The marketplace is the birthplace of all great inventions. It's the place where supply and demand determine what's best for us. It frees us from having any convictions of our own because "truth" will arise from the "marketplace of ideas", and whatever opinion is "bought" into most becomes our shared truth.
source: Wikimedia Commons
Laissez-faire capitalism goes further than just striving for the completely free trading of commodities and labor. It has become such an completely overshadowing dogma that literally everything is treated as commodities in a marketplace. We are, as a species, so ingrained with the idea that freedom, a free market and true democracy go hand-in-hand, that we find a market-solution for everything, and are often not able to see the ineffectiveness of these "solutions", all the while alienating us further and further from our humanity.
Let's look at pollution. Capitalism dictates that consumers need to buy more shit they don't need at an ever increasing rate; have you ever come to the logical conclusion that this means we'll never make products better? Never. If economic growth is at the pinnacle of our dogma of the day, it follows logically that we produce stuff that breaks soon enough to ensure continued growth. Now instead of recognizing this major flaw of free market thinking, we figure "let's make pollution it's own marketplace!" Yeah: supply and demand brought us brilliant minds like Steve Jobs and wonderful gadgets like his I-Phone, it will surely do wonders for the environment too.
Companies can now buy rights to pollute. That's the brilliant market solution we thought of: if you pollute you pay for it in hard cash. This so called "carbon emission trading" is just one new form of pollution-trading, it's something the corporate sector has used successfully in the past to reduce the cost of their emissions, not to reduce the actual emissions. So, each factory gets a certain amount of "emission rights"; when they're all spent and the factory produces more poisonous emissions, it will be fined. Say I have a factory for which it is very expensive and difficult to reduce emissions, and you have a factory for which it is relatively easy and cheap to realize huge reductions, then we both win if I can buy your left over emission rights: you gain money and I save most of the money I would have lost by making the adjustments needed to actually reduce my spewing out poison in the air, ground and water.
Think about that for a second. Do you also get that eerie feeling that clean air is now a commodity to be traded among the largest polluters on the planet? This solution doesn't work. It's been proven not to work. But our blind faith in the holy marketplace unfortunately transcends common sense. The air belongs to no one, and thus to us all, but we applaud the ones that say it doesn't... We still stand in line for that new I-phone, that shining gem of the free market spirit.
Well, let me burst that bubble right now: Steve Jobs has never invented anything. All he did was steal ideas from other places and assembled them in an eye-pleasing package. He was not a pleasant man to work for or work with and he elevated the sewing of other smaller companies for trivialities, like the shape of a corner of a laptop, or the color used in a particular promotion-campaign, to an art-form.
How many of you believe that the mouse and the point-and-click user-interface are Apple inventions? Sorry, that was Xerox. And this goes for almost everything coming from Apple. They get their screens from Samsung for Peet's sake... If you still don't believe it, there's this YouTube channel that had a contest in 2012 and the challenge was to show something that was invented by Apple itself after Steve Wozniak left the company. Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, was the brilliant one; look at the video at this post's tail-side, you'll see why I still love this man :-) But the challenge by Tek Syndicate produced no real winners:
Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything?
What's most sobering of all, is that Apple's gadgets are filled to the brim with technology that's been developed by publicly funded institutions, like GPS from NASA, several technologies from the DOD, CIA, NSA and universities... Almost everything in Apple's products is funded by your tax-dollars. And yet we all stand in line for the next piece of innovative nothingness, produced by slave-labor in far away countries. Apple also pays taxes in these far away countries and almost no taxes in the countries that buy their stuff and funded their research and development costs.
Don't think for a second by the way that things are any better at the Android- or Windows-side of these matters. Apple is just so often pushed forward as a prime example of the market's ability to push technology and humanity forward, that it's only logical to use them as the prime example of the opposite, let alone the fact that the idolization of a spoiled child like Steve Jobs says a lot about the capitalist mind-set we're all inflicted with in some degree. Steve Jobs and his company are both prime examples of the sad fact that success in any marketplace has nothing to do with being good, just, honest or true, but everything with one's ability to sell whatever product, opinion or idea they want to propagate.
And that brings me to the most overlooked and most dangerous marketplace of them all: the marketplace of opinions and ideas... The premise sounds so natural and right to us. Where there's opposing ideas, chuck them into the marketplace of ideas and whichever idea gets more "likes" gradually becomes the truth. In this marketplace of ideas the currency is not money, but attention. The ideas that manage to gain the biggest amount of the public's attention today, becomes that public's shared truth of tomorrow.
This basic idea sounds good but annihilates any notion of truth outside your personal opinion. "Everybody has their own truth, there is no real truth, truth is personal" and so on and so forth. This has evolved into a general belief that everyone has the right to their own facts. To a place where almost everyone says that capitalism works, when it's so easy to show that it doesn't. Not for quality products, not for brilliant innovations, not for brilliant ideas.
Why did Hilary defeat Sanders, and why did Trump defeat Clinton in 2016? Just ask the media:
Donald Trump didn't spend nearly as much on advertising as typical presidential candidates, and he didn't have to -- he relied on billions of dollars of free mentions in media ranging from major TV news networks to Buzzfeed and Twitter instead.
The real estate magnate got $4.96 billion in free earned media in the year leading up to the presidential election, according to data from tracking firm mediaQuant. He received $5.6 billion throughout the entirety of his campaign, more than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio combined.
source: TheStreet
Even now, after he's voted out of office, Trump is a one-man-circus, inducing controversy after controversy with his nightly tweets and bonkers ideas like a wall between two countries or having won the elections. This would be career-ending in normal times, but in the marketplace of ideas, where the currency is attention, a market-leading clown is the ticket to success. The ratio in which he crushed his opponents in the 2016 primaries was almost identical to the ratio of their respective air-time and media-coverage. I tried, but can't find the study that showed this, so I hope you'll take my word for that. Same with Hillary and Bernie: Hillary got twice the coverage Bernie did. The media repeated that injustice to Bernie Sanders during the 2019 primaries...
The scary thing here is that it is the marketplace of everything (and everyone and everywhere) that constantly feeds our collective consciousness with more belief in that marketplace. As long as we "buy" into that, as long as we think we can "vote with our dollars", we'll be stuck in the status-quo that only benefits the very few and keeps the rest of us fighting over scraps and leftovers. Well, I'll close by inviting you to watch this video. Let's hope Wozniak's 2018 ideas on Bitcoin become our shared truth of tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. Heck, I'm even willing to wait an entire week! ;-)
Steve Wozniak: "What an Incredible Thing Bitcoin is"
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