Plutonomy: A Leaked Citibank Memo

[Doktor Howl]

I think what he's saying is that everybody will be hooked into these "many : many" communication services which will create structures to encourage good consumer choices.

Like the television and the internet have done?   

Won't the people who run those structures be selling advertizements as fast as they can?

for example, when you're walking around at the supermarket, your iPhone will tell you what products to buy based on what causes you support. If you hate breast cancer, it'll tell you which products donate to breast cancer foundations. And that by doing this, you'll earn some kind of score you can use to compete with others.

--is that right, captain?

That's honestly the most horrible vision of the future I've had this month, and I've had a few.

[Cain]

*sigh*

I said it once, but apparently it hasn't sunk in yet.

YOU WILL ONLY DEFEAT THE PLUTOCRATS THROUGH VIOLENCE.  THEY SURE AS FUCK WILL USE VIOLENCE AGAINST YOU, AND IN FACT HAVE ALREADY FOR DECADES, YOU'RE JUST TOO STUPID TO RECOGNIZE IT FOR WHAT IT IS.  AS SOON AS A SYSTEM WHICH CREATES TRILLIONS FOR ITS BENEFICIARIES IS GENUINELY THREATENED, THEY WILL HIRE PEOPLE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO KILL YOU.  AND THEY WILL, BECAUSE YOUR LILY-WHITE SUBURBAN ASS IS NO MATCH FOR A FORMER SAS/DELTA FORCE/FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION/INSERT SPECIAL FORCES MEMBER HERE TYPE.

Ultimately, all political power derives from the barrel of a gun.  You can either accept that, or end up as another statistic.

[Captain Utopia]

So you're going to attempt to network an apathetic public and do...what, exactly?  Perhaps I am simply too stupid to understand it as written.

Nah, I'm a god-awful writer who has trouble expressing even what the current weather is like, without causing confusion.  The sentence structure of mine generally sucks :-/  But I am practicing.

• This will happen with or without my involvement.  There is a little coin to be made by being involved, which means it'll probably happen sooner rather than later.
• I think the public are apathetic because they have no meaningful way to impact the system.  Give them the tools, and make it easy, and let them do whatever they want.  That's always going to be better than what they currently do - a passive nothing.

I suspect that even all made the "right" consumer choices, it still wouldn't decrease financial inequality.

I think this can be illustrated by the green movement --

1. There was a lot of buzz about how the environment was going to shit.
2. This created a demand for "green" products and industry
3. Companies redesigned themselves and "went green" in order to maximize profits

At point #3 - this happened quite early on, and there was no easy way for a person who had the all the facts that this was happening, to communicate it to any audience.  The system I describe will change that dramatically.

Thing is -- people will always try to game the system, you can't design it to be fool-proof.  But you can design it such that it can detect and respond quickly to threats upon its integrity.  If a corporation finds a loop-hole, and no blogger or citizen-journalist discovers what they are doing, and no whistle-blower comes out against them... then yes, that situation will persist.  That is what we have now -- the difference is that once it is discovered, not only can you negate it, you can impose penalties.. and you can do that quickly enough to be a dangerous blip on the short-term corporate radar.

I guess the trick would be to start or participate in advocacy groups that attack the building blocks of plutonomy - like outsourcing. I can see "made in the USA" products as having a competitive advantage if outsourced goods were branded the right way.

Sure.  It's a last-mile problem though, when you're in-store, you need a quick and reliable way to access the crowd-sourced repository of knowledge.  This is where mobile-technology makes this thing actually workable -- if it's a hassle, and if there are no personal benefits to using it, no one will.

Still, we'd have to all be on the same page for this to work. We'd have to get most americans to buy Local Brand instead of Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic... being that mega-corporations have done a great job of mixing branding with identity politics (ie "What kind of computer is for individuals? What brands of shoes do athletes wear?"), and being that outsourced products tend to be cheaper, it's going to be a giant struggle.

I think it's unlikely that you'd get most of any group to all follow the same buying habits, because most members of a group may share a few core values, but vary wildly on other issues.  Our current frameworks only support the reliable communication of big issues/core values.

So you create an ecosystem of micro-motivations.  You get a few of thousand people to "like" the idea of boycotting Nike over some shitty sweatshop practices and all of a sudden, the manager of the sweatshop decides it's worth spending a few more dollars a day to supply the workers with water and longer breaks.  It's the sort of issue not large enough to get the attention of the CEO's to issue a top-down decision, but which can be decided and validated at lower levels.  The corporations which don't encourage their decision-makers to be more flexible will suffer.  And the longer a company ignores a dissatisfied public, the more negative publicity will be generated.

Wait.  I think I understand.

Everyone's going to start acting rationally at the same time?

No, not at all.  You give people who want to act slightly more rationally, the tools which enable them to further their individual interests.  They are automatically linked with people who share those interests.  In doing so, the effect on rationality is incremental.

[Cain]

Goddamn, you stupid fucking hippies who haven't even studied a successful revolution are starting to do my head in.

[Jasper]

*sigh*

I said it once, but apparently it hasn't sunk in yet.

YOU WILL ONLY DEFEAT THE PLUTOCRATS THROUGH VIOLENCE.  THEY SURE AS FUCK WILL USE VIOLENCE AGAINST YOU, AND IN FACT HAVE ALREADY FOR DECADES, YOU'RE JUST TOO STUPID TO RECOGNIZE IT FOR WHAT IT IS.  AS SOON AS A SYSTEM WHICH CREATES TRILLIONS FOR ITS BENEFICIARIES IS GENUINELY THREATENED, THEY WILL HIRE PEOPLE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO KILL YOU.  AND THEY WILL, BECAUSE YOUR LILY-WHITE SUBURBAN ASS IS NO MATCH FOR A FORMER SAS/DELTA FORCE/FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION/INSERT SPECIAL FORCES MEMBER HERE TYPE.

Ultimately, all political power derives from the barrel of a gun.  You can either accept that, or end up as another statistic.

No, I get it.  That's why I'm prejudiced against rich people.

[Cain]

*sigh*

I said it once, but apparently it hasn't sunk in yet.

YOU WILL ONLY DEFEAT THE PLUTOCRATS THROUGH VIOLENCE.  THEY SURE AS FUCK WILL USE VIOLENCE AGAINST YOU, AND IN FACT HAVE ALREADY FOR DECADES, YOU'RE JUST TOO STUPID TO RECOGNIZE IT FOR WHAT IT IS.  AS SOON AS A SYSTEM WHICH CREATES TRILLIONS FOR ITS BENEFICIARIES IS GENUINELY THREATENED, THEY WILL HIRE PEOPLE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO KILL YOU.  AND THEY WILL, BECAUSE YOUR LILY-WHITE SUBURBAN ASS IS NO MATCH FOR A FORMER SAS/DELTA FORCE/FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION/INSERT SPECIAL FORCES MEMBER HERE TYPE.

Ultimately, all political power derives from the barrel of a gun.  You can either accept that, or end up as another statistic.

No, I get it.  That's why I'm prejudiced against rich people.

Oh I know you, and a few others here do.

It's just some people posting ITT seem determined to end up as Darwin Award material.  Although I'm sure there is a downside, since eventually the only revolutionaries left will be the smart and vicious ones.

[Jasper]

Well, he's not "Captain Utopia" for nothing. 

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I'm with Cain on this one. There's no way the Plutocrats will allow a shakeup like thatg to happen without intervention. but I don't think they will need violence, not for this, anyway. A cutesie app to tell people which brands to buy based on causes will be commercialized in a heartbeat. Not to mention that the off-brand products are all made by big-brand corporations anyway. In fact they probably get a tax break for doing it.

No fundamental change is possible without revolution. The last time somebody tried to set up a system to supercede the system, we got the Constitution. And that's worked out swimmingly, don't you think?

The Plutocrats will not be collapsing anytime soon. Even if the world blows up in nuclear war, your cross-country radproof dune buggy will probably have a Halliburton stamp on the back bumper.

[Captain Utopia]

I think what he's saying is that everybody will be hooked into these "many : many" communication services which will create structures to encourage good consumer choices.


for example, when you're walking around at the supermarket, your iPhone will tell you what products to buy based on what causes you support. If you hate breast cancer, it'll tell you which products donate to breast cancer foundations. And that by doing this, you'll earn some kind of score you can use to compete with others.

--is that right, captain?

Pretty much, except that there would be long-term causes you'd have linked to products.. and the only time you'd whip out your camera phone is if you didn't know, or were simply curious about the current status.

I think what he's saying is that everybody will be hooked into these "many : many" communication services which will create structures to encourage good consumer choices.

Like the television and the internet have done?  

Won't the people who run those structures be selling advertizements as fast as they can?

Television is definitely a one : many communication device.  It broadcasts, it's not a conversation.

The internet is still incredibly young and we are only beginning to scratch the surface of its potential.

If you run it as an open source project, then no, you need not assume that the structure will be filled with advertisements.

That's honestly the most horrible vision of the future I've had this month, and I've had a few.

How so?

[LMNO]

I simply decided to become a rich person.  Problem solved.

[Captain Utopia]

*sigh*

I said it once, but apparently it hasn't sunk in yet.

YOU WILL ONLY DEFEAT THE PLUTOCRATS THROUGH VIOLENCE.  THEY SURE AS FUCK WILL USE VIOLENCE AGAINST YOU, AND IN FACT HAVE ALREADY FOR DECADES, YOU'RE JUST TOO STUPID TO RECOGNIZE IT FOR WHAT IT IS.  AS SOON AS A SYSTEM WHICH CREATES TRILLIONS FOR ITS BENEFICIARIES IS GENUINELY THREATENED, THEY WILL HIRE PEOPLE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO KILL YOU.  AND THEY WILL, BECAUSE YOUR LILY-WHITE SUBURBAN ASS IS NO MATCH FOR A FORMER SAS/DELTA FORCE/FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION/INSERT SPECIAL FORCES MEMBER HERE TYPE.

Ultimately, all political power derives from the barrel of a gun.  You can either accept that, or end up as another statistic.

Have you spent much time studying how open source/internet projects work?  Once an idea is established, variations will flourish.  The only tricky part would be to define a common information-exchange protocol from the get-go.

Besides, the core question here is whether such a system could develop/expand and become a genuine threat.  Because I don't expect they will recognise it as a threat until such time as it is much too late to stop the actual concept.  At that point, they're fucked.

But I'm not going to spend much more time trying to convince anyone that it is a threat, I'm just going to go ahead and do it if someone doesn't get it done first.

[Kai]

*sigh*

I said it once, but apparently it hasn't sunk in yet.

YOU WILL ONLY DEFEAT THE PLUTOCRATS THROUGH VIOLENCE.  THEY SURE AS FUCK WILL USE VIOLENCE AGAINST YOU, AND IN FACT HAVE ALREADY FOR DECADES, YOU'RE JUST TOO STUPID TO RECOGNIZE IT FOR WHAT IT IS.  AS SOON AS A SYSTEM WHICH CREATES TRILLIONS FOR ITS BENEFICIARIES IS GENUINELY THREATENED, THEY WILL HIRE PEOPLE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO KILL YOU.  AND THEY WILL, BECAUSE YOUR LILY-WHITE SUBURBAN ASS IS NO MATCH FOR A FORMER SAS/DELTA FORCE/FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION/INSERT SPECIAL FORCES MEMBER HERE TYPE.

Ultimately, all political power derives from the barrel of a gun.  You can either accept that, or end up as another statistic.

Indeed. So it's time to learn to survive stealthily in the jungle rather than be hunted.

[Captain Utopia]

Well, he's not "Captain Utopia" for nothing. 

Bingo!

I enjoy the "we're all fucked, but we may as well enjoy the ride/THE MACHINE WILL SHOOT YOU" narrative, as much as anyone else, but that doesn't make it True.

[Kai]

Well, he's not "Captain Utopia" for nothing. 

Bingo!

I enjoy the "we're all fucked, but we may as well enjoy the ride/THE MACHINE WILL SHOOT YOU" narrative, as much as anyone else, but that doesn't make it True.

Human moral progress doesn't happen.

Just saying.

[Captain Utopia]

Human moral progress doesn't happen.

Just saying.

Because we all still support child brides/slavery/domestic abuse/rape in our society?

I'd say human moral progress is doing quite well considering that it's had very little in way of motivating forces to improve.