Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
Swimming against the current.
A headwind.
Whatever you want to do these days, that's how it feels. There are lots of reasons for it.
Consolidation is a big one: so many people have so few choices. A handful of companies are our only options, and they're endlessly chasing things that have nothing to do with our needs or happiness.
The pattern is fractal. Everywhere you look.
It's not just your telephone, your social platform.
It's your employer, too. Your means of surviving.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
Eventually the mud gets us to a breaking point. We have a lot of names for this. Marxists will chime in right here with "consumption crisis:" the inequality becoming so pronounced that business can no longer find anyone with money to spend on their products, seizing the economic machine as a whole.
So the questions of our moment are:
How close are we to the breaking point?
Do we need to actually REACH the breaking point to address a crisis?
What will people demand in the event of the breach?
Glyph
@danilo I think the biggest lesson of fin de siècle anarchist accelerationism is that there is no “breaking point”, no set of conditions so intolerable that the proletariat will rise up in glorious revolution towards utopia. At best, in the “revolution” model of the world, you get a bloody nightmare where some even worse authoritarians punish the current generation of authoritarians.
Things can get better, or things can get worse. There is no “we’re fucked”.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
Every person subjected to a post-acquisition layoff is thrown into an objectively more difficult market. The global pool of jobs has contracted as a consequence of the consolidation.
So that's their headwinds. Tech workers, currently, are feeling an extreme version of this as layoff contagion enabled a blood letting of half a million jobs
But this is just one dimension. It's buying groceries, and no matter which label you choose, one of a handful of companies stands behind it.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
It's trying to rent an apartment, or buy a house, the costs of which increase steadily as they fall into fewer and fewer hands.
It is, in other words, inequality.
It just keeps on going. I remember when I first saw the gap between productivity and wages documented, in my 20’s, I went absolutely off the wall. How were we accepting this?
I'm almost 40 now. It uh, hasn't really gotten better. Everyone is just kind of walking through the mud.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
Employment is actually one of the clearer ways to understand our perpetual headwind.
There are two companies. One company absorbs the other. It doesn't matter why.
Afterward, the combined company has ALL these costs. All these children getting fed, all these pets receiving care, all these aging parents being supported.
That's expensive. The company doesn't want that at all.
So it makes a little spreadsheet and cancels as many obligations as it wants. Unilaterally.
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