openbook

Status update:

Sort by: recent trending random

Anonymous

8 hours ago

Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, made the following statement circa 1780:

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

#capitalism_💬 #bank_💬 #quote_💬

#fskynet_💬

+14 comment raw

Anonymous

6 months ago

Interesting #article_💬 about the breakdown of our climate being due to a "behavioral crisis" driven by marketing. The accumulation of advertisers and counter-intelligence programs to confuse and persuade the populace for a variety of profit-motivated reasons have conspired to rob us of our better judgment and left the populace degenerating into consumerist addicts who cannot address large collective problems or have a cohesive narrative or conversation that won't be polluted by corporate interests.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/13/human-behavioural-crisis-at-root-of-climate-breakdown-say-scientists

“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.

#climatechange_💬 #psychology_💬 #article_💬
#globalwarming_💬 #fskynet_💬

+1 comments(1) raw

Anonymous

6 months ago

The cost of labour per unit of output is constantly diminishing and the price of products is also tending to fall. The more the quantity of labour for a given output decreases, the more the value produced per worker — productivity — has to increase if the amount of achievable profit is not to fall. We have, then, this apparent paradox: the more productivity rises, the more it has to go on rising, in order to prevent the volume of profit from diminishing. Hence the pursuit of productivity gains moves ever faster, manpower levels tend to reduce, while pressure on workers intensifies and wage levels fall, as does the overall payroll. The system is approaching an internal limit at which production and investment in production cease to be sufficiently profitable.

Over time, Gorz explains, this leads investors to turn away from the “real economy” of production, where productivity gains and profits are harder to achieve and instead seek profit through financial speculation in “fictitious” forms of value such as debt and new types of financial instruments. The value is fictitious in the sense that loans, return on investment, future economic growth, trust and goodwill are social intangibles that are quite unlike physical capital. They depend upon collective belief and social trust and can evaporate overnight.

Still, it is generally easier and more profitable to invest in these (fictitious, speculative) forms of financial value than in actually producing goods and services at a time when productivity gains and profit are declining. No wonder speculative bubbles are so attractive: There is just too much capital is sloshing around looking for profitable investment which the real economy is less capable of delivering. No wonder companies have so much cash on hand (from profits) that they are declining to invest. No wonder the amount of available finance capital dwarfs the real economy. Gorz noted that financial assets in 2007 stood at $160 trillion, which was three to four times global GDP — a ratio that has surely gotten more extreme in the past eight years.

Meanwhile, climate change adds yet another layer of difficulty because it virtually requires an abrupt retreat from capitalism, as Naomi Klein argues in her recent book This Changes Everything. Gorz made this point quite clear:

“It is impossible to avoid climate catastrophe without a radical break with the economic logic and methods that have been taking us in that direction for 150 years. On current trend projections, global GDP will increase by a factor of three or four by 2050. But, according to a report by the UN Climate Council, CO2 emissions will have to fall by 85% by that date to limit global warming to a maximum of 2°C. Beyond 2°C, the consequences will be irreversible and uncontrollable.

“Negative growth is, therefore, imperative for our survival. But it presupposes a different economy, a different lifestyle, a different civilization and different social relations. In the absence of these, collapse could be avoided only through restrictions, rationing, and the kind of authoritarian resource-allocation typical of a war economy. The exit from capitalism will happen, then, one way or another, either in a civilized or barbarous fashion. The question is simply what form it will take and how quickly it will occur.

“To envisage a different economy, different social relations, different modes and means of production and different ways of life is regarded as “unrealistic,” as though the society based on commodities, wages, and money could not be surpassed. In reality, a whole host of convergent indices suggest that the surpassing of that society is already under way, and that the chances of a civilized exit from capitalism depend primarily on our capacity to discern the trends and practices that herald its possibility.”

This is where the many initiatives and movements that revolve around the commons, peer production, the solidarity economy, co-operatives, Transition Towns, degrowth, the sharing and collaborative economy, and much else, come in. These are all harbingers of a different way of meeting everyday needs without becoming ensnared in utopian capitalist imperatives (constant growth, ever-increasing productivity gains, profits from the real economy). Pursuing this path ultimately destroys a society, as we can see from years of austerity politics in Greece.

In other words, the most promising way to resolve the capitalist crisis of our time is to start to decommodify production and consumption – i.e., extend and invent non-market ways to meet our needs. Indeed, we need to reconceptualize “production” and “consumption” themselves as separate categories, and begin to re-integrate them — and our role as actors in them — through commons-based peer production.

André Gorz in 2007 wrote “The Exit from Capitalism Has Already Begun”.

#climatechange_💬
#capitalism_💬 #allconsumingbeast_💬 #gifteconomy_💬

tagged: #fskynet_💬

-278 comments(5) raw

Anonymous

6 months ago

Song: Rising Tide of the Nameless (#bagheadarmy )

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FB80lRIbZ7s
#music_💬 #anonymous_💬 #fskynet_💬

#anonfm_💬

-22 comment raw

Anonymous

7 months ago

Enlightenment is a collective act.

“Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free”

I have overcome my fears, and no longer depend on money. I depend on my wits, my fishing pole, my solar oven. But if I'm around people who depend on money, I end up depending on them and their money. When I don't depend on money I don't find community since it's still so rare.

I'm trying to build more of a movement against capitalism now.

One of the tricks of enlightenment is that you can't become enlightened by yourself. This is a trick of individualism. To become enlightened when no one else is, means living in a good way but being alone. True enlightenment is a collective thing. But Theres more to life than waiting for people to see through the illusion. It helps things along when you help others see through the illusion, and build the infrastructure to do it. Encourage meditation and psychedelics. Provide quiet space. Invite people with you on a hike. It's much easier to quiet the mind when you have a quiet place in the woods, yet some people never even think to leave the city.

Enlightenment comes and goes for the individuals who still live in a world of individualism. But once we have the experience, the teachings, the comradery, we can build the infrastructure. The infrastructure of peace, that doesn't just allow overcoming personal illusions, but allows creating a society that is conducive to everyone being able to overcome these illusions without being held back by their material reality. This infrastructure begins as an idea: fractal generosity. More about it on my channel, if you want: https://m.youtube.com/@lunchbagheadwaters3543/videos

#enlightenment_💬 #gifteconomy_💬 #fractalgenerosity_💬
#fskynet_💬

+0 comment raw

Anonymous

9 months ago

tagged: #fskynet_💬

-159 comments(2) raw

Anonymous

9 months ago

My critique of the UBI...

Distributing money is like handing out heroine, giving drunks a bunch of money and telling them to "spend it wisely", the UBI is going to be a nightmare for a lot of people. Maybe your heroine is OnlyFans, or DoorDash, or videogames, but it's all the same. Some crap to pass the time, to placate ourselves, to distract ourselves from our suffering, because we feel alone in the world. Surrounded by all these people, we still feel alone, because although we're connected more than ever before, we're not actually *feeling* connected or feeling a *part of anything* together. We're not "in it together", we're "in it for ourselves", and that's an existential lonliness that we can't ever solve with money because depending on money is whats causing the problem in the first place.

And this is why I'm worried about AI replacing all the jobs. It's the foretold inevitable end of the market economy, the end of wage labor, the end of capitalism, but then instead of ending capitalism we just give everyone a UBI? It'll just immerse us more permanently into the Matrix of consumerism. The heroine and the OnlyFans will only get better as AI optimizes everything, still focusing on profit and the quality of the product instead of the quality of human life.

The real problem we need to solve is that the human family is not spending enough time with each other, we're not having the conversations we need to have, we're not working on the things we need to work on, because we're all busy working for money and then throwing money at the problem. But money can never solve our problem, because it's not so much a material lack as it is a spiritual malady we're suffering from. You'd be surprised how many resources I can find wandering around homeless, you'd be surprised how hard it is to starve in America, but you'd also be surprised how much that is not what homeless people are suffering from. Every year I feel like I've got to carry more weapons with me, it's like Mad Max out here because of the drugs and the police always moving everyone around so there's no stability or sanity on the streets anymore. People are suffering from their families being disappointed in them, people are suffering from being called lazy, people are suffering from complex bureaucratic glitches and having their identity stolen and their kids stop talking to them because they're homeless and shit like that. They're suffering from wanting to work and being unable to, or being unable to find work that isn't somehow unethical. There's no "good work" left in the system. I don't want to work in a chemical plant, producing a chemical I don't think should exist. I don't want to stand there selling crap food to people that they shouldn't even be eating, with a big smile plastered on my face, when I know how nasty the kitchen behind me really is. But I'm supposed to be considered a more valuable member of society if I make money so I'm more valuable if I work at that chemical plant? Sell people sugar and bad food? I'm more valuable to society if I'm selling drugs? More valuable if I'm a good lawyer being paid to get criminals off? Or a court judge getting paid for putting innocent people away? It's a crazy life. Most of the things humans do wrong is for money, but we're considered worthless if we don't have money. Money is the crime we're all caught up in, that we all need to stop doing, and of course people with money will always blame people without money if they're trying to distract everyone from the fact that money is the problem, and that it's actually their own pursuit of profit that's making the world worse. In this system we're caught between being poor, or morally depraved. Neither of these choices are good choices. We try to make out rich people or homeless people as the bad guys but this is just another illusory division that money causes us to fall for. We need to stop hating on each other for how much or how little money we have and just forget about the money, and start circulating resources. There's plenty enough to go around, we just aren't putting in the time or energy to do it because we're all so busy working for money like a bunch of suckers. /rant

If any of this resonates with you get involved with the distribution network where we circulate resources for everyone's sake at r/distributionNetwork :
https://www.reddit.com/r/distributionNetwork/

Also, still working on this website but it's mostly done, it's a more complete explanation of how the distribution network works:
https://lunchz.github.io/distribution/

#distributionNetwork_💬 #distribution_💬 #advice_💬

#fskynet_💬 #capitalism_💬

+31 comment raw

Anonymous

13 months ago

"The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine"

This is a great short video summarizing what Noam Chompsky called the "5 filters" in his book "Manufacturing Consent".

It describes how the mass media industry is fundamentally and inherently manipulated to perpetuate a filtered view of reality through the influence of:

1. Ownership
2. Advertising
3. the Media Elite
4. Flak
5. "the Common Enemy"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M

#massmedia_💬 #critique_💬 #video_💬

#fskynet_💬

-90 comments(1) raw

Anonymous

15 months ago

Mass Psychosis - How an Entire Population becomes Mentally Ill.

This video talks about the decent into madness, as an individual, and as a society. It then discusses totalitarianism as one such mass psychosis that seems to repeat throughout history, and even ends on a positive note with some suggestions of how to reverse the mass psychosis of totalitarianism while we're still in it's early stages. #fskynet_💬

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M

#MassPsychosis_💬 #MentalHealth_💬 #video_💬
#groupthink_💬

-21 comment raw

Anonymous

17 months ago

"IN-SHADOW" A Modern Odyssey - Animated Short Film

This is a very poetic visual description of the decline of the USA. A lot of the themes are global, like technological hi-jacking our minds, social media profiteering destroying the social contract, and various critiques of various industries and the deep pockets behind those industries that are pulling the strings. It could be called a visually stunning history of America, with emphasis on the more recent state of affairs.

This has no talking, just creepy background music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j800SVeiS5I

#video_💬 #capitalism_💬 #dystopia_💬

#fskynet_💬

-8 comments(1) raw

load ten more...