What Happens When People Become Assets
Our economy has become so abstract that real people can’t afford houses because wealth funds use them as investments
If central currency can be thought of as the operating system of our economy, corporations are the software that runs on top of it. They are the true natives of capitalism, which is why they are so much more at home in this environment than we humans. In perhaps the most spectacular reversal of figure and ground we’ve yet witnessed, corporations have been winning court cases that give them the rights of human beings — from personhood and property to free speech and religious convictions — while human beings now strive to brand themselves in the style of corporations. But corporations are not people. They are abstract, and can scale-up infinitely to meet the demands of the debt-based economy. People can only work so hard or consume so much before we reach our limits. We are still part of the organic world, and subject to the laws of nature. Corporations know no such bounds, making them an awful lot like the digital technologies they are developing and inhabiting.
The pioneering philosopher of the political economy, Adam Smith, was well aware of the abstract nature of corporations — particularly large ones — and stressed that regulations would be necessary to…
