There’s something that just doesn’t compute with capitalist economy.
We’re Grandpa Simpson, all the time
It’s been all about growth no matter what for decades. But we cannot grow anymore, pretty much anywhere you look at.
If we do grow –say games industry- careers are limited in time (average career in that field is eight years, which will not be enough for your life/retirement) and space (there’s only a few studios which can sustain you an eight-year+ career, otherwise it’s freelancing and inshallah).
Progress in technology always offsets new careers, faster and faster. For instance, we kind of forgot about driverless cars, but they never stopped making progress. They’re about to reach the level needed to be deployed; any industry needing drivers is going to be impacted so, so hard in the next five to ten years. 24/7, autonomous vehicles? Just imagine how much it will disrupt the world.
Meanwhile business growth doesn’t answer anything about wages and Quality of Life; sure, everyone can start their little business that can grow into something huge, but nobody has the money to subscribe to everything that is subscription-based which turns out, is everything.
We can’t all start selling $60 white shirts while subscribing to patreons and podcasts and having four jobs. Numbers don’t add up, time being the first: there’s not enough time for all that work and hustle.
Sustainable small businesses –which are rare- die in the hands of growing businesses, which are aggressively suffocating those small businesses so, we lose this option all the time. The pandemic aggravated the issue tenfold.
What’s the end game for businesses? To sell to a megacorp? What megacorps are going to do? They’re already megacorps. These days they’re bored and don’t know what else to do; they’re done growing, they own everything and now they sit with treasure chests that are kind of useless because all the money in the world doesn’t change anything if it just sits in a tax haven. Megacorps make more money per year than some countries. That’s quite new, and insane.
I see programmers complain so much about app stores shenanigans and 30% cut etc. But that’s how those megacorps are printing money while customers try to sustain their businesses as best as they can. Meta just announced a 47% cut on in-VR sales. Before taxes? I can’t comprehend how things get worse. Nobody will be able to sustain any kind of business in VR with a cut that large so what’s the end game here?
We look like headless chicken running around with the only thing stopping us being a body slam.
It’s all messed up and absolutely unsustainable. We need to redistribute wealth better and slow down the economy for climate change purposes. We just do.