from our new found growth? I remember hearing a few years back that almost 2 billion people on Earth still live in slums, and this doesn't count the ones who are living in subsistence. But yeah I'd like to read more about economic history to properly understand it.

[Grammatolatry]

Maybe we're developing a whole new culture with globalization. A culture that's a mishmash of lots of diluted things. Maybe once we're near death we'll see the nostalgic awesome points that we didn't realize we enjoyed.

[bobby 55]

It's only the highest rating show in the country. I'll pass on your "only morons could be entertained by that" message to my mum.

....or maybe not.

once again, Success does NOT equal Cultural Progression. I'd argue that most economically successful things do not advance the culture at all, and that things that do advance culture end up not being as economically successful.. And that's whats bloody wrong with the world. (I tried to explain that in my post).

Christ! It's a television show, I'd say it's already limited to how it'd progress culture.

I find it a bit unfair to label it as entertainment only morons could enjoy just the same.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

I find it a bit unfair to label it as entertainment only morons could enjoy just the same.

I was going to rant about this, But I found my opinions summarized by this film..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_qgVn-Op7Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFvT_qEZ ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcpWk2WK ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5hrcwU7Dk

I fucking LOVE this film.

In the end, those shows are about people that want their 5 seconds of fame, they're the shallowest, free-riding people on the planet, so why the fuck should we care about them. In the end this is what the networks want you to do, so that they can produce even cheaper Television shows using people who are greedy as hell, they want to encourage the thinking that anyone can get a freeride.. Life doesn't work like that. In the past we used to watch Television that was more about Characters and amazing stories, not anymore. Now its all Soap Operas, Game shows and Reality TV stars.. Take your Snookie and Kim Kardashian Television and shove em up your asses.. We should be inspiring generations, not polluting them with the idea that they don't have to work hard- they can just go on television, become a star and get a freeride through life.. And in turn, people bitch about them, they fade from society, their lives ruined.. Consumed and pushed out year after year.. Do you honestly think anyone cares about people on Big Brother from 10 years ago? NOPE.. What about Actors, Hell yes, everyone remembers the amazing performances of actors from their pasts.. This is what I'm talking about.

Do you want to justify the existence of Shows like "The Tester" that has nothing to do what so ever with game testing or QA? I sure wouldn't. Its a farce.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaweuBPqIj8

I remember when I became a QA having to shoot catapults and tackle mascots.. I also remember lots of drunk single chicks. /Epic Sarcasm. Really the show should've been called "The Fanboy"

Im mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore lol.

[bobby 55]

Oh man, Network. Now there's cultural progression. I'm afraid I can't argue about television coz I never take it that seriously. Whether those fucking abysmal reality tv shows are successful or not doesn't concern me, the off switch and channel selector are on the remote for a reason.

I can't see how people who choose to watch them are guilty of being morons. Some people do like to turn their brains off after a hard day at the salt mines, I can relate to that every now and then.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

I know that, but there's better ways of doing it. For our generation we've at least adapted to using Video Games for that, so in many cases we've moved on.
Cinema is too involved for it to be used in the same way. But I recall things like Childrens TV back in the 80s there were a lot of shows that really felt great to watch, being a child in the 80s was definitely awesome because people put a lot of effort into the things they create EG. Nicktoons.. whereas Childrens television now is craptastic and plays down the viewers intelligence. TV Shows like Star Trek were huge in terms of their cultural impact, yet now we see countless attempts to replicate that success and most of them are failures- usually due to budget (because Sci-fi/SeeeFeiiii(SyFy) are cheap bastards that produce B-grade shit). Why the fuck can't we produce things like that anymore?!

I'd argue a big part of this is how cheap the Television networks have become, and as a result, they put minimal effort as possible and minimal investment. Television is dead IMO, anyone watching these shows I'm questioning if 1. they're enjoying it or rather are just doing it out of social conformity (as most are now participating in Social Networking based Television) so they have something to talk about around the water cooler 2. just have the TV on for the sake of having it on because of impulsion.

What I'm against is how the Media indoctrinates people- Reality TV is the most vile of all indoctrination- if you read between the lines you can see what the media giants are trying to do.

I'm sick of Success always having to dictate culture, and I'm sick of mob rule when it comes to what we should choose to watch and what we can actually watch/produce.