The Shitconomy

How an Economy of Stuff Turned Into an Economy of Shit

Consider a tiny theory. Once upon a time, we had an economy made of stuff. It wasn’t perfect. But it was pretty good. That was yesterday. Today, we have an economy made of…shit.

I want to tell you a story about that, using the example of Genius — a service that lets anyone “annotate” anything else on the web. It’s a tiny but perfect metaphor for everything that went wrong with the economy, and maybe a lot more besides.

The U.S. starved investment in public goods for decades, killing its young, middle, poor, and future. Hence, today, unlike the rest of the rich world, it doesn’t have working healthcare, transport, education, infrastructure. Much of it now resembles the broken parts of poor countries. If you think I’m overstating it, consider: the majority of public school kids in the US are now in poverty. That’s not just a tragedy — it’s two things. First, a needless tragedy of choice. Second, a unparalleled tragedy: nowhere else in the modern rich world has anything remotely like the above ever happened.

The Last Great Hope

The Internet was once a Great Shining Hope for exactly this reason. It was what economics call a public platform good — a public good so powerful that it let us make public goods of our own. If all that stuff, education, healthcare, etc, couldn’t be free…then maybe at least information could. The net gave us the opportunity to create little public spaces, town squares and commons, of our own. We called them websites or blogs or homepages. Whatever they were, the point was to create a mini public space — a place where people could enjoy stuff that you made, and maybe they contributed to, to come together, and prosper a little bit, if not in hard terms, then at least in soft ones.

And for a while, a million little town squares bloomed. No, they weren’t utopias. But they were examples of public goods working pretty well. You could make your own website, etc, create a little community of your own, make new friends, contacts, share your expertise, develop yourself, and see a real benefit in your life. Maybe your own little town square could even help you defy economic decline, and launch you into a new career. It wasn’t true for everyone, but it was true for some. And so the internet was probably the greatest public good the world knew for centuries, rivaling the invention of public water, electricity, libraries, parks.

The Art of Turning Prosperity Into Shit

And then along came the smirking overfashioned would-be Masters of the Universe at Genius. They made a system where anyone could “annotate” (what does that even mean? Fear not, I’ll propound below) the entire web. Result: hordes of losers of modernity, you know the type, usually angry guys enraged at women for never being their girlfriends, minorities for “taking” their jobs, and the world in general for not putting them on the pedestal they once occupied by birthright, see a golden opportunity to leave nasty, bigoted comments at the targets of their ire.

Let’s go back to our millions of little shining town squares analogy. What’s that like? Like some dudes for whom capitalism was more like a inferiority-complex fuelled jihad than a moral philosophy…decided to rent other dudes a fleet of weaponized drones…that they could hover over the little town square of anyone they didn’t like…particularly women and minorities…take a dump from a hundred feet up…and there was nothing the owner of or the people in the town square could do to stop them.

Now that’s a great, as they say, business model…if you don’t give a damn about, oh, humans, and have the moral arithmetic of a venomous rodent. The guys renting the drones get rich and powerful! They don’t face any consequences! It’s all perfectly legal. The hordes of angry losers in an age of rage can’t believe their luck. They have a foolproof, convenient, hilarious way to shit all over anyone they never liked…and no one can do a thing about it. Look out below!! Turd bomb incoming!! Turd fleet…mobilize!! LOLzerz!!

Of course, there’s another side to the equation. Remember the once-shining town squares? They’re covered in shit. Dripping with it. The gleaming spires and soaring arches are now plastered in the shit of enraged douchebags. The masses once congregating therein, discussing, conversing, chilling, sharing, enjoying, relating, connecting, living, flee for their lives. Hey — no one wants a shit-bomb to land squarely on their pate, right?

So maybe not so LOLzerz.

The Economics of Shit

What does “annotate the web” mean, beneath the marketing spin? It means that Genius has privatised the last great public space known to humanity. They get rich by renting weapons of low-grade info-war to budding sociopaths, illiterates, and turd-lobbing bumpkins. To use on the innocents mingling in once shining town squares. Whether or not they want to be napalmed by shit. And let’s be frank for a second: unless you have a kink of the kind best left thoroughly cleansed from your browser history — who really does?

Genius will no doubt walk away grinning sumgly with a fortune. But in a working economy, it shouldn’t. No one is left better off. The grinning, enraged pinheads lobbing the turd bombs aren’t any better off. They’re not any smarter, healthier, friendlier, successful at or in life. And neither, of course, are the people fleeing the squares, dodging and ducking the hellish rain of shit spackling the cobblestones.

In economic terms, Genius is a Shit Machine. It bombs people with shit — or maybe lets people bomb other people with shit. It doesn’t really matter which. The arms dealers get rich. But nobody really benefits. Grows, develops, lives a better, fuller, truer life. One side wins, the other loses: net result — zero. In this specific and pretty extreme case, probably less than zero.

The economy might “grow” as a result of Shit Machines. But in sum, society is no better off, and usually left worse off, as a result of such “growth”. Think about it. I bomb you with shit. You have to buy stuff, maybe hire a fleet of workers, to clean up the shit. You’re spending money, time, effort, the economy is putatively “growing”…but all we’re really doing is cleaning up each others’ shit.

We’re not exactly inventing cures for cancer or clean energy here, folks…we’re just cleaning up shit.

The Rise of the Shit Machines

Our nightmares reveal our dreams. We used to be afraid of Terminators and simulated hyperreal Matrixes. But we missed the forest for the trees. The machines already took over. As it turns out, they’re not made of steel and wires. They’re made of rules and regulations, titles and roles, people and processes. For turning shining prosperity into…shit.

The Rise of the Shit Machines is the story of the economy over the last several decades writ large. Some Shit Machines beshit all over our skies, parks, towns, water…some take a massive dump in our hearts, minds, and spirits…and so on. Some pollute our skies, some poison our bodies, some ruin our communities, some dumbify our culture, some misinform our minds, some distort our relationships. But all really do the same thing: bury us in shit.

The economy “grows”…but nobody but the 0.01% really benefits…because cleaning up shit you shouldn’t have to isn’t the same thing as making life better. It’s just struggling for it not to get worse. Hence, for most of us, life is going downhill. Shit Machines do this: transfer wealth to their shareholders, owners, investors, and execs…but only by taking it from the middle, young, planet, and future. No real value is created for anyone.

Society’s just playing a game of musical chairs…or maybe a better metaphor is: mostly, we’re janitors glumly resigned ourselves to wasting our lives cleaning up a bathroom clogged up by Other People’s Shit. But we’re also not, thus, all too often, the great artists, scientists, creators, dreamers, rebels…changing the world…transforming the destiny of humanity…that we can and should be.

This is the bitter harvest of the economy we made. Let me describe the March of the Shit Machines thus. It’s a contest of social uselessness, things without any point, redeeming larger purpose…a race to the bottom to make more and more of those things…that’s sparked by financialization, the idea that everything – even your own goddamned website – should be an asset someone else can buy and sell…so robots owned by hedge funds can earn pennies a second that add up to billions a month…so douchebags with the apparent moral conscience of Satan’s gimp can rake it in.

WTF? Who came up with this cunningly infernal system of beshitting human potential? Who knows...let the historians point the fingers...we’re deep in it…and the point for you and I is: our economy is a essentially one giant collection of little Geniuses. Shit Machines that bury us in Other People’s Shit. That’s the fact — but here’s the truth. It’s no more appropriate for VCs, corporations, governments, banks, you and I, anyone with working human parts to invest millions in Shit Machines than it would be to invest in weaponized Ubers for shit-bombing drones. Because both of those are, in economic terms, more or less precisely equivalent.

The bad news is: even my pet hamster knows the manifest destiny of an economy like that. It’s an express train into the abyss. The good news: we can, and must, build a better one. We can, should, and must demand better. If we’re going to spend billions investing in Shit Machines…then the inconvenient truth is that we’re all going to drown in shit.

The Resistance

So wait. Where’s the Resistance? Every great sci-fi tale has one, after all. In this little series of essays, this mini-book, I’m going to give you a guided tour through the Shitconomy. In the 19th century, young aristocrats would go on what was then known as the Grand Tour: they’d spend a season seeing the historic sights across the great cities of Europe. Paris, Venice, Rome. Think of this series of essays as a Grand Tour through..the ruins of a once-thriving economy now turned to shit…by an endless panoply of Shit Machines…some made of numbers, some made of gears, some made of bits…but which all leave us just a little more bit more up to our necks, maybe our nostrils, in excrement.

Go ahead. Burn me at the stake. It’s true. I’m a hopeless romantic, a shameless idealist. I don’t think we should be up to our nostrils in Other People’s Shit. I think we’re capable of, deserve, and probably should demand, better. From our leaders of industry, polity, economy, and society. Or maybe the truth is we have to become those very leaders to change things. I can’t say. But I can say: you and I know the Shitconomy is the ugly, shitty, failing reality that you, I, our loved ones, and our unborn grandkids are going to face. So herein, I’ll try to unveil the Shit Machines. And together, just maybe, we can dream up a world without them.

Where’s the resistance? You’re the resistance. This isn’t a manual for joining it. Maybe, at most, it’s a half-thought, poorly-written idea. To resist, in whatever way you can, tiny or big, the idea that all we should do with our brief and miraculous lives is shit proudly on everyone else’s.

Umair
London
March 2016