{"id":1459225,"date":"2024-02-25T14:55:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-25T19:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1459225"},"modified":"2024-02-25T14:55:00","modified_gmt":"2024-02-25T19:55:00","slug":"are-you-ready-for-neo-collectivism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/are-you-ready-for-neo-collectivism\/1459225\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Ready For Neo-Collectivism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are You Ready For Neo-Collectivism?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cTwo-thirds of young people would like to live under an explicitly socialist economic system\u201d<\/h2>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Even worse: They have no idea what socialism is.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not long ago\u00a0we looked at The Future Laboratory\u2019s report<\/a>\u00a0on travel that predicted\u00a0carbon passports and limits on personal CO2 emissions<\/em>\u00a0as a way to mitigate climate change.<\/p>\n

The back of the napkin math from our look at that report, was that living standards in G-20 nations would have to drop by 75% in order\u00a0 to bring personal carbon footprints in line with \u201cexpert\u201d recommendations (the typical North American pleb emits somewhere between 12 and 13 tonnes of CO2 per year \u2013 to meet those netzero objectives, set by unelected, globalist technocrats, we need to ratchet that down to 2.3 tonnes per year).<\/p>\n

In the course of breaking that down I came across another report,\u00a0 also authored by Future Labs (whom I described then, as coming across as a WEF-wannabe). That was on the coming \u201cmacrotrend\u201d of\u00a0Neo-Collectivism<\/strong>. At the time I plunked down\u00a0\u00a3265.00<\/em>\u00a0to buy the report, promising to write it up in an upcoming piece.<\/p>\n

Here it is:<\/p>\n

There are five core themes running through 40-page, high-gloss PDF:<\/p>\n

Climate disaster is imminent.<\/p>\n

Democracy and capitalism in their current state aren\u2019t working.<\/p>\n

Individualism is on the way out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeb3\u201d is a driving force of decentralization, (but it is being co-opted by capitalism).<\/p>\n

Young people increasingly see collectivism, if not outright socialism as the solution.<\/p>\n

Like everything The Future Laboratory emits, there\u2019s a lot of word salad:<\/p>\n

\u201ca new model has the potential to reroute power from organisations: Web3. In this digital laboratory, decentralisation reigns: citizens become squads, profits are dispersed and community is king.<\/em><\/p>\n

It represents a fresh start, an Alternet Economy that allows us to imagine how systems rooted in consensus, equity and care can be reproduced in offline societies too. How, for example, could cities, wealth and even entire organisations be shaped by solidarity?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The report promises that,\u00a0\u201cThese practical strategies will\u00a0guide your brand through the shift from individualism to collectivism<\/strong>\u201c<\/em><\/p>\n

However, when you peel back the veneer of equity, social justice and \u201cdeeper meaning\u201d that are supposed to supplant the crass, destructive impulses like capitalism and free exchange, the trends highlighted as \u201cre-imaginings\u201d of work, organization and ownership, turn out to be\u2026 somewhat capitalist and free enterprise-y.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

Any kind of co-operative enterprise that is entered into consensually and produces excess time, services or goods (profit) which is then divided among the participants is basically a free enterprise venture. It\u2019s nothing new.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means that brands, which are nothing without their communities, will make the radical move from being sellers to coordinators. To genuinely place collectivism at the heart of their products, campaigns and workforces, brands should prepare for a future in which they invite customers to run their businesses, design infrastructure as a service, and blur the boundaries between a company, a community and a collective.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

One could argue that customers already run businesses. Or at least they would, if left to themselves: \u201cThe customer is always right\u201d and \u201cNecessity is the Mother of Invention\u201d are what drive a pure market economy.<\/p>\n

What customers value, what they\u00a0need<\/em>, is what gets produced. All other factors are distortions.<\/p>\n

You can ruminate on how profits tend to coagulate toward the few, how monopolies emerge and hierarchies ossify into oligarchs and elites \u2013 but closer inspection\u00a0on\u00a0why\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 for anybody who cares to go down that rabbit hole, usually reveals a broken monetary system, Cantillon Effects and a political class hell bent on perpetuating the grift.<\/p>\n

These realities tend to cast a pall over \u201ccollectivist opportunities\u201d:<\/p>\n

Decentralisation is one of the driving forces behind Web3.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>This re-imagined internet is intended to be governed by its users, and its collectives are flourishing in gaming platforms like Roblox and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) like Friends with Benefits.<\/em><\/p>\n

But this sense of \u2018freedom\u2019 that Web3 promises is already being disputed. Ed Zitron, CEO of media relations company EZPR, argues that Web3\u2019s veneer of equity is being rubbed away to resemble the hierarchies of Silicon Valley \u2013 an idea exemplified by Facebook\u2019s acceleration into the metaverse. \u2018These systems are not \u2018free\u2019 or \u2018owned by the people\u2019, but owned by the people who created the systems,\u2019 he writes<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

You mean platforms and infrastructure are owned by the very people who risk their own capital and time in order to invent and build them? The horror!<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Even Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) find it necessary to implement policy and consensus through the ownership of governance tokens, and those tokens are usually bought and sold\u00a0like commodities.\u00a0<\/em>They have to be, or else nobody would ascribe\u00a0value\u00a0<\/em>to a governance token \u2013 that may be what the project participants are initially\u00a0paid in<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The sub-text of all collectivist or socialist aspirations, spoken or not, is \u201cequality of outcome\u201d \u2013 something which is categorically impossible so long as there are any vestiges of\u00a0free will.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

No matter how much you try to democratize and make any given venture\u00a0equitable<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 at some level people have to decide whether to allocate their time, energy, resources to it, or to something else \u2013 and the only way to do that is to make doing so involve an economic trade-off. It\u2019s the same reason why Proof-of-Work (mining) is so integral to the success of Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

Choice ensues, as does subjective value, then ownership. And wherever you get ownership, you get\u00a0concentration\u00a0<\/em>of ownership. It\u2019s the Pareto Principle 101 (the 80\/20 Rule, which we find everywhere, is like a naturally occurring constant of the universe, like the Golden Mean).<\/p>\n

The only way to obviate concentration and \u201cunfair\u201d ownership distribution, isn\u2019t through\u00a0 halfway-communist euphemisms like \u201cNeo-Collectivism\u201d, communitarianism or \u201csocialism\u201d \u2013 you have to go full-throttle: 100% central planning and abolition of individual rights on\u00a0everything.<\/em><\/p>\n

No \u201cskin in the game\u201d, no subjective value,\u00a0no individual choice<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 just the fulfillment of a collectively decided central plan, against which there are no alternative actions or considerations (sounds a lot like #netzero and #degrowth, tbh).<\/p>\n

In case you think I\u2019m exaggerating the end-point of socialism, the report points (rather blithely, I might add) toward a Brave New World of \u201cPost-Family kinship\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201csomething ME O\u2019Brien, a trans communist writer, is calling for: \u2018In place of the coercive system of atomised family units,\u00a0the abolition of the family<\/strong>\u00a0would generalise what we now call care.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Noting that the \u201cgeneralization of care\u201d would only accomplish\u00a0commoditizing\u00a0<\/em>it \u2013 \u00a0we get a sense of where collectivism inexorably leads:\u00a0abolition of basic human rights.<\/em><\/p>\n

The primary mechanisms through which individual choice and action occur (along with the choice of vocation), include the selection of a spouse, the raising of one\u2019s family and relations with kin.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Theoretical depiction of a post-kinship collective living the proletarian dream.<\/em><\/p>\n

Confusing \u201cDecentralization\u201d With \u201cCollectivism\u201d Considered Harmful<\/h2>\n

\u201cNeo-collectivism is not only motivating consumers to create their own systems of commerce, care and community, but leading brands and organisations to reconfigure their own anatomies too.<\/em><\/p>\n

New initiatives are applying this sense of localism to the retail market, using communal sharing models in order to decouple consumption from capitalism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Where citizens once relied on Silicon Valley powerhouses to spearhead better technologies, they are now taking control, forming human networks that rely on groups of people working in tandem.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

These are all just rhetorical repackagings of free enterprise , entrepreneurship and dare I say it, competition.<\/p>\n

You can call an employee owned co-operative with a relatively flat org chart neo-collectivist and socialist: but it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s a capitalist, free enterprise\u00a0business<\/em>\u00a0and more power to those who can make it work, especially by giving everyone on the team skin in the game (ownership, \u201cequity\u201d,\u00a0shares<\/em>).<\/p>\n

But the danger here is packaging all these ideas around decentralization and new ways to\u00a0do business<\/em>\u00a0as some kind of vindication of collectivism, or socialism. The report introduction cites the Institute of Economic Affairs, that<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo-thirds (67%) of young people in Britain would like to live under an explicitly socialist economic system\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Yet very little in this report, that purports to describe the coming \u201cmacrotrend\u201d of neo-Collectivism, is actually socialist or even really collectivist (except maybe the idea of abolishing the family).<\/p>\n

What the Future Labs report is really talking about is\u00a0decentralization.\u00a0<\/em>It talks about\u00a0localism<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 which is another megatrend, closely related, and coincidentally something I\u2019ve been recently talking about with Charles Hugh Smith, regarding one his books,\u00a0Self-Reliance in the 21st Century<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the Future Lab word salad version:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pandemic helped people recognise the personal limitations of aligning career with purpose, motivating people to find life satisfaction closer to home, and within more localised communities and collectivist opportunities.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNew initiatives are applying this sense of localism to the retail market, using communal sharing models in order to decouple consumption from capitalism.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s what Charles wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cthe entire premise of self-reliance is to relocalize one\u2019s own economy as much as possible by earning and spending money in one\u2019s own community, outside the control of corporations \/ globalization.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

and how he describes his book:<\/p>\n

\u201cself-reliance in the 21st century means reducing our dependency on fragile supply chains and becoming producers as well as consumers.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201c[it] is often confused with self-sufficiency\u2013the equivalent of Thoreau s a cabin on Walden Pond. But self-reliance in the 21st century isn t about piling up money or a cabin in the woods; it s about humanity\u2019s most successful innovation:\u00a0cooperating with trustworthy others in productive networks<\/strong>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Future Laboratory and Charles Hugh Smith are talking about the same thing. But when you filter out the \u201cWEF-speak\u201d and glorification of collectivism \u2013 what we\u2019re really looking at is driven by self-reliance (individualism) \u2013 which occurs within a community or what Charles calls a \u201cproductive network\u201d (a free market).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard people whom I thought would know better, such as \u2018Exponential Organizations\u2019 author Salim Ismail, trying to make\u00a0 the case (on Robert Breedlove\u2019s\u00a0\u2018What Is Money\u2019 show<\/a>) that \u201cprivately run socialism\u201d would work better than state run, because it\u2019s the central planning of The State that is inefficient.<\/p>\n

This is really just a variation of \u201cTrue Communism has never been tried\u201d, where techno-utopians like Ismail inadvertently drift toward the \u201cFully Automated Luxury Communism<\/a>\u201d\u00a0 ideations of\u00a0Aaron Bastani (publisher of Jacobin Magazine). We\u2019ll have to to break that out into another post. The short version is that all versions of \u201cFALC\u201d assume a near-zero marginal cost of energy \u2013 which, at least for now, is not the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ismail cited\u00a0\u00a0Uber as an example of\u00a0 a socialist app<\/a>, proving that even brainy people are prone to conflating\u00a0 sharing (or even cooperation) with socialism.<\/p>\n

When you think about it, sharing is impossible without\u00a0ownership<\/em>\u00a0and without\u00a0capitalism,<\/em>\u00a0specifically. Private property is what makes sharing even possible. Without it, in a truly socialist system (no private property), there is no sharing \u2013 there is only taking turns\u00a0using\u00a0<\/em>things\u00a0\u2013\u00a0<\/em>and who\u2019s turn it is gets decided by somebody else.<\/p>\n

So too, is cooperation decidedly individualistic \u2013 one must\u00a0decide\u00a0<\/em>to enter into a mutual agreement with another \u2013 and at least two individuals have to\u00a0decide\u00a0<\/em>it to have any cooperation at all. Socialism, or collectivism is not cooperative \u2013 it is\u00a0conformity<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0compliance\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 enforced by other people.<\/p>\n

What Future Labs is articulating in this report, and techno-utopians like Ismail are hinting at, are really the myriad permutations that can and will arise on the crest of the decentralization revolution. Some may be hyper-individualistic, other decidedly communal, let a thousand flowers bloom.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s not fool ourselves \u2013 or worse \u2013 mistakenly\u00a0vote ourselves\u00a0<\/em>into socialism or embracing collectivism because we think they\u2019re the same thing as decentralization.<\/p>\n

The late great Ross Elver (my long-time lawyer and mentor) was fond of saying \u201cYou can\u2019t suck and blow at the same time\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0The coming megatrend is decentralization<\/em>, and you can\u2019t have decentralization and\u00a0collectivism\u00a0<\/em>at the same time.<\/p>\n

Who gets to decide what\u00a0you\u00a0<\/em>do? You or somebody else?<\/h2>\n

Decentralization is about the core, fundamental human right:\u00a0choice<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 and choice is all about\u00a0individualism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Collectivism, under whatever name you want to call it\u00a0abolishes<\/em>\u00a0choice.<\/p>\n

The easiest way to tell the difference is to ask yourself \u201cWho gets to decide what\u00a0you\u00a0<\/em>do (or\u00a0don\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0do)? You? Or somebody else?\u201d<\/p>\n

Decide what? Your travel allowance, your meat consumption, your energy usage\u2026\u00a0everything.<\/em><\/p>\n

If it\u2019s somebody else, then\u00a0it\u2019s socialism \/ collectivism.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I won\u2019t post the Future Labs report here because it\u2019s\u00a0their paid content<\/a>\u00a0and, I assume, their copyright. Perhaps someday, after the abolition of private property, they won\u2019t mind.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

My next e-book\u00a0The CBDC Survival Guide: Navigating Monetary Apartheid\u00a0will be out soon (honest), sign up for\u00a0The Bombthrower mailing list<\/a>\u00a0and I\u2019ll let you know when it drops \u2013 and get a copy of the\u00a0The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto\u00a0in the meantime<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Follow me on Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Nostr<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSun, 02\/25\/2024 – 09:55<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bRead More<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are You Ready For Neo-Collectivism? Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com, \u201cTwo-thirds of young people would like to live under an explicitly socialist economic system\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1459225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbimBl-67BT","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1459225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1459225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1459225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1459225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}