Capitalism Is the Enemy of Commerce
People and businesses can transact in ways that make everyone more prosperous, but capitalism concentrates wealth
Technology is not driving itself. It doesn’t want anything. Rather, there is a market expressing itself through technology — an operating system beneath our various computer interfaces and platforms that is often unrecognized by the developers themselves. This operating system is called capitalism, and it drives the antihuman agenda in our society at least as much as any technology.
Commerce is not the problem. People and businesses can transact in ways that make everyone more prosperous. If anything, capitalism as it’s currently executed is the enemy of commerce, extracting value from marketplaces and delivering it to remote shareholders. The very purpose of the capitalist operating system is to prevent widespread prosperity.
What we now think of as capitalism was born in the late Middle Ages, in the midst of a period of organic economic growth. Soldiers had just returned from the Crusades, having opened up new trade routes and bringing back innovations from foreign lands. One of them, from the Moorish bazaar, was the concept of “market money.”
